Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Gary Redmond founded his Subscription Box business BusterBox.com in 2016 with no prior business experience (and no money).
After failing for many years, he eventually grew it to over $11 Million in total sales, learning exactly what it's like trying to grow a business on limited resources.
This led Gary to try and master the super-powerful and free (but often underappreciated) marketing channel which is email marketing.
Everything you hear on the show is proven, and Gary shares these battle-tested growth hacking strategies so you can implement them in your business right away to make more money.
If you're a beginner, you will get a grounding in the fundamentals of email marketing and how to apply it to get your business off the ground.
For more advanced folks, we'll dive deep into cool and clever hacks you can use to optimise and automate the most critical areas of your business.
This podcast is for entrepreneurs & business owners who want to learn how to use the power of email marketing to acquire, retain and upsell to their customers on autopilot.
Gary will also do his best to entertain and inspire you to create the business and the life of your dreams through your online business.
Topics covered include email marketing, e-commerce, consultant, coach, expert, entrepreneurship, automation, productivity, subscription boxes, advertising & business.
Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Why I Deleted 50,000 Emails From My List
What if your email marketing could triumph over the chaos of online business shifts? Join me, Gary Redmond, as I share my journey of evolution in the digital marketing realm.
In this episode of Unbox the Inbox, I recount my transition from the niche of subscription box email marketing to embracing a broader spectrum of online businesses, including coaching, consulting, and software.
The ever-changing landscape of the online market demanded a pivot, and I’m all set to walk you through how this shift is not just a necessity but an opportunity to fortify your online business amidst economic ebbs and flows.
Elevate your content strategy and discover the benefits of a diverse focus as I gear up to feature more insightful interviews, expanding our collective wisdom and reach.
Revitalizing email marketing strategies takes center stage as we tackle the challenge of inactive subscribers. I unpack a strategic approach that managed to breathe life back into 20,000 dormant subscribers while purging 40,000 inactive ones, enhancing both open rates and email deliverability.
This is more than just list maintenance; it’s about ensuring your messages hit the primary inbox, amplifying their impact. Get ready for practical tips that can revolutionize how you engage with your audience, ensuring your entrepreneurial dreams don’t just survive but flourish in this rapidly evolving market.
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Hello and welcome to 2025, and welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. So on this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. Create their dream life through their online business. So for our first podcast of 2025, I just wanted to have a quick story and a quick hack, but first I really want to just reconnect with you guys. I had a bit of an extended break over Christmas. I did intend to do a podcast last week, but I just took some more time to think and to rest and things like that. So I think the the most important thing for me this year and this podcast is you won't hear me talk as much about subscription box businesses as you were in the past, and the reason why I'm making this shift is, to be totally honest, the subscription box industry has been great to me, but it's quite small. It's like a niche within a niche within a niche, and then inside of that, I've also niched myself down a little bit. So what do I mean? Okay, like, you've got online business, then you've got e-commerce as the niche within online business, then you've got subscription boxes and then I'm like the email guy for subscription boxes. So why is that important? It's basically because I realized, you know, I do these podcasts to help people, to connect with my audience, but also to make money. Right, it's to build authority, it's to show people that I know what I'm talking about and I can help you with your business. I can help you to get sales and grow your business.
Speaker 1:However, after a certain amount of time, I realized I've kind of said almost everything I want to say about subscription box businesses, unless I wanted to go into the beginner market, which other people are just doing that better than me, to be honest. You've got my co-founder, liam, who has a new membership. You've got Julie Ball, who's done it for a a long time, and other people in the industry as well, and I'm just not that passionate about getting people to start subscription box businesses, which is direction I would need to go if I wanted to continue in sort of coaching people in that niche. So over the last sort of year or so, I had been in contact with some of my friends who are like fitness coaches, yoga instructors, and I was having some chats with them and they were talking about their own strategies for growing their business and I mentioned that I could help them with their email marketing. And one thing led to another and I ended up kind of helping out a few people and it turns out that they were able to get some great results for their business as well, which kind of opened my eyes to the fact that maybe I don't need to operate in such a small pond.
