On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Nikita Vakhrushev. Nikita is the CEO & Founder of ASPEKT, an agency that specializes in Ecom/DTC email & SMS marketing. We talk about adding DKIM & DMARC for email security, suppressing email addresses for better deliverability, Implementing effective list cleaning strategies, and so much more!
Nikita Vakhrushev has spent the last 7 years immersed in the digital marketing world. After starting his own ecom brand and quickly pivoting into the agency model, he found his place in ecommerce 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+ DTC brands, having the knowledge behind all marketing channels, but 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.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!
Nikita Vakhrushev
One of the biggest things that I think a lot of people overlook is suppressing their audiences.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I've got a fun one. Nikita and I already got way too off the rails before we pressed record so we had to pause and get right into it.
So today I'm welcoming to the show an amazing subject matter expert. He is the CEO and founder of ASPEKT. They're an agency that specializes in Ecommerce and direct consumer email and SMS marketing.
Nikita Vakhrushev, welcome to the show.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Thank you, Chase. I hope to not go on too many tangents here. But we'll see. I'll try to stay on track.
Chase Clymer
Well, that's why we have an editor. He'll make everything work for us.
Awesome, Nikita.
Well, first, before we dive into what you guys are up to at the agency, just talk to me about your background in Ecommerce. How did you end up here? What was your interesting path?
Nikita Vakhrushev
I feel like whenever someone starts an Ecommerce, it's either in one of two ways. They're either going from traditional marketing to digital marketing and they're trying out Facebook ads at this big ad agency, or they start spending money on their own ads and start their own Ecommerce brand. I'm in the latter part.
I started off in print-on-demand and having my own t-shirt store. Eventually, that scaled up to, like, a 10k a month business. And I had people reach out to me, asking me like, “Hey, how did you do this? How did you set up ads? How did you set up the email? How did you set up your Facebook pages?”
And eventually, I started helping out more and more people that I knew and started to reach out to other people in Facebook groups. Eventually, I started providing agency services and realized that was more scalable and profitable than Ecommerce, so I made my way into growing that agency model and things started to take off in 2020.
And since then, we've been growing. And we grew to a point where in 2022, we switched from just doing everything to just doing email. So we used to do Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok, UGC, you name it. And now we're just subject matter experts on the email and SMS side.
Chase Clymer
It's so funny how when you get any sort of success, before you know it, people are asking you to help them do the thing that you're doing. And I don't know if you did this or not, but I know I found myself just giving away free advice and just helping anyone.
And I realized, “I should probably start charging for some of this stuff.” Did that happen to you?
Nikita Vakhrushev
A lot of it was like, “Yeah, it's so simple. You just do this and this.” And they're like, “I have no idea what I'm looking at.” I'm looking at matrix code when they're trying to remove ‘powered by Shopify’.” And I'm like, “This is so simple. Just give me 100 bucks and I'll do it for you.” And then I'll get a Zelle notification and I'll do it for them.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. That's exactly the mindset I had. I was like, “This is so simple. How can you be doing this?”
And when we started our agency, it was a lot of, “How are you paying that much for that? How do they have you in such a bad contract?”
And as you get older, you start to realize it's not necessarily an age, but in business and in how people perceive value, you'll realize that there is a giant delta between wanting to learn something and needing it done.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, 100%. It's almost the same... I think it just goes for any service industry, whether it's blue collar or white collar.
You always... Depending on the quality of work, you got a shit talk from the last person that was handling the account or redid your deck. So in the same position here, it's like, “How were they on with this agency for that long and they were not getting this quality of results or this quality of email designs and they still stayed on with them for, like, 2 years and they're paying them double the price that we were paying, or they're recharging?”
So I totally get where you're coming from there.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely interested. Okay, so you hit me up a while back and there's a really timely thing that we're going to talk about.
So if you're in Ecommerce, you either work for a store or you have access to a store and they use any sort of email marketing platform, like Klaviyo or MailChimp or Sendlane, there's a bunch of other ones out there, but that probably hits 90% of the audience.
You got an email about deliverability changes that were coming, pushed by Google and Yahoo. We're going to dive into that today, Nikita. So I guess, what were those changes? What were they trying to alert you to?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, pretty much if you have an email account and you don't live under a rock, you'd be bombarded by two main things. Number one, you had to set up a DKIM verification for your email domain, and a DMARC record. Both of those sound like alien language if you're just running an Ecomm brand and you're not in email marketing.
But to put it simply, those are just extra verification measures so that way, Google and Yahoo can, I guess, differentiate between phishing scams or any potential scams versus a legitimate email address.
