IAM2280 – Founder Shares the Importance of Providing Value Through Email Marketing

Title: Transcript - Mon, 28 Oct 2024 05:15:15 GMT

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 05:15:15 GMT, Duration: [00:16:58.44]

[00:00:00.72] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Everyone has an email address, everyone has a phone number. And once you have that information about the customer or the lead, you can always contact them at any point, unless they unsubscribe. Then at that point you can't. But you have that information. You don't have to rely on an algorithm in order to get views or get people to watch your information or read or even buy from you.

[00:00:23.26] - Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO Podcast.

[00:00:50.61] - Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO Podcast and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Nikita Vakrushev. Nikita, excited to have you on the show.

[00:00:59.25] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Pleasure to have you. Pleasure to be on Gresh and really excited to chat about all things entrepreneurship, CEO and provide any value I can.

[00:01:07.75] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And Nikita is doing so many awesome things, so I know it's going to be an extremely valuable episode because he's doing awesome things. And of course, before we jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about some of those awesome things so you can hear a little bit more about him. And Nikita has spent the last seven years immersed in the digital marketing world. After starting his own E. Com brand and quickly pivoting into the agency model, he found his place in E commerce advertising services. After amassing all the marketing skills needed to scale brands, he found great success in email and SMS marketing, which is what he specializes in today. Now, after working with over 100 D2C brands, having the knowledge behind all marketing channels, and sticking with email as his bread and butter, Nikita has a unique perspective on how to get the most out of a brand's retention channels. And he has a wealth of knowledge and information. I was checking out his YouTube as well too. He provides so much value, so I know this is going to be extremely valuable. One of the things I was listening to from a previous episode or previous podcast podcast he was on, I think he got his start in print on demand and he saw some opportunities which kind of led to everything he's doing now. So, Nikita, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the IMCO community?

[00:02:11.61] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Yeah, I'm excited. And you did your research? Actually, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[00:02:18.00] - Gresham Harkless

When people are doing awesome things In a rock stars. I love to kind of learn a little bit more before we hop into the show. So I guess to kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CL story.

[00:02:29.88] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Yeah, I honestly started like, I. I've always wanted to be in like the business world or like having my own business. It's. I don't know, I was just like a free spirit as a kid and doing the, like, figuring things out, troubleshooting. So it was almost like a natural progression. It all actually started back in high school where I kind of had like a little side hustle. I was part of the print media club in high school where, you know, you make T shirts, stickers, design, and that's where I kind of got the foundation for using like the Adobe suite of like Photoshop and Illustrator. And eventually that turned into like, hey, I mean, I'm already making these cool shirts for myself. Let me go ahead and see if anyone else in the class wants any. So started to make some side money there, which was really nice and kind of got a little taste of entrepreneurship. Fast forward. A couple years later, I was in college. I think it was like my first year. And halfway through I stumbled across this Reddit post where it was like, hey, you can make money online by doing like, by printing T shirts and selling them online on Amazon and Shopify, but you don't have to do the fulfillment. All you have to do is just do the designs and marketing. And I'm like, this is perfect. That was the thing that was the biggest, like pain in the ass when I was doing it myself, was just doing the actually heat pressing and all that. So that kind of kicked it off into that print on demand journey where got some pretty decent success off the bat in like 2017. Dropshipping wasn't as saturated, or at least the print on demand side wasn't as saturated. So basically kick, like hit the ground running with that. Started getting sales around like spring of 2017. Scaled that up to I think about like 5 or 6k a month as like a business. And outside of all expenses, I think I was clearing anywhere between like a thousand to fifteen hundred a month. And you know, as a college kid, I was like, this is a lot of money not knowing how much money you actually need to survive. But after that first year of college, I'm like, okay, I'm not, I'm not going to enroll for a second, second year. And ended up just going into the route of print on demand. Now unfortunately, during that summer where I was like taking off and starting my own business, my Amazon store got shut down and I had to like kind of get scrappy with it and get more into Shopify, Facebook ads, Google Ads and email marketing as a channel. That kind of led me to get a baseline of skills for how to market brands or at least on a very base level. And then eventually I stumbled across a couple videos from Alex Becker and he was like, yeah, you can sell your services as an agency. And I'm like, oh, this is, this only makes sense for me to do so. Started reaching out to people in Facebook groups, people that are part of my community, my friends, family and the extended family that were in the online space and helped them with like setting up Facebook ads, doing Facebook ad images, setting up emails and all that. And that kind of helped me get into the agency space a little bit more. Eventually as the years went on, kind of failed forward. Basically the big problem was client acquisition. It's always hard to get clients or at least charge premiums that you kind of deserve as a service provider. So in between then, I guess in between 2017 and 2020, I had a day job where I was doing marketing at a title loan agency, basically helping with them with SEO, paid ads, etc and eventually in 2020 I quit that or 2019, I quit that job, went fully solo. And then 2020 started to build up a foundation of clients through upwork was a, it was a great channel, got a lot of work and that kind of, I sped run through a lot of like the growing pains that you get as like a freelancer. And around 2021 started to build up a team of just really good a players that can handle Facebook ads, email design, creative, et cetera. And about by the end of 2021 we realized that man, this is so hard to scale with five different services, all the different clients. And my team was burnt out. I was burnt out and we pivoted into email marketing. And ever since 2122 we've just only been doing email and we've been crushing it for our clients.