Speaker 1:And another thing to be totally honest with you is, if you're not aware, the subscription box industry and all online businesses in general are just struggling a little bit, to be honest, and it's felt a little bit more even in the subscription box industry because a lot of the businesses were small. There was a big boom after COVID and 2021 and 2022 were great, but 2023 is when things started to shift and 2024 is when things still continue to be quite difficult. You've got a tougher economy, higher ad costs, more sort of rules and regulations and, like in BusterBox, we've had our own challenges and it hasn't been a massively successful couple of years in terms of growth. We've obviously maintained our business, we've kept getting paid and stuff like that, but we're kind of big enough to survive a lot of those shocks and I know some of my clients that were smaller and other people that I talked to and people looking for help with their businesses are struggling. Okay, now, that's not to discourage anyone from launching an online business. It's been the most rewarding thing I've ever done in the last sort of nine, 10 years is to have an online business, and the subscription box industry has been very good to me.
Speaker 1:But for me to continue to grow and to get the reward for my efforts in producing these podcasts and all my content that I'm doing, I feel like it's just a better move for me to just pivot a little bit more to email marketing for online businesses. Okay, so you might hear some episodes that may be not quite totally relevant to a subscription box business, but will be relevant to an online business overall. Okay, so I'll do my best to try and, you know, serve the people that are listening yourself and my audience right now, but the reality is, yeah, I'm going to try and generalize a little bit in terms of how to use email marketing for other types of businesses such as coaching, consulting, software, subscription boxes obviously, subscription business in general, how to just use email marketing to grow your business. Sort of, get off my chest and let you all. Let you guys all know about that um from the very beginning of 2025, because, for the reasons that I mentioned, I believe it's more beneficial for me for the to continue to grow um, my audience and my, my income as well, from the, from the coaching and stuff like that like I'm not pretending that, uh, I don't, you know, do this for for money, and you shouldn't pretend that either. Everybody launches an online business for money. Of course, I'm not expecting to get paid for the podcast or anything like that, but it's part of your content strategy, where I produce free content. So you believe that I know what I'm talking about and then you buy offers from me through my email list or my social media or whatever. So that's essentially my direction for 2025. So I hope to be able to continue to serve you.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I'm thinking of doing is a little bit more of sort of interviews, and I guess sometimes, if I'm totally honest with myself, I record podcast episodes that maybe I think other people might wanna to hear, rather than what I really want to talk about. Or, you know, I maybe haven't put as much effort in to the content that I could have. Ok, like usually, I try and include things that maybe would have happened to me this week or some tip or improvement, but I guess I just need to have a think about that myself. But I'm thinking more you know mindset, you know lessons and other types of things, rather than just being you know what's the best way to get more opens to your emails. Okay, so things may evolve from this point forward, but I intend to continue the podcast.
Speaker 1:I hope a lot of people do reach out to me and tell me that they listen to it. A lot of people reach out to me and I've never even heard of them, but they've listened to every episode, which is interesting to me as well. So send me an email if this is reaching your ears and you're enjoying the podcast or have enjoyed it up until this point. So, yeah, I guess I just wanted to just get that off my chest that things are changing a little bit. It's scary, it's exciting, it's outside of my comfort zone and I have to also be honest that maybe I can put a little bit more effort, I think. I think it's more aligning. Aligning what I want to say to you know, to what you guys want to hear, I suppose, is going to help me with that effort. Like, as I said, just recording the podcast that I would like, I would like to listen to and that I could probably do a little bit better. So maybe some more interviews and insights, rather than sort of straight tactics. You know, do this and increase your open rates anyway.
Speaker 1:Having said all that, I do have an insight for you today, and that insight is why the hell did I delete 50,000 people from the BusterBox email list in December, okay? So I want to talk to you about deliverability. Okay, we have a tag system set up through ActiveCampaign and some email senders actually have this built in, but what it is is if someone doesn't open your emails for, like, say, 30 days or 60 days, after 30 days you can tag them as disengaged, and if they don't open for 60 days or 90 days, you can tag them as inactive, okay. And what happens is this is set up basically I think clavio has it built in but basically they become sort of an inactive contact. Okay. So that had been happening for a long time over the past three or four years, and there's what's supposed to happen is, when someone is tagged as inactive, they're added to a re-engagement campaign and the re-engagement campaign sends them a couple of emails over the next 30 or 60 days and if they still don't open any emails, they're automatically removed from the list.
