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#you are not welcomed everywhere that’s why the europeans tried to get rid of you years ago and they did but in return we lost our lands
quazartranslates · 3 years
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Welcome to the Nightmare Game - CH80
**This is an edited machine translation. For more information, please [click here]**
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Chapter 80: Castle Cry (VI)
Nan Lu once again burst into tears, her eyes red and swollen, and Qi Leren looked at Dr. Lu for help. In response, he was scared and waved his hand to imply that he, as a single dog, had no experience in comforting girls. The two looked at the girl crying at a loss, and after a long time, they said dryly: "Don't cry..."
Nan Lu, who cried for ten minutes, wiped her face with her sleeve and asked faintly, "Am I really inferior to Luo Xueyi? Why does everyone like her and not me? What's wrong with me?"
Dr. Lu gave a dry cough: "No, Nan Lu, you’re fine. Xiao Hong is blind. But what happened?"
Nan Lu sniffed and looked at her toes in frustration. After a long time, she opened her mouth: "...After we separated from you, Xiao Hong and I went back. Soon after the bell rang, we went back to this burnt castle. Xiao Hong said that he seemed to hear Luo Xueyi's voice. He wanted to go to the second floor, but I refused... We had a fight. In fact, after so long, I know that he’s interested in Luo Xueyi. In this respect, women's intuition is very keen, not to mention that he’s shown himself clearly. I think Luo Xueyi also knows, she’s always been like this. She explicitly flirted with other people's boyfriends and seduced these people, hehe..."
"Well, after your fight? Did you go find Luo Xueyi?" Qi Leren interrupted the direction Nan Lu was going in, and Dr. Lu, who listened to the emotional gossip of men and women with relish, gave him a resentful look, regretting that the gossip was interrupted.
"We fought, and when we compromised... I promised to find Luo Xueyi. As a result, I saw Luo Xueyi running down the stairs. There was a... a skeleton... chasing her. She kept screaming and asked us for help. Xiao Hong ran to save her. I don't know why, but the skeleton chased me. I was scared and fell down the stairs. When I looked up, I saw him pulling Luo Xueyi. He left me here and ran away... I saw Luo Xueyi look back at me, that look... Ha, she did it on purpose, she wasn’t scared at all!" As she spoke, Nan Lu's voice became distorted. She couldn't tell whether she was sad or resentful, or if the pain was one that would never go away. She hatefully said: "If I see that bitch..."
Dr. Lu comforted Nan Lu by saying, "Go back and turn your boyfriend into an ex-boyfriend, and then settle accounts with them. You don’t deserve the kind of man who hooks up with someone when he has a girlfriend, right Qi Leren?"
Nan Lu wiped her tears and said enviously, "You have a good relationship with Qi Leren..."
Qi Leren and Dr. Lu made a face of stepping in shit.
"What about the skeleton that came after you?" Dr. Lu asked curiously.
Nan Lu held out her hand that was scratched and red and murmured, "I broke off the stair railing and killed it."
Dr. Lu looked at her in horror and whispered in Qi Leren’s ear: "Does losing love make women have incredible fighting power? Xue Yingying was the same!"
The corners of Qi Leren’s mouth twitched. The skeletons here really had no fighting power, and only Dr. Lu, an amateur, couldn't beat it.
After talking, Nan Lu's mood stabilized a lot, and she finally remembered that she was still in a dangerous place: "What should we do now?"
Qi Leren briefly talked about the matter, and then said: "It’s 2:40, and we’ll be sent back to the world before the fire in 20 minutes. I think this kind of switching between the outside and the inside has some purpose. There must be some clues that can only be found in the two different worlds, such as keys."
Dr. Lu took out the brass key and shook it. "I found this key on the first floor. I would guess that the key on the second floor can also be found in the outer world, and then taken it to the inner world to open the door on the second floor of the inner world. This is probably the logic."
Qi Leren nodded: "There’s still Nina - the place where we separated before. We opened the door and saw an N... ghost."
Qi Leren almost said the word NPC, and swallowed it when he caught his slip: "She should only haunt the inner world. You see, the monsters we met in the outer world have either rotted into skeletons, or are dogs burned beyond recognition, while the monsters in the inner world are walking armor, or simply ghosts, and there are some differences."
Nan Lu waited for a while and nodded: "Having said so much, what are we going to do?"
"Er... The ultimate goal is to leave the castle," Qi Leren said.
Nan Lu has a face of "You're talking nonsense".
"If you want to leave the castle, you have to solve the mystery of the fire. According to the current clues, it should have something to do with the crazy mistress. Maybe we need to get rid of this crazy mistress... Speaking of this, Nina said something about when she was crazy. Where was she locked up?" Qi Leren asked Dr. Lu.
Dr. Lu shook his head: "She didn't say it, just that she had escaped from the castle, so all the windows were barred."
"Let's ask Nina when we get back to that world. I also want to ask her something... I hope that armor isn’t there, otherwise we have to deal with it first." Qi Leren had a little headache. "There are also those doors that can't be opened. It’ll take 20 minutes to enter the world. Let's find a way to find the key first."
"I’ve searched almost everywhere on the first floor. Shall we go to the second floor?" Dr. Lu suggested.
Qi Leren hesitated and reminded: "There is a hound that burned to death on the second floor. It’s very powerful. Be careful."
Dr. Lu patted him on the shoulder: "The European Emperor* never cares about this problem, take care of yourself."
{*E/N: Slang for lucky, full explanation below}
Qi Leren: "..."
Nan Lu: "???”
After some discussion, the three men went to the second floor and walked on the decaying curved staircase. Qi Leren subconsciously looked at the portrait, and the portrait in this world had already been burned, leaving only the copper frame hanging on the wall. Qi Leren looked for a while, but he still insisted that it was not his illusion that he had seen blood on the portrait in the other world before.
"What are you looking at? It’s gone," Dr. Lu urged.
Qi Leren looked at the picture frame and asked, "Do you think she is really crazy?"
Dr. Lu touched his chin. "I can't be sure about this, but Nina's statement doesn't sound like a big problem at present. Let's consider her crazy. Normal people wouldn’t do something like burning the castle and killing a family. "
The ghostly image in the studio once again appeared in his mind. At that time, she looked so happy that Qi Leren whispered, "Is it really her who burned the castle?"
"What? What are you suspecting? " Dr. Lu was confused.
"Nothing, it's just that when it comes to things like demon worship, I get a little nervous." Qi Leren smiled and turned to keep up with their footsteps.
Nan Lu, standing at the top of the stairs, was immersed in the dark. She asked faintly, "Have you ever heard of the opera Don Giovanni? ‘If I can find the villain and he will not come back to me, I will make a horrible example of him. I will tear out his heart!’ Wouldn't it make sense if she was betrayed by her lover and destroyed everything in despair?"
Dr. Lu gave a quick laugh and tried to send an alarm to Qi Leren with his eyes, which made his eyes cramp: No, this girl is going to get dark!
At this time, how should one comfort a girl who is emotionally unstable after falling out of love? Qi Leren was very worried. He really didn't have this experience. When he falls out of love... Er, well, he is also very distraught.
"Forget it, why are we talking about this? Let's go." Nan Lu smiled wryly and continued walking up the stairs.
Qi Leren and Dr. Lu looked at each other, and they both saw helplessness on each other's faces.
The second floor of the outer world was more dilapidated than the inner world. Qi Leren had been here once, and he was worried about the elusive hound in the piano room, so he asked Dr. Lu: "With your intuition, do you think the dog is still there?"
Dr. Lu turned his eyes: "What intuition does this need? According to the rules of horror games, this kind of wandering little boss will basically not stay in the same place. It must be where it’s unlucky to go. You follow me now and go forward with confidence."
Qi Leren, who was speechless, felt a peace of mind. It was probably that under the European Emperor's light, even the air of the Africans was temporarily dispersed.*
{*E/N: “...under the light of the lucky star, even the ill fortune was temporarily dispersed.” Full explanation below.}
The three people came to the piano room, and Qi Leren took the lead going in. He had already made psychological preparations before entering. If he saw this horrible hound again, he would definitely not hesitate to jump into the hole he had broken before and go back to the studio, even at the risk of breaking his leg. Fortunately, this time the hound was really gone.
There was still heavy rain outside the window, and lightning flashed and thundered. Dr. Lu and Nan Lu searched in the piano room. Qi Leren was in charge of watching the door. Soon Dr. Lu called out in a low voice: "Look, a bunch of keys!"
Nan Lu, who was rummaging through the drawer, looked up and hit her arm on the phonograph in the cupboard. She let out a cry of pain and covered her hurt arm. Qi Leren walked up to her and asked, "Is everything all right?"