[00:06:41.74] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, well I appreciate you so much in sharing your journey. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. Harold, about that boat that you're in. Could you take us a little bit more into how you serve your clients and what you're doing with that email marketing?

[00:06:53.00] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Yeah, so we mainly work with E commerce and direct to consumer brands. We help them with basically the retention side of things. So a lot of people like if you go on Instagram, reels You see all the grind set videos of like you got to do Facebook ads, you got to do Google Ads and TikTok ads and TikTok shop. It's a very sexy thing and a very sexy topic. But a lot of people miss, I guess underestimate the power of email and sms. Those are the two main channels that we work on and we help, you know, design, create, copyright and set up these strategies for all of our clients. And people say email's dead. It's further from the truth because that it's like a channel where all of the Internet, it's like the Internet backbone almost where everyone has an email address, everyone has a phone number. And once you have that information about the customer or the lead, you can always contact them at any point unless they unsubscribe. Then at that point you can't. But you have that information. You don't have to rely on an algorithm in order to like get views or get people to watch your information or read or even buy from you.

[00:08:00.75] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that ends up being such a huge thing when you start to understand.

[00:08:03.91] - Nikita Vakhrushev

That what I tell to those people that think that I don't want to bother them, it's like you're not really bothering them because it all depends on the messaging you're doing. If you're constantly promoting, yeah, you're bothering them. But if you're actually providing value, education and nurture to the people that are on your list, you're actually helping them in some sort of way while also staying top of mind. So on the cadence side, we try to keep emails anywhere between one to two a week, maybe sometimes more during sales periods where we want to really promote. And on the SMS side, we try to send out one every other week and then maybe one to two a week if there's a high sales period.

[00:08:41.73] - Gresham Harkless

And I almost wonder if that is part of like your secret sauce for yourself, the business or combination of both. Is it that ability to not just look at these ways that we could connect with clients is just ways or things that we check off a list but understand the full context and the full like even marketing context because I think so many times we don't realize that service and the communication that marketing can provide. Do you feel like understanding that and be able to execute that is part of what sets you apart and makes you unique?

[00:09:07.90] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Oh, 100%. I think one of the reasons why we stand out as like an email or retention agency is because I've gone through the entire like, almost like education stack of knowing how Facebook Ads work, knowing how social media works, knowing how Google Ads work, because without that knowledge, I would have a less under. I would have a smaller understanding of how email plays into that. Because if you don't understand the entire funnel, you don't know how this specific puzzle fits. And because of those pivots that I had to go through way back in the day, it's now that I understand, okay. Leads from Facebook are a bit different than leads from Google or leads from social. Interact with email differently than paid ads. So all these different marketing channels that you may use on a daily basis to get new customers in the way that you contact them is a bit different than for, for example, like, your friend or your relative.

[00:10:02.39] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That ends up being such a huge thing to have that 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 Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something you lean on that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:10:14.15] - Nikita Vakhrushev

