IAM748- Founder Helps You Visualizes Your Email Activity

Jayson is the founder & CEO of EmailAnalytics, an email productivity tool that visualizes your email activity — or that of your employees. He is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Inc. Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles over the last 10 years, covering marketing & entrepreneurship. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that made the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019.

• CEO Hack: Defending against stress and anxiety by maintaining a healthy lifestyle
• CEO Nugget: (1) Find a CTO to work directly with you (2) Invest in SEO – Hire a writer and use Eversuggest
• CEO Defined: Leadership, the visionary and motivational engine behind the team

Website: https://emailanalytics.com/

theentrepreneurcast.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaysondemers
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysondemers/

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Transcription

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[00:00:02.50] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:30.30] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jason Demers of email analytics. Jason, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:39.20] – Jayson DeMers

Hey, Gresh. Awesome to be here. Thanks a lot for having me on.

[00:00:42.20] – Gresham Harkless

No problem. So pleasure is definitely all of ours. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Jason so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jason is the founder and CEO of Email Analytics, an email productivity tool that visualizes your email activity or that of your employees. He is a long-time columnist for Forbes Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and various other major media publications where he has authored over a thousand articles over the last ten years covering marketing and entrepreneurship. In twenty-ten, he founded a marketing agency that made the Inc. five thousand before selling it in January of twenty nineteen. Jason, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:18.70] – Jayson DeMers

Absolutely. Let's do it.

[00:01:19.79] – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with

[00:01:27.50] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. Absolutely. So, essentially, my business, email analytics, started it was born really of a problem that I discovered as I was working at my marketing agency. So my marketing agency was completely we were completely remote. All our employees were distributed around the world, and everybody worked from home. What I found was that I needed a good way to track, and monitor productivity and activity to sort of see how's everybody's workload, does everyone has enough to do, does anyone else needs more to do, and things like that. I couldn't really find a good tool because, you know, tracking hours is just kind of a pain.

I wanted something that would sort of automatically deliver a report to me based on, you know, without my employees having to do much work on their end. And what I realized was that in my business, all of my employees, almost all of their activity had some way to do with email. So whether they were communicating internally or with leads, clients, vendors, or other stakeholders, it was pretty much like if they weren't emailing, then they didn't have enough to do, because the job was for everybody, was so communication-heavy. And so I thought, what if I could visualize email activity and sort of plot it on charts and graphs and so on?

Could I then get a better idea, yeah, of what I'm looking for in everyone's workloads and productivity? So I started looking for such a tool, and I found that one didn't exist. And so I decided, well, hey, if I have this problem, if I have this need, there's gotta be lots of other business owners that need this. And so I'm gonna go ahead and create this. I'm gonna build it myself now. I'm not a tech guy. I'm not a dev or a coder. So I sort of found a team, and I and I progressed or project the development of the app. That's what segued me out of, my marketing agency, which I decided to sell and go full-time working on email analytics. So that brought me here.

[00:03:17.69] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And and especially, like, the the true in true entrepreneurial form, if you see a problem, you see an issue, you have it for yourself, and then you start to solve it not just for yourself. You find out you just gotta solve it not just for yourself, but so many other people as well. So

[00:03:31.40] – Jayson DeMers

That's my first inclination. Absolutely. Yeah. If I have this problem, there's gotta be others that have it, and it's gotta be a way to monetize that.

[00:03:38.19] – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. Exactly. Scratching your edge for sure. Yep. Lead you to those, great opportunities. So I know we touched on it a little bit when I read your bio, and you did as well. Could you take us through email analytics exactly how it works and how it serves the clients that you have?

[00:03:50.69] – Jayson DeMers

Absolutely. So it's really meant for any business that has remote employees or even if you have in-house employees and you just want a better visualization of what their email activity looks like, it works for anyone. I find that it particularly is useful for sales teams and customer service teams because there are critical APIs that those types of teams have. For instance, average email response time is a huge one, for sales and customer service. The faster you can respond to new leads, the more conversions you're gonna get, and the same with fast response times to customers. It makes them happier, and it makes them more loyal, which obviously all contributes to revenue. So email analytics is really simple.

I wanted it to be easy. So what you do is you just essentially log in with your Gmail account, so it works with Gmail or G Suite, and that's that's it. It goes to work after you log in, and it starts to collect your email history, and then it automatically just shows interesting graphs for you. And if you wanna bring in your employees or your team members, you just send them an invitation to the app, They accept it by clicking a link. They log in with their Gmail account and boom, the app goes to work and collects their data. And of course, it plots it on charts and graphs, and it lets you compare your team members against each other and things of that nature.