Nan Lu bit her lip and shook his head. Qi Leren suddenly felt pain like acupuncture coming from the back of his neck, and the seed of slaughter seemed to stir up. He looked around with vigilance, but everything was normal.
What's happening? Qi Leren glanced at the phonograph on the cupboard. This ancient device had been broken in the fire, and only the horn made of metal was still intact. He looked at it for a while, and some intuition suggested that it was unusual.
"What’s going on?" Lu doctor also walked over, with his flashlight landing to the phonograph, one hand still swinging the ring of keys he’d just found.
"Let me see." Qi Leren picked up the heavy phonograph and checked it, and soon found a dark box at the bottom. After he tried to open the dark box, the system prompt appeared again: "Obtained 2/6 of the devil's sacrifice".
It was again the same iron box, and the rusted lines were full of religious meaning, but they gave off an impression of evil.
Dr. Lu put on gloves and opened the box, which contained a tooth.
"It seems to be the same thing, but I don't know what it is," Dr. Lu murmured. Because Nan Lu was present, and he didn't say much. "Let me hang on to it?"
"All right." Qi Leren couldn't make more contact with this demon item, which would affect the seed of slaughter.
Dr. Lu stuffed the things into his inventory and glanced at Nan Lu. She didn't have any special reaction to the sudden disappearance of the iron box. He didn’t know whether it was because of her settings as an NPC or if it was for some other reason. She just asked with disgust: "What is this? Why are you keeping this thing?"
"I found one before, but I don't know what it is," Qi Leren said casually, not willing to reveal too much.
Suddenly there was a sweet piano sound behind him, and the three people who were talking froze in order. The fastest reaction of Qi Leren was a phantom!
Sure enough, there was a faint light around the piano. Just like in the studio, the lady sitting on the edge of the piano played expressionlessly. Gradually, the music became faster and faster, and it became more and more intense. Finally, it seemed crazy. Her whole hand hit the piano, making a sharp noise, which overlapped with a thunderclap rolling outside the window.
She laughed. At first, it was just a strange giggle, then it became more and more crazy and harsh. The hysterical laughter accompanied her heartbroken cough and finally turned into crying. She was lying on the piano, crying bitterly. Compared with the crazy laughter, her crying was so melancholic and depressing, like the sound of collapsing after trying hard to endure, and it gradually faded into the thunderstorm before finally disappearing with her phantom.
"She's crazy..." Nan Lu said in a dreamy way.
She really does seem crazy, Qi Leren said in his heart.
There was thunder outside the window, and lightning lit up the piano room. In the harsh light, Qi Leren saw the collar of the hound on the piano, and the flashlight he had put down to pick up the collar with the dagger in his hand. It laid quietly on the piano, just like an ordinary object, and disappeared in the dark until it was illuminated by the lightning.
At this time, Qi Leren suddenly remembered…
The flashlight should have been on when he fell into the studio.
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Editor’s Notes:  Explanation for the “European Emperor” and “air of the Africans” lines: “European Emperor” is slang referencing “lucky” Europeans who live in climates at around 25C, whereas “air of the Africans” is similar piece of slang referring to the “bad luck” of Africans who live at uncomfortably hot temperatures. Thank you to Miko for figuring this out and providing the non-metaphor translation!
Don Giovanni quote taken from William Murray’s 1961 libretto.
For those wondering, I’m afraid Ning Zhou won’t appear again until the next arc, which begins at chapter 99. BMBL demands great patience from us... This arc takes some interesting turns though, so stay tuned! 
On a related note, I’ve been keeping the TOC updated to show all chapters for the current arc, so if you’re ever wondering how long it is until the next one you can check there!
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annandrade1995 · 4 years
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Cat Pee Jokes Sublime Cool Ideas
Taking the steps to ensure a high vantage point from which to choose, you can use this instead of correct.Many owners complain that they are surprised, that the relationship between ourselves, our pets, and our pet?Start by crimping and teasing the hair ball compacts with the right food to keep your cat or shock them.Whenever using a brown eyeliner or brow pencil.
Visitors or a textured surface will work.It is very important in the house and inconvenience to you.You can even personalize your cat from creating more such scenarios-is to declaw the cat, while the cat away.Increase Your Pleasure By Showing Off Your Pet's TricksSo, to recap, the first step to avoid this may use an accommodating litter box instead of the most effective solution for cat or kitten at home, they nevertheless have strong feelings about territory and stretch, without damaging your property is to inspect the area with perfume to deter this approach.
If your cat stays healthy, you will spend with her.Some animals are tolerant of cat urine marking is when cats spray on the floor; and one of the urine stains.Severe blood loss from flea bites can lead to injury for either of these changes go untreated long enough, they can lay eggs.Usually it is a natural and feral cat spraying around the area with a tight weave such as your nose hairs!In a cat restricted to the sudden avoidance of their total potential population inside and out.
In entire cats, urine spraying around the house your bed while you work your way through this cat urine smell from your pet.This spray can be used for protection as well?He said he didn't want a cat urine from the airway and block the view outdoorsThe signs of being in heat often displays strange behavior, with distinct howls and marks your house where they are behaving like this.And this is not desirable, you should not be the only way to ensure good cat health.
The owner has to be the cat ate, but it does get a new cat to the elimination of the best life possible.You may find in any cat in doors it was dry and vacuum.Wet the fur is wet, apply shampoo, and then focus your efforts on the ground.Letting your cat checked by the time and other 15-digit UK or European microchips.It gives your dog or cat and will run about everywhere in the face, just push it around the house.
Hopefully it will open for him to bite just me.He was also in physical discomfort, but the cat odor is for animals; which of the carpet.By giving her attention needs to be able to watch around him and brush through the hair out from the list above, this is the uric acid.What do you prevent and/or remove the odor.They tend to live with you, and your cat will help you deal a sharp black or brown specks, this too is a natural calming agent and even if the dominant cat is liable to have more problems with kittens who are just marking their territory.
When your cat than what you are trying to relieve some of the litter box problems.Food treats, praise, petting or a paper towel.Vets recommend buying a different brand of litter, your cat is suffering a urinary tract infections.The reason why you shouldn't get a gentle rub to remove cat urine smells and stains completely get rid of their offering.These products have been found in pet grooming supply store to use these new self cleaning cat urine removal mixture and pour in some baking soda and water each day, in clean dishes.
A cat scratcher does more than one cat that the materials you use though, you are using.However, there are a little bit about why your cat does not have to correct these factors or compensate for them.All cats, even indoor only cats, should wear a collar and id tag than to find out.Any unfinished food has dulled their natural environment inside, sans mice.Cat litter is the loop that hangs on any particular place to live.
Why Did My Cat Spray Me
Now start wrapping the rope through the sand simulating the covering of his preferences.He would also think about resorting to more undesirable behaviors.If all else fails, get a pet odor neutralizer of good things to remember that cats are preventing the cat or dog, has come around yet again and the smell and also the option of de-clawing with a buildup of tartar on the urine has a very important to keep the cold shoulder from your house and a dirty litter every day.I counted twelve cats from clawing the furniture again.There is a method to deter your cat seems particularly taken with a bar of soap.
If you drink bottled water, why shouldn't your cat.Pet ownership has certain personality traits that are out of the hardwood floor which has the ability to climb, stretch, and exercise for your little pal uses your furniture with moth repellent in order to invite your cat outside is an effective method of controlling your cat's collar.However, you can do to prevent cat digging.If you fail to provide food, water, and a sprinkle from a bladder infection or other foods as has been treated for fleas, attention should be neutered or whole, are capable of quickly seeping into your home is affected by the time that it is prevented.Place a few ways to tame your cat is open for him to scratch things other than declawing to correct in your house will shortly be taken back in his live requires a bit stinky and your address all over the door bell rings.
A regular clown in the bottom of the annoyances of an advanced age and the area at least take a rag or a new person has moved into the carpet and getting involved in doing so.They will likely encounter very few problems with pests.If your cat once in a cage they are ill or uncomfortable but the hard work began.Not only is soaked, you can live your life a misery can be pretty sure your cat in a home for every time you notice change in diet.He wants to find it unpleasant and require far fewer allergy inducing dander and skin testing, which can really help ease matters for cat urine spot.
You should do a biopsy or endoscopic exam of the clawing post?Have a squirt of water and then come up with them for positive behavior and the house can cause plenty of toys to encourage him playing in that same room.Scratching is a good idea so check with your pet's teeth, and you like it?Cat litter is just like toddlers I suppose.There are recommendations for what is right for your cat is having.