And this also hit not only Ecommerce–cold email agencies got hit by this significantly.
I'm sure you get a bunch of cold emails as I do, people reaching out, promising the world and under delivering. I'm sure there's a lot of that going on on a much more massive scale. So it's just reducing clutter and reducing unverified email accounts being able to reach out to you.
And a part of that was updating those two records. And if you didn't have those two records updated, most likely your open rates and your click through rates and your revenue on the email side are dwindling.
So those are the two main things that Google and Yahoo, I guess, tried to push for. And now it's... I think as of April 15th, it's live. So you better have those two records updated.
Chase Clymer
I know that we're still getting emails to this day that are like, “Hey, update your records here.” Because we got access to... I don't know… A lot. A lot of Klaviyo accounts at this point. And yeah, we're always getting updates about that. And so we've done it quite a few times. I did it myself using some of the other platforms that we use as an agency.
And like we said before, “It's not that hard. Why aren't you guys doing it?” But there is a pretty steep learning curve. And this, I would never put it in a DIY category because it's... You're getting into some interesting stuff within your domain settings.
And I know 99% of founders out there aren't technical founders in our world. They wouldn't be comfortable with what you need to do on the back end there. But I still think maybe we should walk people through it and I'll try to ask you to dumb things down if it's getting too technical and you do the same to me.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Absolutely.
And it's funny that you mentioned that it's not a DIY type solution because even though I've created a YouTube video going over the exact step-by-step process, we had one of our clients actually mess up the installation process, leaving an extra space in between one of the records.
And we saw the screenshots, everything was done correctly, or it looked like it was done correctly. And a week later, our open rates went from 50% to 12%. And we had to spend an extra month trying to get them back on track to their normal deliverability.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think one thing that's worth pointing out is just having access to their email platform. So let's just... I'm going to use Klaviyo as the example for the rest of this thing.
So if you have access to a client's Klaviyo, it doesn't matter. You can't do it within Klaviyo. You actually need access to their registrar, which is where your domain name hangs out. So electriceye.io is our domain name and our registrar is Namecheap. But there are probably hundreds of registrars out there.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah. For the most part, a lot of them stick under the category of Namecheap, GoDaddy, SiteGround, Google Domains, unfortunately, and then Shopify domains. So all of those... I'd say that's 99%. I don't think I've dealt with anything outside of those.
Chase Clymer
Oh, we have. We always get the weird edge case. And we're like, “Where's the documentation on where to find what I'm looking for?”
You have to get access to the registrar. That's step one.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yep. Get access to their DNS settings or find a DNS zone editor. If you're trying to figure out what the DNS zone editor is, it's just a bunch of records line by line, almost like an Excel spreadsheet of host and value and then a TTL, so a time to live.
So once you're in that area, you're then going to go ahead and navigate back to Klaviyo. You're going to go to Settings, Email, and then Branded Sending Domain. Once you're in a Branded Sending Domain, that is where you install your dedicated sending domain. And that dedicated sending domain takes care of that DKIM verification for you.
So once you have that set up, you're basically good on the DKIM part.
Now to install it, there's two ways. There's dynamic and then there's static. Now I had to learn this the hard way of brute forcing it. But basically, if you need to use a CNAME record to update your value, which I believe is in Shopify domain settings, you have to use a static domain. There's two options, static and dynamic.
So if you need a CNAME, you use static. If you don't need CNAME, then use the dynamic, which again, for GoDaddy, Namecheap, SiteGround, all of those for the most part require dynamic. It's only Shopify that needs the static.
Once you upload that, upload the text record for verification. Verify it. If everything looks good, you activate it and you're pretty much good on the dedicated sending domain side.
Chase Clymer
For the more popular registrars, it's pretty straightforward and you can probably find a YouTube video out there to walk you through your exact email platform and registrar and how to do this stuff.
But for the more obscure registrars or when you get into any sort of situation that has advanced DNS controls for localization, or… There are countless other reasons that I can't think of because I'm talking, but there are reasons why your DNS might be goofy.
And then it just gets... It's just an edge case where it's like, this is going to be different and we've got to work through it and there's going to be a bunch of learning before we get this right.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, exactly. So again, until I had to set up one on Shopify domains, I didn't know that because I always clicked on dynamic because of course it makes sense. You want it to be dynamic so you don't have to keep updating it, that you have to use static for Shopify domains. So it's just one of those things where you have to kind of test through.
If you're not comfortable going through it or going through a tutorial, you'd have to reach out to one of your agency partners or you can reach out to me and we can talk about it.
