#54. DIY Email Marketing Vs. Hiring An Agency? | Podcast

Alissa: 0:16

He’s the puppeteer. He’s the one who holds the strings behind the podcast. Everyone say hi to Andriy, the CEO of Flowium.

Vira: 0:49

Hello everyone. Welcome to episode number 54 of Flowium Podcast. We are email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium, and we are so, so passionate about email marketing. And because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world, and we specialize in providing a premium full-service e-commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our services are tailored specifically for your business and are designed to help you increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50%, delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we are here about. And today we have a super exciting guest. It’s not his first time, but Alissa, let’s introduce the guy.

Alissa: 1:39

He’s the puppeteer. He’s the one who holds the strings behind the podcast. Everyone say hi to Andriy, the CEO of Flowium, and also our boss. He doesn’t like when we call him that, But you know what it is, what it is. Sorry, Andriy. Sorry, not sorry. We’re really excited to have him on today as always. And as a lot of you probably already know, Andriy is probably even more passionate about email marketing than Vira and I are, which is hard to come by, but it’s true. And he’s also the king of content when it comes to email marketing. So if you guys follow us on YouTube, if you follow any of us on LinkedIn, if you follow any of our mediums of social media and all of our marketing, you’ll know that Andriy is one of the key contributors to content. And he’s the mastermind behind a lot of what we do at Flowium. So as always, super excited to have him on board today. And today we are really going to be focusing on whether or not you as an e-commerce business owner, for those e-commerce businesses that are listening to us out there, if you should actually work with an email marketing agency or take the risk and do DIY email marketing, which is more of like a your own approach. So without further ado, we are going to go into some very quick blitz Q&A because we’ve done this before with Andriy. So we’re going to make it very random. And very unexpected. He has no idea what we’re asking him today. So Andriy, are you ready?

Andriy: 3:01

Yes. And thank you for having me here.

Alissa: 3:03

Yeah, of course. Of course. Okay.

Vira: 3:07

Andriy, you invited yourself. So.

Andriy: 3:10

Yeah, you know what? Like every Tuesday I’m like working out in the gym early morning and I’m the first one who listens to this podcast and I’m like always laughing and people like looking at me like, who is this weirdo? He’s always laughing because I’m cracking all the time from your jokes.

Vira: 3:29

You’re laughing at email marketing, Andriy. That’s bad. Like, seriously, laughing at email marketing jokes, that’s very like nerdy of you. But I’m the same. We are the same. So welcome to the club.

Alissa: 3:43

Okay, here we go. Andriy, do you know how to swim?

Andriy: 3:46

I do.

Alissa: 3:47

Okay. Do you believe in Santa Claus?

Andriy: 3:50

I do.

Alissa: 3:51

Have you ever seen a UFO?

Andriy: 3:54

No.

Vira: 3:56

Why so serious? Wow.

Alissa: 3:58

So do you think mice really eat cheese?

Andriy: 4:02

Yes, I do. This is what they do in cartoons, you know.

Vira: 4:10

Cartoons are always legit. That’s— yeah.

Alissa: 4:13

Okay, and second to last one. Have you ever done gymnastics before?

Andriy: 4:18

Yes, I did.

Alissa: 4:19

What? No way! I didn’t even know that. That’s wild.

Andriy: 4:22

Not professionally, like I didn’t go to Olympics yet, but yes, I did.

Vira: 4:26

And today on our, on our team call, we actually learned that if you have two passports or if you have— if you were born, say, in Ukraine and you have the passport of the US, you can compete for both like Ukrainian team or US team. So you’ll have a choice.

Alissa: 4:41

Yeah, you have to choose.

Andriy: 4:42

And we learned that Alisa has like 12 passports.

Vira: 4:44

Yeah, she’s James Bond.

Alissa: 4:46

Don’t publicize that information.

Vira: 4:51

My name is Bond. Oh my gosh.

Alissa: 4:53

Oh my gosh. Okay, last one. Socks or mattress?

Andriy: 4:58

Socks. I knew that you will ask me that question.

Alissa: 5:00

So he came ready. He came ready.

Vira: 5:04

He came ready.

Alissa: 5:05

Stop laughing, everybody. This is a serious podcast. Okay, stop. Let’s get started. Vira, take it away.

Vira: 5:11

Let’s get started. So the big question when you have the business, should I do everything in-house? Should I DIY everything or should I hire the online marketing agency? And that’s actually the question that I’m personally struggling right now with when I’m starting my own business, I freaking still don’t have email marketing, you guys. And I had Klaviyo for like a few months now and I still haven’t sent one email. And that’s funny because I mean, I know how to do email, so I’m like debating whether or not should I hire someone to do my email marketing for me. So Andriy, what are your thoughts? What are the sort of like key things to consider when you’re deciding between DIYing it yourself or hiring someone to do it for you?