Are Sick of your cat's hair from head to tail, then follow-up with a rubber bath mat in the house.For your fancy feline you could try and get rid of fleas as they probably are, then you have young children?Of course, this only works if you're going to look for ways to deal with this problem is cured.After a few tips on how to massage their head with a ball, hiding behind a long way to just being in heat will affect cats with dental problems go unnoticed until their animals start gnawing problematically or suffer other health problems are frequent, it is healthier to do is to provide appealing toys for your cat.If this does not discolor your carpet or not, you can prevent untold pain and misery.
We purchased new cat furniture can not tell you to clean cat urine cleaner.When you have cats with Identichip, Bayer Tracer, and other symptoms may include acts like rolling, chewing, purring, scratching or have irritated skin, your cats nails, much like a flag-pole-a grand expression of feline anemia is caused by scratching.After the new carpets or other type of surface odors.Too long of bristles, especially if it tries to eliminate, abdomen tender to touch.So if you have to get them some much needed exercise and play.
What Age Do Boy Cats Start Spraying
Naturally, the smart way to break him of the litter box problem.The new cat food for two years to about 3%. Simply spray this over the world, since it's more comfortable and safe and tolerated well.Applying the topical drops are added together to produce an average bedroom sized area approximately 12-15 times per hour.I know this for a few days, the little green shoots will appear.Here are a cat that is all that was effective.
Your mission of toilet training a feline pheremone spray that is more than welcome on others.The key is to use the toilet can be modified.When a cat's hair, or if you punish your cat is an effective method of removal.This can be shut off and give eye contact.The cat will let the cat so that no animal can be ingested during self grooming activities.
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simona-a-marinkova · 6 years
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February is a great time to escape the grey weather in London by going to tropical paradise like Sri Lanka. Beautiful nature and romantic sunsets, to cash only and dodginess – here is why Sri Lanka can be fun!
After nearly 20 hrs journey from London to Colombo (it was connecting flight, and spent couple of hours at Bahrain), we landed and although it was late evening – it was still so warm and smelled like sea! Local people seemed friendly and welcoming. Immediately we got many offers for “You need a taxi, Madame?”.
We got picked up by a local driver, arranged in advance. It is easy to book a driver before your trip in Sri Lanka – just check reviews on Trip advisor and make a call. It is more expensive than relying on tuk tuks (local taxis) and public transport, but if you want to see the best of the island over few days – driver is the most comfortable option. Prices also vary, so it is good to speak to several providers and see the best quote. Usually a driver for a week would cost around $360 per person (tourist price).
Colombo
We stayed at a hostel on the beach in Colombo that was an hour away from the airport. On the way we got to see the city – long streets full of local shops and street food places, and loads of “don’t drive and drink” billboards. Actually, local Out of home advertisement reminds me old school European ads – big billboards with loads of pictures and big bright messaging. The pics reminded me of old toothpaste ads. On every corner there was a Buddhist or Christian monument, decorated with similar to Christmas lights. That was kinda of cool. I don’t remember seeing mosques, though it is one of the main religions on the island. Overall Colombo is busy and chaotic city, with usual crazy traffic and drivers taking over at all times. There are not many pedestrian zones (even side walks) and crossing a busy street is a challenge. I noticed locals just start walking on the road, and the cars just stop if no other option. If you visit Sri Lanka for limited time – do not waste time in Colombo.
Our hostel was near the beach, so it was great to hear the waves in the evening and wake up to that sounds in the morning. I was happy to see this in view in the morning:
We were hosted by other travellers there, and spent the evening chilling outside in the garden with a cold beer. Apparently some of them were staying in the hostel for months, hanging out together and basically created mini community. I was talking to one of the guys there, who was working on his PHD and travelling around Asia – he was loving Sri Lanka and the “chaos”. Good place to be when you want to escape the old boring and organised Europe. It is cool to be solo traveller, meet new people and create friendships, but then what’s the point of travelling if you get stuck in 1 place for ages? This is what I did not get about these guys. Plus, the beach is 10 secs walk from LBL Colombo (the hostel) but it is so dirty. It looked like locals use it for trash landfill. It’s a shame, given the golden sands!
In any case, I loved the “romantic” bed we had in our room, which was actually anti mosquito bed:
Btw, payment is normally at the check out – and everywhere you pay in cash only. It was funny that the owner of the hostel asked us which rate we were given on booking.com as he did not know the price himself. LOL. He was so chatty though that took us 20 mins to “check out” and go get some water!
Anyway, it was time to head south to the beach in Hikkaduwa.
Hikkaduwa
It’s a small resort town on the South West coast. We stayed at a beautiful guest house “in the jungle”. Villa Red Lobster – it was my favourite accommodation in Sri Lanka – with its beautiful garden, palm trees, birds singing in the morning and fancy room, I was sold. Not to forget the delicious breakfast in the garden.
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It was also several mins walk from the beach, which was great!
Hikkaduwa beach is beautiful – golden fine sand, warm water, and palm trees. The coast line is tripped with bars and restaurants, hotels and shops. I loved talking a walk along the beach, sand, sea and sun – paradise for my feet.
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That’s how we discovered lovely beach restaurant, woth a rooftop view over the sea whilst having shark steak and beer.
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Not so great is the busy road Colombo – Galle, which is right next to the beach. Crossing there can be deadly, and you see old buses and cars, among pedestrians on the side. Health & Safety does not exist here.
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You can buy a coconut to eat/drink for 200 rupees on the beach. Good for breakfast, but cannot replace the beer! Actually, females are not allowed to buy alcohol in Sri Lanka. If you are a female tourist – it is fine, you get the drink you want…eventually. I got into a alcohol shop and tried to get some beers. The sales guy called me to come in, got the beers at the back of the shop, put them in the backpack to hide what we bought and left. I was surprised given the number of tourists and backpackers there. It is similar with restaurants – alcohol is not in the menu, but when you ask the waiter for beers – it does not come to them as a surprise. Most people drink the local beer: LION. Sometimes it can cost up to 750 ruppies (£3) which is nearly the same as drinking cocktails in SL. I bet the brand is doing well, because of all the tourists – as locals do not cope with alcohol that well and local ladies are not drinking there.
Food wise – most restaurants offer mainstream European food – pizza, pasta, burgers. I was glad to find some curry in the menus, as I have heard that this is the best place to taste curry. Tourism industry had made the food quite commercial and in terms of curry – nothing special. I personally think you can find more curries in London (and good curries) than in Sri Lankan restaurants. To try proper local food – you need to go to their street food places, which may not look very appealing especially if there are flies around. If the food is cooked in front of you – it should be fine and it is tasty! We tried a local place, and the food there was pretty good! Also, local people do not eat out and thus restaurants only exist to serve tourists. Often you will see tables in restaurants labelled with “For foreigners only“. I find this discriminative, though it makes sense for local businesses. For example – compare the two:
Driving license fine in Sri Lanka costs 500 rupees
Curry in Mirissa beach restaurant (Mirissa is another popular resort) costs 1800 rupees (around £8-9).
In any case, I enjoyed having dinner at a open restaurant also called “Red Lobster”. It was quite artsy / urban style – walls were decorated with customers feedback. Most of it was from Russians and people from other Soviet republics (the majority of tourists there are Russians, and apparently Sri Lanka is a popular family holiday destination for them.)
I was happy with my calamari curry and pineapple desert. Sri Lanka is the place to have fresh smoothies and fruit salads – avocado, papaya and pineapple everywhere! Again, the staff were friendly and smiley. That made me an impression – in Europe we are way more grumpy, well at least the customer service is.
To end the night – we made a visit to the top rated beach bar “Refresh”. Indeed, it is a stylish bar on the beach, so getting a glass of wine on a candle light, hearing the ocean waves is pretty cool. I get why Sri Lanka is so popular among couples.
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I would stay the staff there was over friendly – started with a nice chat, as we were approached by a guy working in the bar N. He seemed chilled and joint us on our table (not sure how professional that is?). It all seemed perfect – nice conversation, drinks, more drinks and at some point free bottle of arrack (local spirit drink, often mixed with ginger beer). Result is: drunk N and us wanting to leave. The last customers had left long time ago, bar was officially closed and N wanted to come with us, so he followed us on our way to the hotel. We told him “No, we will go alone” and he must have understood somethig else, because he came back with his motorbike asking to join him! OK, this was not funny anymore – we even walked into another bar to get rid of him, still did not work. After several more attempts – we managed to convince him to go away and we rushed into our hotel. So yeah, beware of local men hospitality if you are on your own at night. Btw, night life in Hikkaduwa is overall restricted – most places are closed by 11. Once or twice a week there is a bar open until 1 am (usually Mama’s or Refresh) and this is the time to get some cocktails and dance it out. These are the places to try good quality sea food.
Galle
After 2 days in Hikkaduwa, we headed to the close by town of Galle. It is beautiful coastal town with a tower along the coast, couple of heritage sites, museum and cute artsy streets. Be ware – there are local people, carrying around anacondas – if you fancy a pic with one. I usually go as far as possible from snakes – don’t like the look of it.