Speaker 1:Now what I noticed was, for whatever reason, I don't know why, but there was about 50 000 contacts inactive campaign and from our list of about 210 000 that were marked as inactive but still subscribed and still basically not kicked off the lists. Okay. So I was like, okay, well, we're paying, we're paying ActiveCampaign to have, you know, 200, between 200 and 250,000 contacts, when 50,000 of those are not open on our emails. So what I did was I basically sent some specific emails instead of our normal. So what we do is, when we're sending our broadcasts out to try and get sales or whatever, we always exclude people who are inactive. Okay, because the reason why we do it is we don't want to send an email to 150,000 people, which is our sort of leads list, with 50,000 of those inactive who haven't opened an email from us in 90 days or more, because that's going to show Google, yahoo and Outlook that, like a big proportion of our people are not opening our emails, which means we're probably spammers, which means they're going to put us in promotions or they're going to put us in spam, okay. So what you always want to do is you want to avoid emailing people who are not engaging with you and try and only email people who are now.
Speaker 1:Having said that, there is obviously re-engagement strategies that I'm going to tell you what I did. So I created another campaign and I basically created an email that said hey, are you still interested in getting BusterBox? If you are, we're running a special offer. The first line actually said we noticed you haven't been opening our emails. We have a very special offer for you. If you want to get this, go here. If not, you can unsubscribe.
Speaker 1:At the bottom of this email, we what I sent that was to only the inactive subscribers, and you might ask why would you do that? It's it's it's okay to try and re-engage someone you know or a list of people like a few times, and what I'm talking about was continually sending emails to your inactive subscribers as part of your your overall list is going to harm your deliverability. So what I wanted to do was to basically wake up some of those 50,000 people I think it was actually 60 something thousand people, to be honest and if they opened the email they would. I basically had an automation to remove them from the in, remove the tag as inactive, okay, which was supposed to happen, um, if they opened an email anyway. But I kind of noticed that, um, I think some people were just kind of stuck in the inactive status, um, and I basically created a second automation that said if someone opens this re-engagement email which I sent to like 60,000 people, then remove the tag inactive. So what I did was I did that and then I re-sent the campaign about a week later to people who had not opened the original email and they also were removed from the inactive list.
Speaker 1:So what we started off with about 60,000 people around 15 to 20,000 people then were removed as inactive and were moved back to our weekly campaign list. So we basically took almost like getting 20,000 new subscribers because they were inactive, which means we weren't emailing them, but they also weren't kicked off our list. And for the other 40 odd thousand people, what I did was, towards the middle to end of December, I added them to the automation manually, which is the re-engagement automation, and basically what that is is it sends them three emails over the space of 60 days and it says like hey, you haven't been opening their emails. Do you want to stay subscribed or not? And if they don't open or engage with any of those three emails, they are booted off the list. So on December 23rd, when we were all off for Christmas, about 40,000 people completed that automation and didn't open any of the emails and they were kicked off the list.
Speaker 1:So you might be wondering, like why the hell would you kick all those people off your list? Because they weren't engaging with us anyway? We were paying to have them inside of our active campaign account and we tried to re-engage them. I tried to re-engage them through my campaigns. I actually did two campaigns. To be honest, I did the same thing that I said a campaign, a resend, and then two weeks later I did another campaign and a resend and for that now those people had been tried to contact four times in the space of a month and they went into the automation, which also tried to contact them three more times, so we can safely say they weren't opening their emails. So more times, so we can safely say they weren't opening their emails.
Speaker 1:So if they're not opening their emails, it's very important to actually remove them from your list, um, and even if they are on your list and they're inactive, you shouldn't email them. You should remove them from your, from your broadcast list, okay, so that is something that we did and I think it's interesting that it was. You know, it was kind of strange to come back in January and see that our list had dropped from 210,000 to 167,000. But I did have a bit of a hesitation. I did go in and double check a lot of the contacts like, oh, did I do something wrong? But in the end it was just basically those people were not opening the emails and we weren't able to contact them and they were just taking up space. So we removed them. So that is something that we did which is quite eye-catching in terms of the number of subscribers, and that's the reason why we did it.
Speaker 1:So if you are having trouble with your deliverability of your emails and actually I should say a deliverability of our emails has since gone up from about 20 something percent, 25% to about sorry, the open rate, I mean to like 30% plus Okay, so it has made actually quite a big difference to the open rates of our emails, which will hopefully improve our sender reputation and help us to land in more inboxes rather than promotion or spam folders. So that's why we deleted 50,000 emails. It's hopefully to make things better. So that's pretty much for this week's episode. Pretty much it for this week's episode, I should say. I'm looking forward to chatting to you again next week and if anybody has any questions or topics they'd like me to cover, then I will cover them in the next episode. You can send me an email at gary, at garyredmondnet, or let me know in the facebook group. Um, and yeah, other than that, I hope you have a great start to 2025 and I'll see you in the next episode.