Andriy: 6:00

So as lawyers and CPA likes to say here in America, if you ask them any questions, the typical answer, it depends. So it’s the same thing here, like it depends. I mean, there’s like 5 factors that I would like to cover today on this episode is time versus money, second is speed, 3 experience, 4 scale, and 5 the next level team. We should go in details more, but we are, if you want, we can take your brand and we can give you advice as where you should hire somebody or do it yourself.

Vira: 6:33

Can I please not be my own account manager if we decide to work together?

Andriy: 6:40

Yes. Yes.

Vira: 6:40

Good.

Alissa: 6:40

Okay. So the first one, Andrii, that you mentioned was time versus money. So let’s go with that. So in terms of that, explain.

Andriy: 6:47

Yeah. So I can answer this, like giving my example. So there’s like 3 periods in your business life or in your venture or whatever you call it. So first, when you have more time, than money. Zero money, but you have all time in the world. So in that case, you should look up those YouTube videos, free YouTube videos, blog posts. You should read, you should educate, and you should do everything yourself because remember, you have close to zero money. Then when you’re getting some traction or you start making some money, the next option you have is to start buying some courses. So this is where you don’t have as much time but you don’t have as much money as well. So you’re like in the middle. So at that time you should consider to buy some kind of courses, like inexpensive courses or expensive courses doing some coaching or masterminds. So this is like second stage. And third stage is when you don’t have time at all. So time is more valuable than money. 3 months ago we hired SEO agency because do I know how to do it? Can I learn? Can I do it myself? 100% yes. Do I have time for it? 100% no. So that’s why hired agency who does everything for us because we have budget for this, but I don’t have time to do it.

Vira: 8:06

Right, right.

Alissa: 8:07

So as a business owner, it’s super important for you to understand what stage of the business that you’re actually in versus pretending like you’re in one stage when in reality you’re not.

Andriy: 8:16

Correct. In your case, I mean, it’s a little bit weird because you’re, I mean, you’re working at Flowium, but also building your own brand. But I would calculate how much you’re making per hour. And for you to build those flows strategy, maybe it would be cheaper to hire somebody to do it for you while you’re making money. So it’s just a basic principle of cash flow, right?

Vira: 8:43

And there are honestly, you guys, there are a ton of resources on our Flowium YouTube channel, on our website. And I’m like going through our Flowium YouTube channel right now. Did you guys know what is the most popular video that we have on our channel? And you probably know, but Alisa, while you don’t know, what is it? Okay, so the most popular one and it has like 20K reviews, it’s the How to Create a Cart Abandonment Flow.

Alissa: 9:11

And I’ve actually watched that myself.

Vira: 9:13

I did too. So you guys, we have like a ton of different resources and you can totally DIY it, but just, yeah, do the calculation whether or not it makes sense for you financially. So, Andriy, the Second criteria, you talked about the speed, like how fast you can deliver the results. Tell us more about it.

Andriy: 9:35

Sure. So it comes to the first thing as well, like in terms of time, how soon do you need the certain thing implemented? Is it like SEO, email marketing, design, web development? Doesn’t matter which area, but how soon do you need it? If you have 1 year to implement it, maybe you should not hire anybody. Maybe you need to learn it yourself and try and test. But if you know that you need that thing done yesterday, you might consider hiring somebody else, maybe not agency, but freelancer or maybe somebody internally. There’s some people we hire internally to help us speed up the process, but some teams we hire like as an agency to help us speed things up.

Vira: 10:45

Yeah, that’s really cool. And I feel like, Alissa, correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like we have two kinds of clients. We have clients who want to hire someone who knows like email marketing better than them. So they want to hire someone who’s better and someone who just want to be like super involved and just want to outsource all of the like work to someone else. Yeah, they are very like involved with strategies and everything.

Alissa: 11:08

Yeah. Yeah, we definitely have that. And then we also have the occasional client who wants something done yesterday as well as Andriy mentioned. So we do have for the most part two different kinds of clients, but we do have that one little outlier where it’s like, hi, we’re signing up with you today and we’d also like all our email marketing done last week and you’re and you’re like, okay, let me come back every single time.

Vira: 11:27

That’s gonna be me, guys. That’s gonna be me.

Alissa: 11:30

Yeah, right, right.

Vira: 11:32

Cool. The third one, the third aspect of hiring an agency versus DIY is expertise or like experience. You guys, what do you think about this one? It’s pretty big one for me anyways.