But when it comes to the second part, which is updating your DMARC record, this is significantly easier, and this covers pretty much anything that requires DMARC for email sending.
So for example, Shopify domains–or not Shopify domains–sending out emails through your Shopify branded email for purchases or shipping updates, etc. You need a DMARC setup for that. You need DMARC setup for your Yotpo or for your Gorgias support tickets. And then you need a DMARC setup for your Klaviyo.
The thing is, once you do this once, you don't have to worry about doing it for the other platforms.
And setting it up is pretty straightforward. You just create a new record in your DNS zone editor, create a text record, make sure that your host is underscore DMARC, D-M-A-R-C, and then the value is V = DMARC1 in all caps and one is a number, semi-colon, p = none, semi-colon.
I would double, double, triple verify this by Googling it and making sure that's set up correctly because I'm sure it's not going to come through the same way on the audio side. But that is how you set up DMARC.
And then once you set that up, you can go to dmarcian.com and they have a tool that you can verify to make sure that your DMARC is set up correctly.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's great. We'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.
I know that there are listeners out there that don't know if they've set this up or if their team set this up or it's like, “My assistant Chase manages this stuff, I'm sure he's on top of it.”
But what happens if I don't do it? So if I didn't make these changes, and we said that it might have happened about 15 days ago as the time that we're recording this, are my emails not sending? Are they ending up somewhere different like spam or like the promotions tab? What's actually happening now?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yes. So your emails are likely going to end up in spam, mainly because Google… when you send out an email, Google sees the authentication behind that email on the coding side. You may not see it when you're setting up your email in Klaviyo because that's just a glorified email design tool.
But on the back end, when you send out that email, let's say for your email, Chase, you're using chase101@gmail.com. That Gmail account will read the authentication behind that email through the code. And it'll see that it's missing an extra layer of that authentication, whether it's a DMARC or that DKIM record.
And it'll say that, “Okay, these things are mismatching, your email is going straight to spam.” In order for it to get out of spam and for future emails to get out of spam, you need to set up that verification. Otherwise, any future correspondence is just going to go to spam. And then your open rates and your click-through rates are going to go down.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
In the same vein of deliverability... And maybe I should wrap up what we're talking about here with adding these in DMARC and DKIM. Do it. It's not an option. If you haven't done it, do it. Double check that it's done. That's just going to get you back to where you were before.
But if we're going to double down on deliverability during this conversation, what are some other strategies that our listeners should keep in mind or to consider to improve their deliverability?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest things that I think a lot of people overlook is suppressing their audiences.
And I think, again, let's use Klaviyo for this example. If you go to your recent email campaign that you sent out, and there's usually a drop down when you scroll past the initial send time or whatever, it says that you had like 50,000 people segmented and then maybe out of all of the exclusion suppressions, you had maybe like 45,000 actual delivered, part of that campaign.
So one thing that we try to do is we try to remove that extra 5,000 people that got suppressed or maybe bounced or maybe led to spam immediately before we send out that email. And that has significantly improved some of our clients deliverability because we're already preemptively removing potential bad apples from that pool, leading to better deliverability through the inbox.
For example, let's say we had sent out an email to 100 people, 10 of those people, 5 of them maybe bounced previously because their inbox is full, and then 5 of those maybe led to spam. So we'd want to exclude those 10 people and only send out to 90 because then Google, Yahoo, Verizon, Apple, Outlook all see that, “Okay, these people are actually delivering directly into the inbox and people are opening up those emails.”
Leading to, I guess, a domino effect of more and more deliveries into the inbox. I don't know if that's too woo-woo or too complicated to explain.
Chase Clymer
No, no, no. I'm going to dumb it down for you though because I know exactly what you're talking about.
So the people that own the inboxes, not Chase, not me, but Gmail or Yahoo or the conglomerates actually behind these email inboxes can see when someone is sending out an email newsletter and they'll have multiple people that are getting that same newsletter.
And if they see a pattern of like, “Okay, these are all coming out and 100 emails are coming in to Yahoo.” And it starts to see that more and more of them are going to spam, it'll just automatically send the rest of them to spam. Whereas if you get rid of the ones that are going to go to spam, then it won't automatically send any more to spam.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yep. 100%. Yeah.
And getting rid of those people that bounce is the easiest thing you can do. And it's already a predetermined filter in Klaviyo or a predetermined segment that you can set up easily.
Another one is people that haven't engaged in the last 180 days and up. You'd be surprised at how many people just linger in that list and they're not opening up your emails. They're not going to keep opening up your emails but you're still sending to them. So that's ruining your domain reputation just a little bit.