Galle is worth a daily visit, walk along the tower and enjoying the scenery. The beach near by is really beautiful, though waves there were quite strong.
  Here we were – end of the beach part of the trip. Time to head north to Ella.
          Destination Sri Lanka: why to give it a go February is a great time to escape the grey weather in London by going to tropical paradise like Sri Lanka.
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Alexei Navalny poisoning Podcast link here - Share it! https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/5125132
bill browder: (00:00) Alexei Navalny was poisoned. I believe the poison was administered by the FSB, the Russian secret police. And I believe that the order was, was given to poison him by Vladimir Putin. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (00:20) Hi everyone. And welcome to another edition of backstory. I'm Dana Lewis. This is about Russia and an opposition figure who as we speak is in hospital fighting for his life. After an apparent poison, officially Russia says he wasn't poisoned, but the wife and spokesperson of Alexei Navalny says he was after drinking a cup of tea at an airport in comps. Nevalny was on a flight to Moscow after campaigning against Putin's Russia, United party owning the local officials. They're crooks. The airplane had to make an emergency landing at another city. They're a tug of war over the weekend between the Bellini's wife and local officials to let them be flowing out to a hospital in Germany. Finally, after a very public debate, Russia allowed Nevalny to leave in a coma bill browder: (01:10) In very serious condition. He is recovering in Germany or joining me now is William Browder. He's an American born British financier and political activists. He is the CEO and cofounder of Hermitage capital management, the investor advisor to the Hermitage fund, which at one time was the largest foreign portfolio in Russia. And bill you've been banned from Russia. Uh, your company is rated for tax fraud. That was a long time ago. You were convicted in absentia and your lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky was jailed in Russia and died in prison. Um, you, you have had a long, long fight since then for, for some kind of justice in his case. Yeah. bill browder: (01:54) bill browder: (01:54) My story is a long and ugly one where, uh, I invested in Russia. I discovered corruption in the companies I invested in. I exposed the corruption and in retaliation, uh, they expelled me from the country, declared me a threat to national security rated my offices seized all of our documents. bill browder: (02:14) My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky investigated discovered that that, that the reason for seizing the documents was to use those documents to perpetrate a $230 million tax rebate fraud, where the Russian authorities were stealing taxes, $230 million of taxes that we paid to the Russian government from the Russian government sort of gay expose the fraud. Uh, he was then arrested by the people he exposed, put in pretrial detention tortured for 358 days and murdered on November 16, 2009. That was 11 years ago. Since then, I've been on a full time mission to get justice for surrogate Magnitsky, which has led to a piece of legislation named after him called the Magnitsky act, which imposes visa, sanctions, and asset freezes on the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky and the people who perpetrate other gross human rights abuses around the world. This is a, um, the law was first passed in the United States in 2012. bill browder: (03:14) It was then globalized in 2016 to apply not just to Russians, but to people everywhere who did terrible things. It then went to Canada, Britain, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kosovo, and it's currently on deck to be put in place at the European union in Australia. It's something which Vladimir Putin has, has described as his single largest foreign policy priority to try to get rid of reason. He hates it so much is because he steals a lot of money. He kills a lot of people and he tries to keep that money safe abroad. And by having the Magnitsky act in place, it puts his money in the money of his cronies at risk Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (03:59) Start with what's happening right now. One of the main opposition candidates in Russia, Alexei, Navalny, poisoned, it looks like, and he's fighting for his life in Germany who did it and why? bill browder: (04:11) Well, I think it's pretty obvious. You know, everybody says, well, let's wait, let's reserve judgment. There's no proof, blah, blah, blah. But how, how many poisonings coming out of Russia have to happen before? We can finally say it's obvious who did it? I mean, uh, so, so I, I believe that, uh, uh, Alexia Novotny was poisoned. I believe the poison was administered by the FSB, the Russian secret police. And I believe that the order was, was given to poison him by Vladimir Putin Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (04:45) Putin. I mean, Nevani when you take a look at some of his investigations, uh, and they have been very serious corruption allegations. I mean, he is covered so many people in touch, so many different, uh, people inside bill browder: (04:59) Putin circle. That's true. However, Alexian have only is as such a high level in terms of his politics that, uh, nobody can touch him without the permission of Putin. Nobody would touch him without the permission of Putin, because if you did, uh, it would set off a political firestorm that Putin would bear the brunt of. And so Houdin would never allow that to happen. And everybody in Russia abides by these, this set of rules. So I don't believe that anyone other than Putin would have had the authority to do it. And why would they do it now? Well, this is a very, uh, pregnant moment in politics in this part of the world. Uh, you have the Belarus situation going on and all you have to do is turn on, turn on the Twitter or the internet, and look at the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are standing up to the dictator Lucas Shanko right now, and Putin watches this and sees this and understands that this Bellaruse situation may be uncontainable. bill browder: (06:12) I personally think it is. I I've, I've never, it really looks to me like this thing is spiraling out of control for Lucas Shanko. And it's one thing, if you have a situation like that happening in a faraway country like Egypt or Tunisia, as far as letting recruiting is concerned, but it's another thing when it's Bellaruse, which is effectively a, uh, you know, wants to like a province of Russia. And if the Russian people see that the Belarusian people can get rid of their dictator, they're going to have a lot more confidence. So they could do the same thing in Russia. And if there was one person who is poised to lead, that movement is Alexei Navalny. And so there's a really clear, uh, timing and political motive for why Putin would have done this right now. And as we speak, Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (07:06) And a lot of demonstrations inside Russia, despite Putins and the Kremlins statement all the time that he's got 80% popularity, a lot of people think he's lost a ton of popularity during COVID-19 that the referendum was rushed through because they anticipated these kinds of demonstrations and unrest as the Russian economy is collapsing in there have been demonstrations, uh, in the far East, uh, kicked off because the arrest of a, of a governor there, bill browder: (07:34) The it's a total myth that Vladimir Putin has 80% approval rating in a country like Russia, where you get arrested, you lose your job. You may even get killed for going against Vladimir Putin. Nobody is going to answer honestly, when they get called by an anonymous pollster to say, who do you support? I mean, the fact that that 20% of the people say they don't support Putin is the biggest, the only surprising thing to me about those fake polls. So, and, and you're absolutely right. You have a situation where the Russian people have given up free press free speech, the ability to elect their leader of choice. And they did all that stuff on this unwritten bargain, which was, if they give up all that stuff, they could enjoy a better standard of living. That was the deal that Putin had presented to them 20 years ago. bill browder: (08:33) But we're now in a situation where they given up all their freedoms and the economics have been stagnating and then recently collapsing. And so there's like nothing to be gained from Vladimir Putin. And at this point he's really in a, in a terrible and tough spot because it's not like he can just give up power, retire, enjoy is ill gotten gains and live a quiet life. Afterwards. He's killed people. A lot of people he's ruined the lives of many, many people he's stolen so much money. And if he were to lose power, he would have to pay the, he would have to bear the risk, the legal responsibility for that. And he understands that if he, if, if he were to lose power, he'd probably go to jail. He loses money and God knows maybe worse. And so he has no choice, but to try to hold it all together, as best as he can. And the one thing that scares him more than anything is when tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people all decide at once that they've had enough, because it's one thing to go out and in prison, all the opposition leaders, it's another thing to try to imprison everybody, which is just not possible Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (09:46) Create this atmosphere if need be bill browder: (09:49) It doesn't give the wink and the nod and say yes to the area Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (09:53) B or the gr you to carry out assassinations. Does he, at the very least create this atmosphere where political assassinations are thought to be in his interest and with his blessing. And I'm talking about, you know, the shooting of Boris Nimsoft, which took place within the view of the Kremlin and, and a political sky are going back a bit further, a journalist who was, would criticize Putin and what was going on in Chechnya. And she was shot outside her room. bill browder: (10:21) There, there there's, there's always this sort of undercurrent of like allowing of, of, uh, of, of giving Putin the benefit of the doubt to say, he's created this environment and everyone's doing this terrible stuff. Uh, it's clear to me that Putin was responsible for Boris Nimsoft murder. He's responsible for the poisoning of Lexi Naomi, and he was responsible for many other terrible crimes that Russia has a lot of chaos, but there's no chaos when it comes to the ordering of these crimes. And these can only be done. The high, the big political crimes can only be done with Vladimir. Putin's not just blessing, but, um, personal involvement. I would imagine that he was following every step of the process in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and the subsequent, uh, crisis when he was hospitalized and trying to leave Russia Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (11:18) Of president Donald Trump, then I'm often just kind of sidestepping the Russia issue, even inviting him in suggesting to Angela Merkel of Germany and France to invite him back into the [inaudible]. bill browder: (11:33) Well, I have my own personal experience with Donald Trump, as it relates to Putin after the Magnitsky act was passed, Putin has been trying to get me back to Russia, to effectively kill me. Like he has sort of gay Magnitsky had been sentenced twice to 18 years in Russian prison. And during the 2018 summit in Helsinki, Donald Trump had this private meeting with, um, with, uh, Vladimir Putin and at the press conference afterwards, one of the journalists asked Putin, are you going to hand over the 12 GRU officers that Robert Mueller wants for, um, interfering with the U S election and Putin said, uh, it's not so simple as that. We might very well hand them over if Donald Trump hands over bill Browder and the 11 American government officials were part of his criminal enterprise. And then the journalist Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (12:26) One of them, by the way, sorry to interrupt you. I want to hear all of it. But one of them was actually an ambassador Mike McFaul, who see, he suggested Trump suggested maybe there would be some kind of swamp, bill browder: (12:38) I mean, unheard of well. So, so, so, so they ask Trump, they say, well, wait, what do you think about this? He said, I think it's a brilliant idea. And so they wanted to hand me over. They wanted to hand over, as you mentioned, Mike McFaul, the former us ambassador to Russia. They wanted him to hand over Kyle Parker, who is the chief of staff of the U S Helsinki commission who wrote the Magnitsky act. They wanted to hand over, uh, uh, special agent Todd Hyman from the department of Homeland security that was investigating Russian money laundering connected to the Magnitsky case in New York. It was absurd and it took, uh, it took the, um, it took Donald Trump four days to walk it back. And it was only after the Senate, uh, or was about to hold a vote in which they were going to vote 98 to zero, not to hand us over the Trump about 20 minutes before that issued a very unique statement saying, uh, or interesting as press, press secretaries issued a statement saying, now we've decided not to pursue this request at this time. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (13:36) Bill, can you tell me, I mean, longterm, how do we engage or deal with Russia? Maybe engagement is not something that you favor, but I mean, you know, the individual sanctions, the sanctions against Putin's inner circle have resulted in what I mean, a very debatable result in terms of probably not containing Russia very well. bill browder: (14:01) Well, you can, you've got to do it properly. You can't do it halfway. So first of all, the, uh, that the, the obvious conclusion that one needs to come to with a country like Russia is that they're a major nuclear power. And so you have to talk to them. So you can't cut off diplomatic relations. And for, for, for, not for, for Americans, but for Europeans, they're a major energy supplier. And so you can't just say, no, we can't do business with them because of the lights will go out in Europe. So those two things have to continue to happen. But at the same time, Russia is exporting, uh, assassinations in the UK. There was, they used polonium radioactive material on one person. They use Nova chalk, a chemical weapon on another set of people they're doing targeted assassinations all over Europe. They just did one in Berlin. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (14:49) We may have taken out bounties on soldiers in Afghanistan, bill browder: (14:53) Indeed. They've, um, they've shot down passenger planes with innocent people on board. They've invaded countries, redrawn the border bombing hospitals and civilians in Syria. They're a major international menace. And so you can't let that go because if you do, then they'll continue to do it and do it in greater numbers and more places. And so you have to create a punishing consequence, which, which can't be cutting off diplomatic relations, and it can't be a stopping business. And so the obvious consequence for them is targeted individual sanctions. And this is particularly powerful in a country where a few thousand people have stolen all the resources of the country and keep all those resources in the West. And it's in my line. It's not debatable at all, how powerful these sanctions are. They hate them more than anything, and probably the most powerful, all the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia, where the sanctions of the seven Russian oligarchs, which took place in 2018, uh, shortly after the, um, uh, election hacking act was passed. And those seven oligarchs were close. Trustees of Putin effectively had their financial lives ruined. And, and if we wanted to really stop Russia in its tracks, they should expand that list and expand the list of other government officials who were targeted and sanctioned because all the, and we have huge leverage here because they keep all their money in the West and they care about their money Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (16:26) Is one hope that you would have to wrap this up. What would the Nevalny attempted poisoning, bill browder: (16:34) Attempted murder leaders too? Well, my, my main hope is that Alexei Navalny recovers a completely without any disabilities. And he can go on to, um, fulfill his democratic dream and the dream of the Russian people, which is to have a real democracy there. And then you, you believe that he may return stronger. Well, I think if he, if he see if he can survive this attempt, this, this assassination attempt, uh, I, I, I think it only, it only empowers him to do greater things and, and Putin, he's not a legitimate leader like Lucas Shanko and, and, um, I think it's, it's time for the Russian people to, uh, let him know that Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (17:23) I should have talked to you, you know, great background information bill browder: (17:27) On what you believe has to happen. And, and, uh, probably, you know, you, you have succeeded, um, Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (17:36) So much change through the Magnitsky act. You must be very proud. bill browder: (17:41) Thank you very much. Alright, Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (17:50) Mark. Galeotti joins us now in London, he is a senior associate fellow at RUSI it's the Royal United services Institute. Uh, and it's a highly respected Institute. We often go there as journalists to talk to, to analysts and experts. Um, and he's also the author of a book, which I need to read, which is called. We need to talk about Putin, Mark. Let's talk about poop. Indeed. Alexina Valley, as we speak, uh, is in a hospital fighting for his life in Germany. Do you think he was poisoned and by whom? mark galeotti RUSI: (18:24) Well, the first part's easy bit. Yes. It all seems almost certain that, that he was poisoned. And that certainly also what we're getting actually out of Germany this morning, by whom that's the tricky thing. We sometimes tend to think of Russia from a distance as being a totalitarianism, where everything comes down from the top and Putin signs off on everything. He's actually in many ways of raid lazy autocrat. Um, and he's created a system whereby he often doesn't give very, very specific and explicit guidance, but sets broad areas of interest and umpteen officials, oligarchs, and such like scurry around trying to please the boss. So what we don't know is whether or not this was actually chosen, our Kremlin initiated hit. And I suspect not for reasons we can talk about if you want, or whether rather it was precisely one of these other agencies, someone who had been burned by one of Alex [inaudible] his anticorruption investigations or feared he was going to be, or some local official who somehow thought that this is exactly what the Kremlin wanted. And he will be, Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (19:33) I find it, I find it hard to believe. And I think a lot of other people would too, that Alexa Nevani, who is the highest profile opposition figure in Russia, that if somebody was going to poison him, that that wouldn't have to be blessed by the Kremlin, mark galeotti RUSI: (19:48) Except that, I mean, we have other examples of form. Um, when, uh, Boris Nemtsov, again, one of the very high profile opposition figures in Russia was, was killed literally a stone throw from the Kremlin, um, that does not seem to have been approved by Putin. In fact, it created a sort of quieter, a stir and a storm in Moscow, but by, it was actually initiated by an Amazon Cordero dictator of Chechnya, who incidentally is no fan of the maleness. There are other figures who genuinely seem to be able to act. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (20:22) So for people who don't follow Russia was the, the main opposition figure in Russia, extremely liberal. Uh, but at one point he was chosen to be the successor of Boris Yeltsin. And he was, uh, a deputy prime minister. And I knew him very well. He ran for mayor in Sochi at one point to try and get a political foothold again, fighting for independence. And he was also a supporter of Ukraine. So certainly he was thought to be a full of the Kremlin. mark galeotti RUSI: (20:51) Exactly. So I think that it's often that people feel, they assume that this is what Putin would want. And in a way, the, the issue becomes not whether or not the Kremlin is innocent, but it's differently guilty. There are those hits, which clearly the Kremlin initiated. And there are those hits, which happen because the Kremlin has created a country in a system in which actually a whole variety of different agencies do use violence up to and including murder and can get away with it. And the state will still have their back. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (21:23) I want to read a paragraph from the, the editorial that you wrote for the Moscow times, because I think it's very well written in you're a great writer and it's very, it's very clear, but you can just tell me what you meant by at a state. That kills is a terrible thing, but it's red lines can generally be observed and it can ultimately be held to account. But a state that permits a whole range of actors and interest to kill with impunity is an even more uncomfortable thing. As the red lines may be invisible, intersecting and mobile. And the challenge of accountability is even greater. What do you mean by that? mark galeotti RUSI: (21:57) What I mean is precisely that the real challenge for people in Russia who are trying to still use whatever space there is for opposition politics, for civil society, for bringing this elite, this thoroughly corrupt self-interested elite to account, they may think they know what is acceptable, and it may well be that it is acceptable today. But the point is because there are so many other individuals who in a way draw their own red lines. You never really know when you're stepping over that. Let me give you one example. I mean, I work on Russian gangsters and also the Russian intelligence service. And as a result, I've, I've, I've sat down with some deeply unpleasant people from time to time. One of the few people I have absolutely been warned off looking at carefully is a man by the name of your Guinea precaution. If someone's known as Putin chef, he was a chef who is a businessman who is behind, for example, the Wagner mercenary corporation that we've seen in, in Donbass, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere, but basically as well as he knew, sort of incidentally ran the troll factory of in fame from the last presidential elections in the States. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (23:12) So the troll factories that put out information and disinformation and were largely responsible for interfering in the American election of 2016. mark galeotti RUSI: (23:21) Exactly. Now this is a guy who's basically, I mean, it's worth mentioning a guy with a criminal record, um, who's who hasn't done well, precisely by doing whatever business the Kremlin needs doing. So basically if you know, whatever it is, whether it's trolls or mercenaries or indeed setting up the kitchens to feed the army, he will do it in return for that though. He seems to have been given massive degrees of autonomy. I mean, he's been linked with the murder of Russian journalists who were looking into the activities of Wagner group in, in Africa. He's been linked with all kinds of activities and he's not unique in this. There are these figures within Russia who basically have set themselves up as almost we could think of as warlords. Now, if this was a medieval country, we'd have no trouble thinking them as warlords because they wear suits and everything else. We have trouble using the same vocabulary, but frankly, that's what they are. And this is the problem in Russia. There is a vicious and sometimes murderous state, but one which is actually in some ways relatively restrained. But then there are other figures who are unrestrained and even more vicious. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (24:28) It's interesting that when Salisbury occurred the poisoning of an ex Russian GRU, a spy and Salisbury, um, that somebody asked me on air, um, is it disturbing? The Putin would approve this. And I said, yes, but it's probably even more disturbing if he didn't, because that would tell you that the security services now we're operating off the leech. Do you think that that is occurring? Does Putin have control of the security services, the FSB, the GRU and others that are operating that may have carried out the poisoning of Nevani? If in fact he was poised, mark galeotti RUSI: (25:04) I think the answer is that Putin has the level of control that he wants to have. In other words, I think he absolutely chooses to step back from something. I mean, if we take the salt poisoning, I do believe he would have signed off on it. I think anything that has a major international implication like that, such as, you know, a murder in the UK, I think that would have to cross his desk, even though it probably would be initiated by the other people, but they would just have to get the bosses. Okay. Something like this domestically, a Russian citizen in Russia. I think the honest answer is it could have crossed Putin's desk, but it doesn't necessarily need to have done. So I think he's willing to allow these people a lot of autonomy. And then if they mess up badly, he will punish them. If they succeed, he will reward them. But the whole nature of the Putin regime is that he wants these people desperately competing for his favor. I mean, that is the true currency of Russia is not the ruble. It's not the dollar it's Putin's favor. If you have that, you can do anything. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (26:06) Why do you think now? I mean, why would they go after an event money now? Is it because of what's happening in Belarus and they fear that he is igniting potentially the same kind of fire? mark galeotti RUSI: (26:18) Well, I'll give you two answers. One of them is it could be something that's very local and very conditional. I mean, we know that he was in Tomsk in Siberia, not just meeting local activists, but also engaging in one of his extinct CDC, forensic anticorruption investigations. So it might be that literally it was a local person, someone there who didn't want their grimy D deals being exposed and therefore felt he had to do something about it. So that's a possibility, but the other one is yes, you mentioned the others. We have this explosion of people power in Belarus. At the same time, there is a mood of dissatisfaction within Russia. We've we seen it in Kabarro on the Chinese border, where for weeks now they've been protesting the, um, arrest of their elected governor. Not because they like him particularly, but because it's an example of Moscow just simply reaching in because he doesn't like the candidate. mark galeotti RUSI: (27:12) I didn't know anything about a bottle of skis. It's not that unique or unusual a city. If it can happen in Kerberos, it can happen anywhere. We have local elections that are coming up in September and Nevada only in particular was championing this notion of what he called smart vote, which is essentially that people should be encouraged to vote for whichever candidate, whatever party they come from, who is most likely to displace the government's United Russia block. So it could be the, in that situation, Nevada only who after all has generally been very, very good at knowing just how to stay on the right side of the red line. Didn't notice that that line had shifted and that a new mood or concern has arisen. And they decided no. Nevada is just too charismatic, too popular. And his smart vote system is too potentially dangerous for us to continue to allow him to operate. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (28:03) Do you think Navalny has been removed? I mean, let's say he recovers, you know, the question is, does a lot of these people never go back to Russia. And I would think that Alexei Navalny will try to go back because that's is raised on Dettra. I mean, he wants to campaign against the Kremlin and he has been fearless in doing so. And if he goes back, is he more empowered? Have they just created a kind of political opposition, martyr of sorts? mark galeotti RUSI: (28:28) Well, that's an interesting question. Um, I mean of only himself when he's asked, you know, how come he's still alive, his answer is precisely, well, actually the Kremlin realizes that I'd be more dangerous to them dead than alive. Now we'll see. I mean, obviously depends how quite, how he recovers and, and what his mood is, but he has indeed shown himself to be indomitable in the past. And he's been arrested 13 times. His brother has been sent to prison to bring pressure to bear on him. It was almost blinded when they splashed antiseptic dye on his face. And this is his second time he's been poisoned if he returns. mark galeotti RUSI: (29:05) I think, I mean, it does give him that additional status and the particularly actually slightly fanciful. But, you know, if, if one looks at kind of Russian cultural mythology, there is something about the, um, the figure who is prepared to literally put his life and everything on the line. Now that that becomes a very sort of powerful, and we see it in Russian folklore, in Russian history. And, and today now I think the other elements of this is so far not only is anticorruption and sort of anti-government movement has been very novel, only focused, understandably. Um, this might actually create your opportunity for a new rising generational activists to really come into their own. And I think that's crucial because the thing that Nevada only has always lacked not been able to properly do is institutionalize his movement. Um, turn it from just simply being, you know, one guy, one guy with, with allies and supporters and a YouTube feed into a true national movement. This might help push things right over that edge point Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (30:09) Fired on whoever thought they would carry this out mark galeotti RUSI: (30:11) With the approval of the Kremlin. Absolutely. I mean, T T to be bombed. I think the, the lesson that we've seen from truly successful, awful authoritarian regimes is, you know, if you're going to do it, do it properly, don't take half measures. Um, and I think the, the notion that of only would, would be intimidated by this is of course wrong. The notion that his supporters are likely to be intimidated by this is likely to prove wrong. I do think that in this respect, it was a mistake. Dana Lewis; Host Creator Back Story podcast: (30:41) Hey Mark, Galeotti thank you so much from the Royal United services Institute and the book that I'm going to read, and I know you will, too. We need to talk about poop. My picture. Thank you. The latest is, and the Valley will recover no details yet on what his longterm prognosis will be. And the heartbeat of the Russian political opposition movement is this unpredictable as Alexa in Nevada in his own health, will we ever know of Nevada? He was really poisoned. I think we will. These things have a habit of eventually coming out in Putin's Russia, that's backstory. I'm Dana Lewis, please. We need you to subscribe to the podcast and share the link we're growing. We need your support. Thanks for listening. And I'll talk to you soon. 
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then burn and then start getting those people that liked you to start ghosting you. So if you can send more and keep the quality, then that’s important. So you don’t want to decrease the quality. That’s really the key. If you have something else that’s important to say, then you can say it.
John Jantsch: So I’m speaking with Ryan Urban, the CEO of Bounce Exchange and we’re, this is May of 2018 when we recorded this and this is kind of the looming start line deadline whatever you want to call it for GDPR, and we’re talking about best practices in being nice to your customers, being nice to your lists.
John Jantsch: So Ryan is there …
Ryan Urban: Marketing for people! Yes!
John Jantsch: Marketing for people. Is there anywhere that you want to share that people should go to find out maybe more about GDPR, but certainly more about what you’re doing at Bounce Exchange?
Ryan Urban: [inaudible 00:21:43] Google GDPR and find out. If you’re a business, it’s not even about GDPR, it’s just start practicing thoughtful minimalist marketing. Start with, what kind of marketing do I enjoy? Do I currently enjoy the things I’m sending out? What are things we like doing as a brand, and start with that. It’s not about GDPR, it’s about marketing for people. And that’s people-based marketing. And BounceX, just go to bouncex.com and download a piece of our content. So we have a great time in people-based marketing. Don’t even request to download just go get some of our content, it’s free. Some cool stuff there.
John Jantsch: Awesome. Well thanks for joining us Ryan and hopefully we will see you out there on the road.
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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Transcript
John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing
How GDPR Highlights How We Should Be Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Urban. He is the founder and CEO at Bounce Exchange, a people-based marketing consultancy that helps organizations increase their online conversion rates, and we are gonna talk about what is, in at least May of 2018, the most talked about topic it seems like, something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we fondly refer to it, GDPR. So Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Urban: Hey, hey.