Andriy: 11:43

When you’re hiring freelancer or you doing something yourself, let’s say you’re doing something yourself, like you checking those YouTube videos and you follow those tutorials and you expect some kind of result, but your result might not be the result you expect it to be because, I mean, you don’t have experience, you don’t know as much as other professionals. That’s why we go to doctor when something hurts, we go to dentist if our tooth hurts, we trust those specialists to help us out. Same thing in digital world. If we need help with Shopify development, we will go to Shopify developer and not to email marketing agency because they have no clue what to do there. So here you can learn it it yourself, you can do it yourself, but remember it’s trial and error. It will take you longer to master it versus if you hire some consultant, an experienced agency, or somebody internally who specializes in that special area. Yeah, so you will get much better results and faster.

Alissa: 12:47

Yeah, and yeah, and like you mentioned, Andriy, I feel like that goes into the speed aspect of things, like the two feed off of each other where it’s like, I need this done yesterday, but you can’t hire someone to do that for you who’s never done it in their lives because then it’s going to take you like 3 times the amount of time that it would if you just went ahead and hired an agency who specializes in that or hired a freelancer who specializes in that. So that makes a lot of sense with in terms of the experience.

Andriy: 13:13

And in terms of experience, there’s two kind of also people. There are some people who risk everything, let’s say blast all their customers every day with the same message, a different message, but just blasting and don’t do any segmentation. They don’t care open rate, click-through rate, and they will hurt themselves. So this is kind of clients who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but they’re just taking action. And there’s second kind of people who are like afraid of to do something else, and it’s like paralysis analysis, so they do nothing because of that. Inexperienced users fall in one of those two categories. Got it. Just going back to the speed, how long it will take for them to figure it out.

Vira: 13:53

Besides, like, to add on that point, like hiring a digital marketing agency or like email marketing agency, it lets you actually focus on what you do the best. Like, your strengths are the things that like you bring to the table as a business owner, maybe some big vision or maybe some big strategies. Yes, you can become really good in email marketing. I do believe that anyone can get good at email marketing. We’re not doing rocket science, but that’s all we do every day, entire day. Like we are reading about email marketing. We are like listening to email marketing podcasts. We are constantly like on calls with Klaviyo and stuff. That’s like the only thing that we are doing and that’s our area of expertise. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andriy: 14:35

I just to play devil’s advocate because like right now we are looking on other agencies to hire for our company, for Flowium, to help us with paid ads and other services. And this is great that we know as an agency the ability, the service we provide, the feedback we get from a client. But as a customer who considering different agencies, like I’m reviewing different agencies like myself, and sometimes It’s like, I don’t know, like, will they do the job they promised? And it’s like, and they want like $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month. And some companies wants to commit for 12 months contract. And it’s like, yeah, I will pay money, but will I get what they promising?

Vira: 15:16

Right.

Alissa: 15:17

Right. Yeah. And that makes sense too. It’s almost like there are subsets of like paralysis, right? Where it’s like, uh, should we just do it in-house? So then that way we don’t actually spend the money on something that we may potentially not get the full service on. So yeah, it’s a big one. It’s definitely a big question.

Vira: 15:32

Cool. Andriy, talk a little bit about the scale of the project. So like what you can do yourself versus what can you get when you are hiring an agency?

Andriy: 15:43

It goes back to that point number 1. It depends where are you in your business journey. If you’re starting up, you don’t care much about scaling. I mean, you just want to make money. So maybe you don’t have much money, so you just want to generate revenue. But if there’s enough revenue coming in, there’s cash flow, and if you want to go to the next level, you need to scale. And there’s many things which affect scalability of your business, but one of them is people. And either you have to hire somebody internally or you need to outsource. And outsource, I mean, let’s say email marketing agency like us will take care of your marketing channels email marketing and the other channels you hire other agencies to do. So this will give you ability to scale and go to the next level. At this moment, I know it might sound expensive to pay some agency $5,000 for X, Y, and Z service, but trust me, if you do the math, you will get the most return on investment for your money.

Vira: 16:46

Right, right. Alissa, you just shared the slide that Klaviyo shared with us on the return on investment for some of our clients. Like, do you remember like some of those numbers?

Alissa: 16:56

One of the numbers was like 429 times ROI. And I was just looking at the number like, how do I even explain this? Like, I don’t— this is such a crazy number, you know, but it’s true. It’s true. The scalability side of things, it’s like for you to really see the results that you’re looking for, you really have to sometimes take it to the next level. And sometimes that next level is beyond what you’re actually able to do internally anyways. Cool.

Andriy: 17:21

When I hear those kind of numbers, when we do prospecting, I always remember Grant Cardone, what he’s saying, like we can cannot afford brands not to hire us. I mean, the results we provide.

Alissa: 17:33

Yeah.

Vira: 17:34

Like to me, this number is like 400%. To me, it sounds like million trillion numbers. It’s like, this doesn’t even like make sense to me, you know, in my head, those numbers.

Alissa: 17:43

But it’s obviously, it’s astronomical.