So like I said, average response time is probably the most important and popular single metric that the tool offers people, but it offers a whole lot more than that. Like, what's your email activity in terms of sent emails and received by day, or even by an hour of the day, which is really popular? You can kinda see what times of day people are working, you know, what happens when they take lunch, what time they come back from lunch, things like that. So that's really sort of a high-level view of what the tool offers. When you have, that information, you can then go improve where you find problem areas. So if somebody, you know, if you find that one of your team members is managing three hundred emails a day, and another is managing one hundred emails a day, there's a disparity workload balance there, and you start to work to rebalance those workloads in a way that makes more sense for everybody.

[00:05:51.30] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense, and I think it's extremely powerful. And as you kinda said, a lot of times when you obviously, it's great to have that data, but to be able to, like, make those decisions from that data takes things to another level. And as you kinda touched on too, I was thinking, like, a lot of times I started to look at a lot of kinda activity tracking, because you don't really sometimes know where or how you're spending your time. So that's why I love that aspect where you're able to see, you know, how responsive you are yourself, but also with team members and get to understand, you know, just that activity and how often those emails are sent out is really great data because you can make begin to make those strategic and correct decisions based off of that.

[00:06:27.19] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's it's it's so powerful. If you've got a list of your top ten, you know, sales performers and one of them has an average response time of, let's say, ten minutes, and your worst performer has an average response time of two hours, you can give them that hard data, and you can say, hey, you know, let's get your let's work on getting your response time from two hours down to, down to one hour by next month. Okay? By doing that, you can measure a market a marked increase in conversion rates because lots of studies have shown that they correlate. And when you have that data, you can show that data, and then you can improve those aspects of your business. So, yeah, it all starts with knowing. Yeah. The power of knowledge. Right?

[00:07:10.80] – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. Knowledge is power. So I appreciate you for creating, you know, a tool to be able to help us, learn and get all that knowledge so that we can be more effective and efficient.

[00:07:18.39] – Jayson DeMers

Oh, absolutely.

[00:07:19.89] – Gresham Harkless

And I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for your business or yourself personally. Personally. But what do you feel kinda sets you apart and makes you unique?

[00:07:27.50] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. In terms of what sets us apart, several competitors out there offer somewhat similar services as we do. Our services in I'm okay. I'm biased. But our services are are better. We offer far more insights. We offer far more metrics, charts, and graphs features and functionality, and you name it. And not only that, but we offer it at a lower price point than our competitors do. So you get the best of both worlds. The reason why we can offer it at a lower price point is because, I learned how to run a fully remote, team while I was running my marketing agency for the last nine years, and that's what I'm doing with email analytics as well. And so we're not paying for office rent or electricity or janitorial services or any of those other types of overhead, we run an operation, and so we can pass on those cost savings to our customers.

[00:08:18.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:08:29.19] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. What I've found throughout my last ten years or so of being a CEO and an entrepreneur is that you will get stressed out, and it will happen not infrequently, unfortunately. And I think you could probably relate, Gresh.

[00:08:44.10] – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Fortunately.

[00:08:46.29] – Jayson DeMers

Yes. And I think that a really important thing about being a CEO is you need to learn how to respond to that stress when you start to feel stress or anxiety, and you need to know how to protect against it. And what I found is actually that defending against stress is a really good way of addressing it sort of before it becomes too much of a problem. So for instance, I try to live a lifestyle that sort of gives me the upper hand so that I'm prepared to deal with stress and anxiety. So for me, this means staying physically and mentally healthy. So I drink lots of water. Every day I walk, I, like, take my dog out for a walk, you know, for three to five miles or so.

I work out on days when I don't walk. Well, I'm sorry. I walk every day, and then every other day, I'll do, like, weights and other sorts of workouts. I'd like to spend I like to make sure that I spend my free time doing completely nonwork-related things. So I play video games with my wife and, you know, play or practice guitar, or play with my dog, things like that. Not a lot of other stuff we can do right now amidst the pandemic. But so we're kind of limited to sort of those those things right now, but that's how I like to stay mentally and physically equipped to deal with the pressures of of being a CEO. And for me, that would be my sort of hack to prevent the problem or mitigate it before it even starts.

[00:10:06.29] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice, could be around email productivity, or could be something you might say if you were to happen to a time machine you would tell your younger business owner.