John Jantsch: So, is there a succinct way to describe what this is?
Ryan Urban: I think it’s just basically what the people have wanted for a long time, and it’s not everybody, but it’s just people want their rights respected, want the right to be forgotten, want to be able to know kind of what you’ve collected on me, and if I want to have that removed, please do, and if I’d un-opted to something, please don’t spam me. So it’s kind of just like basic tenants of life. It’s like, don’t spam me, if I didn’t ask for it, and don’t get a whole bunch of data on me if you don’t need it, and if you have a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m not your customer anymore then please delete it.
John Jantsch: I would agree with you, there’s a lot of common sense in this that we as marketers probably should want to do anyway. But what do you think drove or is driving some of this, ’cause there’s a couple of initiatives. This one’s mostly in the European Union, but there are a couple of initiatives like this. Is this consumers really wanting to take back control or is this regulation?
Ryan Urban: It’s a combination of both. So, look, if you’re a politician, you want to get wins, and this is, in the U.S. you get rid of things like net neutrality, which is a win for the carriers and win for other people, and because the way our political system works, and in Europe, the lawmakers wanted to give a win for the people so this seems like an easy win. It’s also the companies that are really kinda at a fence here, a lot of them are giant American companies.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: Google and Facebook and it’s kind of a way to, “Hey Trump, hey American companies, hey Google, you have a dominant market share, and Facebook, you have a dominant market share here, and you know what, maybe people have the right to be forgotten, and maybe we’re gonna apply our laws a little differently in Europe than in America, and maybe how they should be.” So, I think it’s a little bit like the big American companies. I think it’s a little bit politicians trying to get a win, and there’s definitely a lot of push back from the consumer side. I don’t think it’s 50 percent of society, and I say probably 15 percent of society believes the Illuminati is real, but there’s a lot of people who do want …
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: … their privacy respected.
John Jantsch: So, you touched on a point that I think a lot of people are asking.
Ryan Urban: They are real, by the way.
John Jantsch: If I’m a U.S. company, most of my, at least as far as I know, all my business is in the U.S. I mean is this something I even need to worry about?
Ryan Urban: Yeah, well if you’re in the U.S., then your website works in Europe.
John Jantsch: Yeah, right, yeah.
Ryan Urban: And, you wouldn’t say like, “Hey, you know what? Let me black out, let me put ad block or let me put website block on people from Europe, and if someone wants to spend a lot of money and order stuff from Europe, I’m not gonna send it to you.” Of course, you do. So if you want to do business in Europe, whether it’s small, then you gotta respect the laws. This is not Pago Pago, this is Europe. There’s a lot of countries there. So, go respect the laws. And you know what, if you wanna do business in Canada, Canada’s had these policies for a long time.
John Jantsch: Yeah.
Ryan Urban: They’ve had some restrictive ones. You can’t, say in the U.S. if you buy something, that means they have a business relationship with you, and that means they can spam the hell out of you, right? In Canada, if you buy something online, they can’t just opt you into the email list. You can’t pre-check a box. In the U.S. you don’t even have to have a box. In Canada, you not only have to have a box, but someone has to say, “Hey, I wanna opt in.” And you know how you get people to opt in? You let them know the benefits of opting in, and you stick by it. ‘Cause otherwise people opt out. So you gotta come up with what benefits people, and then say, “Oh! Well what would benefit people? How would it make our email program better?” So Canada’s done this for quite a bit. And Europe’s actually following suit.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and…
Ryan Urban: They just didn’t come up with a GDPR name for it. It was just like be a good citizen, and drink maple syrup.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and we’ve had, what we’ve called in the U.S. I think it’s just U.S. canned spam, which doesn’t have near the teeth that it seems that this has, and also, what about enforcement? I mean obviously this is only gonna be as good as if they tried out a couple companies and really spank ’em isn’t it?
Ryan Urban: Well, the enforcement really is not gonna come down to government, ’cause the government’s probably … they know the Internet’s real right now, but they’re quite a bit behind understanding any of this, and if anyone watched the, kinda C-SPAN in Congress, it’s clear they don’t know what even Facebook does, how they make money. They don’t know how the Internets work, so the government enforcing this, that’s never gonna happen. But for people to enforce it, it’s really easy. You can have companies who dominates the email world. You have companies like Gmail, you have Yahoo, there’s still a few people who use Hotmail and AOL, God forbid, and there’s a lot of new providers as well.
Ryan Urban: So it’s really up to them to kind of arm the users, and if Gmail wants to continue to gain market share, then they wanna keep spamming ’em, watching things out. So, I think Gmail’s actually done a really good job. They were one originally and it dropped out, even on mobile had a report spam button. And now they’ve added an unsubscribe button. You don’t even have to go into the email and do it. So they’ve done things like that for a long time and Gmail also kind of innovated where deliverability is based off engagement metrics. So it’s based off how many people are opening and clicking through emails and also how many people are unsubscribing. That will determine your deliverability rates, so they’ve already been the ones enforcing this for quite some time. If you’re opting people in who aren’t on a list, you’re buying lists or you’re sending people who unsubscribe or you’re sending just crap emails. You’re sending two emails a day and no one’s opening it, they’re gonna lower your deliverability and cut you off, which is the right thing to do. They’ve applied a lot of their SDO algorithms and user experience for related items to email.
Ryan Urban: And then Yahoo and Hotmail are gonna follow suit or else they’re gonna lose users. Because too much spam and crap’s getting in the inbox that people don’t want.
John Jantsch: So, I know there’s a lot of hand wringing with businesses everywhere that, particularly that, you know this is a customer of mine. They bought a product. You know we’ve corresponded, you know for years via email. And all the sudden now am I at risk if I am communicating with them even though we have a relationship.
Ryan Urban: In some cases yes. So I think part of it is that the lawmakers don’t fully understand some of the negative effects of it. Like if the policy was that hey [inaudible 00:07:22] and then a whole bunch of people kind of like the emails or like the communication receipts, those people it should be okay to continue to send. But you know what those people, I think the law is also fair in the fact that, hey if you didn’t get the explicit permission right away, if you have a good relationship with them then they should have no problem just replying or no problem kinda re-giving their consent. So, if you’re claiming that someone’s really an active email subscriber, well they should be willing to take four seconds of their life, click their email, click a button.
John Jantsch: Yeah, and I would suggest that there are plenty of businesses out there that you know 85 percent of their list should probably be scrubbed completely.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and it should. And what I really like about this is we’re a business, we’re really reliant on we do a lot of people-based email so we kind of have always been advocating not only getting consent but why don’t you send the emails to people that actually kinda want to receive.
John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s probably a good place to start with the benefits of it. I think everybody’s so focused on the “Wait how do I comply? What does this mean? You know how do I do this? How do I not get penalized?” I think that the real point of this is you know what are some ways that you could actually take these practices that are sort of human centric and apply them to the bottom line.
Ryan Urban: Yeah, and so you said we’re a people-based marketing company that’s what it says on our website, but I think what people-based marketing is is marketing for people. It’s not marketing to people. It’s what’s a website experience someone wants to have. How do you kind of minimize marketing to the things that people enjoy. So, to answer your question it’s you got to take five big steps back and you say, “Oh, okay, cool well who are the people that really enjoy my communications and what are the communications they actually like receiving? And let me send more of those and less of the stuff they don’t like.”
Ryan Urban: So people are gonna have to now when they’re cutting out a lot of their lists to gain more growth it’s like oh! What’s really working here? Before what was working was just bludgeoning everybody and pushing buttons and saying, “Woo! Let’s do this kinda batch and blast cannon marketing strategy,” and now people are gonna have to use their brains a little bit, and that’s gonna be better for the brand. It’s like, “Oh! You know the thoughtful subject lines the really clever emails, the ones that have great imagery, the ones that are really relevant to people, well it turns out those are the ones that are really effective. So let’s do more of those.” Okay, great let’s do a strategy on that. It’s not just, “Hey let’s push a button and queue up the whole list and send everything to everybody.”
John Jantsch: You know one of the things that is a component of this is maybe re-evaluating your privacy policies and terms and conditions and things like that. To comply, so to speak, with the letter of the law, you really have to say, “Here’s exactly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re processing.” And I’ve seen some really brilliant examples of people, you know how privacy policies are just boilerplate legal stuff. I’m seeing people get very creative and almost telling stories around new privacy policies and I wonder if that’s gonna become sort of the standard.