First thing is not wasting a lot of time in the morning or, like, not having a morning routine. Basically. I used to be a big morning routine guy, and I was very broke now when I. When I switched to not having a morning routine and just waking up, brushing my teeth, going to the bathroom, washing up, and then getting a coffee and going straight to work. Like, I made so much more money because I was able to maximize more. More time. It's like, okay, you get up, you have to journal, you have to do a cold plunge, cold shower, you know, sauna, whatever. Like, you waste so much time doing that. The other thing is, and I've been on this app for, like, the last. I don't even know, like, six years or something. It's called Alarmy. And I'm not paid by them or anything, but they are an alarm app where you can customize your snooze. And since installing this app, I've never had to snooze again, basically. So I was a big. Like, I always snooze. I was the guy that had like 30 different alarms active at once for the next morning. Now I only have one because I set my snooze to do math problems. And it sounds very weird at first, but in order for me to shut down the alarm, I have to solve 10 different math problems in the morning. And you'd be surprised at how effective this is because when you wake up, you're like, oh, shit. And you're trying to solve these math problems, and they're very simple. It's like 35 plus 78 plus 69. Like simple math that you can do very well when you're fully awake, but when you just wake up and the thing is, if you are idle for like 15 seconds, you reset your progress and it starts, the alarm starts blaring again. So I'd be five problems in. Sometimes I snooze and it's like, oh shit, I have to keep doing this. And you reset your progress.

[00:11:58.15] - Gresham Harkless

Nice. Now I haven't heard of that. I think that's pretty awesome. And so what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I like to call a C on nugget. So this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you touched on, but it could be something you would tell your favorite client around email marketing, sms or if you happen to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:16.30] - Nikita Vakhrushev

If I were to go back into a time machine and just go back to like seven years ago, I think the best advice I'd give myself is focus on sales. That's, I think that caused a lot of pain in the early days of like, I had this call with this prospect. They never followed up or I keep following up and I'm not closing them. It comes down to just, I guess humbling yourself and knowing that, wow, I was really bad at those skills. And over the time, funny enough, I made more money when I improved my sales skills. So I think just focusing on sales and lead generation is the best thing that I could have done. Because if you look at it like cash flow and customers are going to solve most of your problems. You know, if you have a lot of clients can't fulfill, you can always hire someone to help out with fulfillment, but. And now you actually have the cash to do it rather than the inverse. It's like, wow, I have this employee there, they have no work and I have no clients. So yeah, sales 100%.

[00:13:12.00] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, sales ends up being that lifeblood. And now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So Nikita, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:24.20] - Nikita Vakhrushev

I think it's a mixture of knowing when to delegate and let go, but at the same time knowing when, knowing when to get your hands dirty. You know, you are the sole person responsible for everything that goes on in your business and it's all up to you and your ability to learn from yourself and your Ability to learn from your mistakes, learn from any successes that you've had. Because everyone's like, oh, I made this mistake. But no one also analyzes the success that they've had and why they had that success. I think, yeah, just a mixture of knowing when to delegate, knowing when you can improve yourself, knowing when you could be doing something better. A lot of it is very self reflection based and I think business owners that don't self reflect or at least they don't take the time to realize why they're doing the things that they're doing could be a detriment to them.

[00:14:14.79] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you use that word mixture. So I truly appreciate that and of course I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak speak just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you. Find about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

[00:14:33.55] - Nikita Vakhrushev

Yeah, I think just the best thing that you can do as an entrepreneur or as a CEO is just see how you can. I think prioritization is like the big like key takeaway I've gotten over the last seven years is no, everyone has the same. Everyone. I, I know this has been like beaten like a dead horse on LinkedIn, but everyone's got the same 24 hours in a day. But yeah, all the LinkedIn BS aside, like that is a genuine truth. And if you say you don't have time for something, you might get more benefit by rephrasing that statement of I don't have enough time for this, but I'm not prioritizing this. And that has helped me a lot. Like I think I learned that like three or four years ago of just rephrasing that question in my head or that statement. And yeah, because when you kind of see it that way, you start to re strategize your priorities and see like, okay, I don't have time to run Facebook ads right now, or I don't have time to do any creative tests or I don't have time to do a sales call today. It's like, well, what's the priority? Is it to get out in front of more audiences or is it to close sales? Then you kind of have to reframe that to like, okay, I have to reprioritize every other thing that's on my list and prioritize this thing now. So main key takeaway there, best way to reach me. I have a YouTube channel like Gresh said earlier and you can find me there. I do weekly videos on all things email marketing. And if you want to learn more, we have an agency and we do provide free audits. So just make sure that you're on when you write free audit that you came from the IMCEO podcast because then we'll do it for free. Otherwise we charge a couple hundred dollars for that. That's on aspectagency.com aspect agency.com awesome.

[00:16:14.94] - Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much Nikita. We'll definitely have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you. But I appreciate you for all you're doing, all the time you took today, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:16:25.99] - Nikita Vakhrushev

This was a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on.

[00:16:29.16] - Intro

Thank you for listening to the I Am CEO Podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue. Tune in next time and visit us at imceo Co. Imceo is not just a phrase, it's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation@blue16media.com this has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.