So those are the two main segments that we look out for. And then never bought and never engaged as well.
Chase Clymer
With the people that haven't interacted with your emails in 180 days or whatnot, obviously, want to suppress those people. But also just from going back to talking about the people that have all these inboxes set up for end customers, they can see the last time someone's logged into that email.
And after a certain time, it becomes a honeypot to where if you're sending emails to a dead email account, you're going to get... It's more likely you're going to hit the Promotions tab or spam. First, if you clean that out and you're not sending emails to dead inboxes, to inboxes where they're not being opened, your goal is to get in as many inboxes and be opened as possible every time.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Exactly. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself. So just excluding those people from future sends is the best thing that you can do aside from making sure that all your sending records are set up correctly.
Chase Clymer
Obviously, you can use... In Klaviyo, there's a suppression kind of thing. And in a lot of email software, there's ways to do this exact same thing.
But there's also list cleaning. Is it that straightforward? Is that convoluted? How does one approach list cleaning to make sure that they don't have some of these weird email addresses still on their list?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, absolutely. I would say I don't want to do too much self promo here. But there is a YouTube video that I put up that goes over all the segments that you can use for suppression for deliverability purposes.
I would recommend just going through setting up all of those segments and checking in on them every quarter and making sure that you're clearing those people out, adding them to your suppressed list in Klaviyo or whatever you're using, and then eventually deleting them from your email list to reduce your Klaviyo bill as well.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Yeah. I'll make sure to link to all that stuff in the show notes.
Before I wrap things up, I do want to talk a bit more about just what you guys are up to at the agency over there. Now, are you guys platform agnostic? At our agency, it's Shopify or bust, like, get out of here, Magento.
But what are the technologies and tools that you guys like to work with and are usually a good fit for your clientele?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our bread and butter is Shopify and Klaviyo, but that's pretty much every email agency. But right now, I'd say we're splitting our focus between Klaviyo and Sendlane.
The biggest thing right now is getting our team trained up on Sendlane best practices, going through the Sendlane Academy because we do see a huge uptick and a huge popularity increase on Sendlane growing as an email tool and brands utilizing it. So that's one big one.
But also we've handled clients on Magento, WooCommerce. I think those are the main two outside of Shopify. And BigCommerce as well.
And then on the email tool side, outside of Klaviyo and Sendlanne, we’re also utilizing Omnisend and Mailchimp.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. So you are pretty agnostic when it comes to the platforms, but very niche down when it comes to the service, email and SMS.
Pretend I'm a merchant out there and I'm like, “I've been meaning to outsource my email stuff. It's just... It's taken up too much of my time as a founder. What size or what other factor should I be recognizing within my own business to where it might be the right time to reach out to an agency such as yours?”
Nikita Vakhrushev
I would say there's a few things. The first one is just your open rates. If you have sub 20% open rates, that's a serious problem. And that to me signifies like, “Okay, there's a deliverability issue.” Because 99% of our clients are above 45% open rates on average. So it's most likely just… something in that system is working incorrectly.
After that, I would say your email revenue is the second biggest.. Well, that’s the main thing that we look at. The email revenue. We typically look for 25 to 35% of total revenue coming in from email.
So for example, if you're making $100K a month, 25 to 35K of that should be coming in from email.
And then after that is if you have nothing set up, if you just have the basic Klaviyo welcome flow and abandon cart flow setup, most likely that’s impacting your revenue and just needs to get updated.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Now, if I'm listening and I'm like, shit, that's me. Where should I go? What should I do?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Well, the first thing we want to do is just an audit. And typically, we charge anywhere between $500 to $1,000 for an audit. But obviously, since Chase is a good friend, I'd want to hook you guys up.
So if you go to our website, we have a free audit tab there. If you click on it, and you write down that you came from Chase's podcast, we'll give that audit to you for free. And it'll go over everything that needs to be worked on and it'll set us up in a good spot on what needs to be worked on initially.
Chase Clymer
Awesome, Nikita. And what's the website again?
Nikita Vakhrushev
It's aspektagency.com. A-S-P-E-K-T agency.com.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So we'll make sure to link to all that stuff in the show notes. Nikita, thank you so much for coming on and just explaining to us non-email experts, what the heck Google and Yahoo and all these people have been yelling about for the first quarter of 2024.
Any parting words to leave with our audience?
Nikita Vakhrushev
Honestly, just make sure those records... If you're going to take anything away, just make sure those email records are set up correctly and to keep an eye out for your open rate.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much, Nikita.
Nikita Vakhrushev
Appreciate it, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out.
Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!