Why did you decide to change the name from Email Marketing NYC to Flowium?
I did not expect to build a company. This is why when I created the first time the name Email Marketing NYC. I just did it just to get the domain and get the website to advertise my service as a freelancer.
The site was very simple. It was just like resume for my work. But when I get more and more traction and then when I committed to build a company, I personally did not like the name because it was too long and it was not unique.
Actually, you (Vira) and me were at the conference, Klaviyo Boston. So typically icebreaker for any conversation, “Where are you from and what do you do?” and our badges, there were names, Email Marketing NYC so we did email marketing and we were from New York City.
So, people who want to talk to us, had to think harder about what to say because those two options were not available anymore. That’s why the main reason just to be unique and make some name, which is meaningful to me and to the team.
What does Flowium stand for?
It’s a combination of two names. Flow stands for automatic emails. Majority of our projects we do on Klaviyo platform. Klaviyo is e-commerce email marketing platform, and automatic emails they call flows. And I-U-M stands for the ending of the word premium so Flowium stands for premium flows.
So what kind of services does Flowium offer?
We provide email marketing service for online retailers. We work strictly with online retailers who sell physical products online and we do only email marketing. This is our specialty.
We live and breathe email marketing and we constantly developing our skills, our knowledge, we coming up with all new strategies.
How many people work for Flowium?
At this moment when we are recording this interview, it’s May of 2020 we have 21 team member on our team, but we are growing and next week I believe we hiring two more people.
So we constantly growing since we getting more and more clients and we want to serve anybody who come to us for help.
What are your plans for the future, YouTube videos, podcasts, online courses, etc?
We are marketing agency and we service business so we provide service to other. However, we like to develop another part of our business to be educational platform to teach people how we do things, what’s working, what’s not working.
That’s why we producing weekly YouTube videos. We starting podcasts pretty soon in a month or less.
Also the big, big long-term vision, we want to develop other marketing channels, add other marketing channels to our agency. But we would like to focus only on owned marketing channels like direct mail, SMS marketing, email marketing we doing already.
So anything that the company owns, we want to focus on those marketing channels.
It might be in a few years, it might be in 5 or 10 years, but this is like long-term vision. We want to help people with their own marketing channels because I personally as a founder have passion.
I believe business owners should build their business on their own land and not rent it. So there should be nobody who come to them and say, “Hey, you cannot do this, or you cannot advertise that, or you cannot say specific words in your advertising.” So the long-term vision to add services for owned marketing channels.
Why do you do what you do?
It’s a very interesting question. Again, I didn’t have that goal or idea that I will be doing what I’m doing now. But I’m very lucky and grateful for what I’m doing because we help businesses to grow tremendously.
I receive, get satisfaction when I see that we are sending emails or we setting up automatic emails and the customers of our clients are happy and our clients are happy, like everybody satisfied. It’s like win-win-win for everybody.
I personally do this because I believe we can help businesses grow. Each business, they have their own value and they provide something good to the world and we help to amplify, helping them to do that on bigger scale.
That’s why every day I’m waking up and when I go to my office, that’s why I do what I do.
What is unique about your business?
It’s very subjective question. I believe on general level, we specialize only on email marketing and we work only with e-commerce or online retailers so this is on bigger level.
On smaller level, we are treating each customer business as our own and we becoming part of our customer’s team versus just acting as a standalone agencies. All our email marketing specialists, copywriter, designer work closely with the client’s team so we are part of the process.
We do not like to set boundaries. That’s why this is unique about us because we want to be on client’s team, not work as a agency.
What do you typically tell people when they ask you what you do?
In digital marketing world, it’s very easy because you say it like, I’m founder of email marketing agency and everybody knows.
But on the street, even to my mom for so many years, I don’t know how to explain what I do. Typically, I said like I’m marketer, I have a marketing agency. If they ask me what does it mean, I tell them about like we specializing on email marketing. And if they ask me more, I tell them in greater details.
But just to simplify everybody’s life, I say that I work at marketing agency and everybody think different things. Because in the past I was saying, I work at email marketing agency and everybody like, “Oh, you are sending spam, those spam emails,” and it was like I had to explain them in detail.
So it’s not about spam and still more I was trying to answer the question, it looks like I’m confusing them. So typically I start from the general response, what I do. If they interested, I tell them more.
What’s your greatest business accomplishment so far?
Personally, I cannot name one. It’s a multiple and it’s organic so every quarter or every year or sometimes even every month is different thing.
First, I was doing everything myself, then I started hiring my team.
Then I changed my business model in terms of how I work with the client because before, I was just doing setups, like creating email marketing strategies, putting all pieces together for clients and saying, “Hey. Bye, Mr. Kline. I’m gone. Then I hire a business coach who told me like, “Hey, you are building bicycles for your clients, but you do not teach them how to ride them.”
That’s why I switched from set-up projects. Now we have long-term engagement with our clients so it was the biggest accomplishment in fall of 2019 and in first quarter of 2020, I hire a team on helping me to do the project itself, to communicate with the client.
And honestly at this moment, this is the biggest accomplishment since the team, the email marketing specialists we have, they know how to communicate better with clients than I do.
There’s many reasons. One of them is like my broken English, accent and so forth, that I’m not from here, but I mean those are mental blocks. But for sure, getting the right people on my team it was like life-changing in my business.
At this moment, this is the biggest accomplishment. And as I said before, it’s just like organically every period of time there’s another accomplishment, better than the previous one.