Andriy: 17:46

Honestly, let’s pat ourselves on the back.

Alissa: 17:50

Yeah. Yeah. A little pat on the back.

Vira: 17:53

Well, you guys, you almost convinced me to hire you. What else? What else?

Alissa: 17:59

What else can you ask for?

Andriy: 18:00

I offer you help so many times and you’re like, I was like politely declining.

Vira: 18:05

I’m like still on the edge. I’m like still deciding. Sell me on this idea, Andriy. So tell a bit about the team, about the next level team as you call it. What do you mean by that? Sure.

Andriy: 18:18

So point number 4, when I say scale, this is the easiest and quickest route to scale with external help, like agencies. And we work with many companies who hire us, and right now they are at a certain point of their business journey. But if they want to go even further, they need to hire internal team. Sorry, they don’t need to, but it’s the next level. So big companies like Amazon— I mean, Amazon probably is too, too big, but can you give me enterprise-level company, at least one?

Vira: 18:51

Nike.

Andriy: 18:52

Nike, for example, they have entire team for emails. They have copywriters, they have designers, they have like other teams. So it’s a duplicate of agency but internal one. So they are doing like 8 hours because we as an agency, we do not dedicate 8 hours of work per day, like 40 hours per week to each brand. It’s not— I mean, it would be a lie and the price would be astronomical to charge the brand. But internally, team This is their job. This is what they have to do, and they do it only for this company. But to be able to hire that kind of team, you need to be on the different level. So yeah, so this part, you unfortunately cannot do it yourself. This is just the next level.

Vira: 19:40

Yeah, I’m just like Googling the average cost of digital marketing coordinator, like entry-level digital marketing coordinator is like $73,000 in the States. The salary of like one person And I mean, it’s worth it, that’s for sure. But you need to understand where you are in your business and where you’re going. And just like going— like looking back at my own experience when I used to work as a marketing generalist, I was like doing everything like Facebook ads, Google ads, all the— I don’t know, all the images that we needed and a little bit of marketing. So sometimes, like when you hire the digital marketing coordinator, they might not know like as much and like as in-depth this topic as for, for example, digital marketing agency can know, right?

Alissa: 20:26

You’re getting the expertise of multiple people for the price of not one person, for less than the price of one person. So it’s like that side of things is kind of a no-brainer in my opinion anyway.

Andriy: 20:38

Number 5, this like the next level of team. I wish that for that, Robert Kiyosaki likes to say he has a like quadrant that he explains and there’s two quadrants. It’s like small business and big business. So I would like to say when you are a big business like 500 employees or more, this is when you should probably have this internal email department or email marketing team.

Alissa: 21:03

Oh yeah, yeah, totally agree. Well, today was short and sweet, but Andriy, thank you so much for coming on and talking about all of this. So what were the 5 points that we covered today? Time versus money, speed, experience, scalability, and then considering the next level team. So these are all things that you need to as business owners consider and really truly understand about where you’re at in your business life cycle to understand whether or not hiring an agency makes the most sense for you. Obviously we’re an agency and we’d like to say, hey, everyone should hire us all the time, but it really depends on where you’re at in terms of your business. So making sure that you’re taking those things into account as you’re, as you’re considering these things, especially when it comes to your email marketing, because we’ve talked about it a lot in the past, given that we’re on 54 episodes as of this episode on email marketing, but it definitely is a very important avenue. For you to be engaging with your customers on a consistent basis. So it’s definitely something that you can’t ignore, and it is a question that you have to ask yourself in terms of how you’re gonna get your email marketing done. So make sure that you re-listen to this episode so that you can continue to ask the question and then find the correct answer for your business.

Vira: 22:13

Cool.

Alissa: 22:14

Yeah, guys, thank you again so much for listening. Please don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. If you like what we do, leave us a review. We are actually starting a little internal kind of, uh, fun freebie here. So if you do leave us a review and you take a screenshot of that review that you’ve left for us and send it our way, either to myself or to Vira by email, vira@flowium.com or alissa@flowium.com. If you send us that screenshot of the review, we will send you your very own customized Flowium socks. We’re not at that level yet where we’re going to send you a customized Flowium mattress, but one day, one day we’ll get there. But for now, the socks. So if you want to receive a pair of Flowium socks, go ahead and leave us a review and then send us an image of that review via email and then we’ll make sure to get those pairs of socks over to you.

Vira: 23:06

Cool. And come back next Tuesday because next Tuesday we will be talking with our guest, with our next guest. Just like come back and you’ll see who’s going to be. We’re going to be talking about the return on investment on email marketing and like what does it mean and how to calculate it, all the, all the good and juicy stuff. So come back next Tuesday. Thank you for listening, you guys.

Alissa: 23:25

Thanks, guys.