[00:10:18.89] – Jayson DeMers

Okay. So I'm a marketer. You know, for the last nine years, I ran the marketing agency, and so I consider myself a marketer at heart. But my first I've got two bits of advice, but my first bit of advice is non-marketing. And it's because I am in the middle of starting a tech company that is email analytics. And so what I've learned is that if you are a non-tech person and you wanna start a tech or a software business, you need to start by getting yourself a good CTO. Mhmm. So, I made some big mistakes and wasted a lot of money on trying to go with cheap or cheaper offshore outsourcing development services and companies.

And I spun my wheels for two years before finding, an offshore company that could build the app that I wanted. But as I grew, as email analytics grew, and as the demands that I had and the needs that I had grew, they were no longer able to support me and what I needed for the business. And that's because they weren't in the same time zone. They did they were just, you know, they were allocating sort of, you know, one or two project managers to me, but that just wasn't enough because those project managers were split among other clients that they had. So I just couldn't get enough time and resources. And so I finally decided to hire myself a CTO, an in-house CTO, and that was the best thing I've ever done for email analytics.

Somebody who worked directly with me on my hours, you know, shares my vision and my enthusiasm. So that's my first tip. Find yourself a CTO if you're a if you're technical a nontechnical founder. My other tip is on the marketing side. Now this is where my expertise is, and I wholeheartedly endorse investing in SEO and content marketing, and they go hand in hand. It is the only, thing that I invest in from a marketing side for email analytics, and the returns are phenomenal. In particular, I would recommend, a tool called Ubersuggest for using for keyword research. I like that tool. Then hire a writer to write for your company blog, and target the right keywords. Essentially, just invest in SEO and in creating great content, and it will pay off. And sometimes it it'll pay off very quickly. So that would be my sort of marketing side nugget.

[00:12:36.60] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Jason, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:12:46.60] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. When I think about what being a CEO means, there are three sort of facets that come to mind. Number one is leadership. Obviously, you have to be a leader. Number two is being a visionary. Visionary and leadership, they kind of they kind of blend together, but they're they're distinct enough that I sort of think of them in two different parts. The visionary is the person who sets the goals for the team, and the leader is the one who ensures that the goals are executed. That's sort of how I think about it.

And then the third component is to be the motivational engine behind the operation or the team. Somebody's gotta keep the team keep the team moving forward. Come to work every day and essentially breathe that motivation into people. And I think that's also the role of a CEO. And by the way, I know what it's like to be a CEO who has lost motivation because that's what happened to me in my last business. And that's why I ended up selling my business because I came to their conclusion, their realization that if I was my own employee, I would fire myself.

I thought to myself, I am not being a good motivator for my team, and that's because I've lost my passion, and so I know what I need to do. I'm no longer equipped to be the CEO of this particular business anymore. Where my passion was in email analytics. I wanted to build this tool. And so that's sort of important, I think, for our CEOs to have that drive, that motor. And if you start to lose it, be honest with yourself and consider what your options are for how to get it back or how you could change lanes perhaps.

[00:14:17.79] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I love that. They the kinda of like the three rungs of leadership vision and motivation. Being able to kinda understand, like, just kinda like the the the, I guess, the legs of a chair and make sure and seeing how ventures that we have, not only do the ventures evolve, not do not only do they look different or they pivot and they change, but we also change as well too. So sometimes our motivations, have evolved or they change and we're looking for different challenges or different things to do. So I commend you for being, you know, honest and looking, you know, in the mirror and then making those steps to get that, kind of motivational, gear up and rearing again.

[00:14:58.10] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate that.

[00:14:59.60] – Gresham Harkless

No problem at all. Well, I definitely appreciate that perspective, and I appreciate your time even more, Jason. So what I wanted to do was pass the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out everything that email analytics is all about.

[00:15:14.29] – Jayson DeMers

Yeah. Sure. So, I've got my co-host and I just started a podcast about just a few months ago. It's called the EntrepreneurCast. You can find me there. You can also find me at email analytics dot com. That's where the blog I run. I'm on Twitter as well as LinkedIn. So go ahead and find me and connect with me. I love to connect with with with new people and network. My final piece of advice that I would give is something that I've learned over the last ten or eleven years of being a CEO, and that's really just to treat your customers the way that you wanna be treated. Ultimately, your customers are your best marketing asset, and it pays off many times over when you treat them you go above and beyond and make them feel like they're special. So that's that's my sort of parting bit of advice.

[00:15:57.39] – Gresham Harkless

I love that and appreciate that. And I think, we will definitely have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you, subscribe to the podcast, and find out all the awesome things, you're working on. And I think it it goes so far as you follow the golden rule and treat, you know, others the way you wanna be treated if we're talking about clients and customers to roll out that red carpet and provide that, really phenomenal experience. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that again, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:16:22.60] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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