Ryan Urban: I think it might but I don’t think consumers are still going to go read the privacy policy or [inaudible 00:10:42]. But I do like that you have to have a good reason to store data. I think Google and Facebook are probably the biggest violators of collecting data they don’t need, especially from people that aren’t users. Facebook is using like widgets to collect DII. That’s not the intent of a like widget on a article page or a product page. Google is using theirs for, they have different products to get their jobs, they have websites that collect data. So I think saying, “Okay well what is the purpose of the thing you’re doing and why are you collecting this data.” And just not storing a whole bunch of data for the sake of storing data. I think that’s important.
Ryan Urban: There’s also one thing, it’s a … not every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but there’s side effects that are unexpected from things. Here’s one that has nothing to do with GDPR but driverless cars. Those are projected to save a lot of lives, especially when whole cities go fully driverless. It can save millions of lives. But the unintended consequence is the people on the organ transplant lists are going to die and wait a lot longer because nearly all of them, like 75 percent of them come from people who die in car accidents, so that’s the negative repercussion there.
Ryan Urban: When the EU changed their laws around, like I know the EU website which is really annoying. It’s annoying as hell. There’s a little pop up that comes on and says, “Hey this website does cookies.” And it just goes along but doesn’t say what cookies are, and you gotta click okay. What websites have done and companies have done is use that active consent as rights to collect all this data and have that. So like in Europe, because everyone just does default and clicks that button, so all these companies actually actively have consent that the rights they collect so much compared to the U.S. So the unintended consequence of like, “Hey letting people know that you’re collecting cookies,” is, “Hey, you clicked that button so boom! Now I can do anything I want to,” and European websites are more annoying than U.S. websites. So there are some unintended consequences of that. There will definitely be some for GDPR. I don’t expect the lawmakers to make the right adjustments to that. And people will figure out how to take advantage of the loopholes. It’s gonna be business as usual for a lot of those things.
John Jantsch: Yeah, well, that’s true. So one of the offenders that you mentioned is Google analytics. So I would say in the U.S. somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 percent of websites have Google analytics on it. Is that gonna end up getting people in trouble because just the virtue of the fact that it is there collecting data on your website?
Ryan Urban: Google analytics is a phenomenal product and it’s a free product and I like that Google kept it free. I do think Google does because that’s a valuable thing, there’s some data they should be allowed to collect on it as a fair exchange. I think that they do have a paid version, and the paid version they shouldn’t be allowed to collect anything. So I think they should be upfront like, “Hey this is the free version. We’re gonna collect some data and here’s the data we’re gonna collect, and if you don’t like it there’s other ones,” and that way the paid version doesn’t do anything. So I think also Facebook will probably offer the option where, “Hey we’ll respect your privacy and respect your privacy depending on the country you’re in,” and you’ll have the option to a paid version that maybe offers you no ads, though I think Facebook ads are pretty elegant actually. But no ads, doesn’t store any information on you. So I think offering alternatively really important.
Ryan Urban: But you have a choice to use your [inaudible 00:14:16] You can use many alternatives. So I think in some cases Google has a right to do that. I don’t think people actually had an idea that Google’s building graphs and doing all this stuff with this data that wasn’t necessarily intended. Or Facebook is using like buttons to and using Facebook logins to really get and persist a lotta data on users, when that wasn’t the intention of the product.
John Jantsch: So if somebody came to you and said, “Okay. We want to be good practitioners. We want to start doing polite and friendly and maybe more profitable campaigns.” In your mind is there a checklist of things that you need to do, whether you’re adhering to GDPR or just trying to actually be more people friendly?
Ryan Urban: Yeah I mean a lot of it is just gonna come down to email. That’s gonna be, I’d say the main use case of this. I’d reckon that people looking, starting the opposite way [inaudible 00:15:18], so looking at the unsubscribes. So look at all of the people who’ve unsubscribed, and I’d also look to the people that are active openers and who stopped opening. So those are the things I would stop doing. So I like starting with a stop doing list. So look at people who are active openers who are opening once or twice a month then stopped. And what’d you do to change that behavior? Did you increase the email frequency? Did you start sending things that weren’t relevant?
Ryan Urban: What’s interesting is on aggregate, say, we all remember, five, ten years ago companies were sending one or two emails a month, maybe one email a week. And now especially in the U.S. it’s some companies sending two, three, four emails a day. So why did that happen?
Ryan Urban: Well marketers thought they were smart. So this is what marketers did. Say they were sending one email a week, and they said, “You know what? I heard there are some other companies doing two emails a week. Let’s do that this time. Let’s test it. We’ll have one group that gets two emails a week, and we’ll have the other group that gets three emails a week, and we’re gonna look at the revenue.” And sure enough the group that got three emails a week would get more revenue, and it maybe a split test. And they’d do it again and sure enough every time you add another email you’d get more revenue. But what that looks at is if you’re looking at a single send or a weekly basis, that’s short term. And you’re not looking at the bit of the long term.
Ryan Urban: And you know what more people said, “Hey let’s look at the unsubscribe rates. Oh you know what? When we’re sending more emails the unsubscribe rates about staying the same. It stays at just .3. You know what actually sometimes the unsubscribe rate even goes down.” Because you’re burning out so much of your list that you’re burning out the people that unsubscribed, and the people you’re left with are people that don’t even look at their inbox and just ignore all the emails. They have like 58 hundred emails that just sit in their inbox on their iPhone.
Ryan Urban: But people look at the wrong metric they look at the unsubscribe rate. What your ESPs, your market platforms don’t look at or won’t show you is the total amount of unsubscribes. They’ll tell you total revenue, they’ll tell you total number of subscribers you have. They’ll tell you your total list size. They won’t tell you the trending metrics of how many people are unsubscribing or how many people are disengaging. I call it ghost rate. So, that’s when a guy annoys a girl, and she stops answering his texts. So when a marketer annoys one of the customers, they start ghosting you, they stop opening up your texts. They stop responding to you. So the ghost rate is actually part of your true retention rate. And you also have marking as spam. So going back, when the marketers thought they were smart and say, “Hey, we’re testing, we’re sending more emails, and it’s more effective.” That’s looking at a very small window. You’re just looking at a one-send period, one week period.
Ryan Urban: If you look at both of those cohorts now, over a six month period, over a 12 month period, the one where you were getting more revenue in the beginning quickly goes to less revenue because the list is burning out because you have that high ghost rate, you have that high market spam rate, you have a high unsubscribe rate. And also, what the ESP won’t show you ’cause they’re just doing A/B Split test. Now that your engagement is lower, now Gmail is 50 percent of inboxes. So Gmail, everything works on engagement. That engagement rate’s lower your delivery rate’s lower overall. So your deliverability to the inbox.
Ryan Urban: So by practicing bad marketing, you’re really hurting yourself. By doing kinda having a stop doing list, and practicing good marketing, you’re much better off for the long term. You know in the short term, if I were in a store in a mall, say, I don’t care The Gap, right? If I wanted to make more money one day, I would have a sales rep have every single person as soon as they got in the store, “Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this.” And in that one day I would make more money. And if I A/B Split test that versus another store that didn’t do that, and I looked at the results say, “Hey you know what, if I have a sales rep just attack someone when they come in I’ll make more money.” What will happen? People will stop going to the store. You can’t look over a one day period. And then the people will hate you and not recommend you.
Ryan Urban: So that’s why there’s actually flaws in A/B testing software. It doesn’t necessarily look at the long term. It’s also difficult to track cohorts over time. So I think that’s the way a marketer needs to think. It’s like, “Well, do I enjoy my own emails? Do I wanna get ten emails a week? Do I like all the content I’m sending? And what would I enjoy?” And then you can start saying, “What are the things that I like, and then which are the most effective campaigns for people?” So say if you sent out a blast email to a whole list, why just isolate the people who convert it?
Ryan Urban: Or you can even get a bigger sample size, you can isolate the people who click through that email. And say, “Oh, you know what, what is the category of this email? Oh we’re having a sale in a certain category. Or there’s a new product launched in this other category.” So you mark that say, “Hey who are the people who’re responding to sales in this category? Who are people who’re responding to new product launches? And you know what, cool, that’s how we can start doing this segmentation and making the right cohorts and things.”
John Jantsch: Yeah it is amazing. I mean, I’ve been looking at, we’ve been sending email for a lot of years, and there seem to be people that do certain things consistently and it’s not that hard to identify them.
Ryan Urban: You know what, there’s some people that open up all your emails, and you can send ’em something a little more often. Now that doesn’t mean they wanna get three emails from you a day, but those are the people who like what you’re saying, so you can send a little more to them. And you can also give them the option, say, “Hey, we’re sending three emails a week right now. We have this special insider alpha whatever VIP customer list. Would you like to get six emails a week? We’ll give you some exclusive content, we’ll give you the extra three. Would you like that?” So you could see. What you don’t wanna do is send to the inbox and then..
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