Melanie Balke is the Founder and CEO of The Email Marketers, a company specializing in helping 8-figure DTC brands grow their revenue and build strong communities through retention marketing. With a deep-rooted passion for entrepreneurship, she built her agency to challenge the flawed traditional model by focusing on genuine client care and exceptional results.

Before founding The Email Marketers, Melanie gained valuable experience as Head of Email Marketing at BAMF, a fast-growing LA agency. She has also consulted for global brands like Mercedes-Benz and SMART, with insights across industries like e-commerce and automotive. Beyond her professional achievements, Melanie is also an avid writer and the self-proclaimed CEO of Dad Jokes, highlighting her love for humor.

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

• [02:08] Melanie Balke shares her early entrepreneurial ventures, from selling rainwater to selling bread
• [04:28] Melanie describes gaining respect for hard work after her fast-paced job in hospitality
• [10:38] The cultural differences between Germany and the US
• [12:13] How Melanie transitioned into email marketing
• [14:44] What makes strategy, creativity, and instant results crucial in email marketing?
• [16:52] Why email marketing is still a powerful tool in 2024
• [19:49] Key strategies for increasing revenue through email marketing and boosting customer retention
• [22:47] The importance of frequency and segmentation in email campaigns and avoiding subscriber fatigue
• [27:22] How to effectively re-engage dormant subscribers and the power of offering free value
• [30:36] The impact of AI on email marketing and the balance between automation and human touch

In this episode…

In the crowded digital landscape, businesses often overlook the potential of email marketing, dismissing it as outdated or ineffective. However, many brands are missing out on a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can drive customer engagement and boost revenue. The challenge lies in understanding how to leverage email marketing in a way that resonates with today’s consumers while cutting through the noise of countless other marketing channels.

Melanie Balke, an email and retention marketing expert, emphasizes the power of combining strategy, creativity, and data-driven insights to craft impactful email campaigns. She advises businesses to focus on understanding customer lifecycles, using data to inform when and how to engage customers effectively. Melanie also highlights the importance of creating a cohesive customer experience through email, ensuring that every touchpoint, from the initial capture to ongoing communication, adds value and strengthens the relationship between the brand and its customers.

Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Melanie Balke, Founder and CEO of The Email Marketers, about the power and relevance of email marketing. Melanie shares profound insights into optimizing email capture, common misconceptions about the effectiveness of email, the importance of tailoring email frequency to avoid subscriber fatigue, and how offering free value can effectively re-engage dormant subscribers.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• John Corcoran on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Melanie Balke on LinkedIn
• The Email Marketers
• BAMF.com

Quotable Moments:

• “Email is absolutely crucial and incredibly cost-effective to convert new customers and retain existing ones.”
• “The first step of your email program is how do I optimize and get people on this list?”
• “In Germany, it takes longer to become friends, but once you are, it’s genuine, unlike in LA, where it’s often superficial.”
• “I love that email has both a strategic piece where you analyze data and a creative piece with copy and design.”
• “Email marketing is not dead. It’s the channel of the undead, still incredibly effective and crucial for businesses.”

Action Steps:

1. Optimize your email capture strategy to ensure maximum subscription conversions from website visitors: Effective because capturing emails at the first interaction with potential customers allows for more opportunities to nurture and convert leads into sales.
2. Segment your audience and tailor the email content to match their position in the customer lifecycle: This personalized approach increases the relevance and impact of your communications, driving better engagement and retention.
3. Analyze email engagement metrics regularly to adjust the frequency and content of your campaigns: Monitoring metrics guides the optimization process, preventing potential customer fatigue, and maintaining a healthy email relationship.
4. Explore the use of AI in marketing to streamline data analysis and content creation processes: AI can enhance the efficiency of your marketing efforts and enable the scaling of personalized customer interactions.
5. Leverage giveaways or value-added content to re-engage unresponsive subscribers: Offering something of value kickstarts engagement and can reactivate customers’ interest in the brand, potentially leading to increased sales.

Sponsor: Rise25

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create a copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars,  YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk,  and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?

Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

John Corcoran 0:00

All right, today we’re talking about email marketing best practices, how to integrate email marketing into your business. My guest today is Melanie Balke. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.

Intro 0:12

Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders, and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran 0:28

Welcome everyone. John Corcoran Here, I’m the host of this show, and you know, if you listen, and hopefully you have before that, each week, I talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs for all kinds of companies. You can check out our archives for episodes with the CEOs or founders or co-founders of Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activation, Blizzard. Go check those out. Gus also has done a number of different episodes on email marketing over the years, although it’s been quite a while. So I’m really excited to dive back into this topic again.

And my guest is Melanie Balke. She’s the Founder and CEO of The Email Marketers. And before founding the email marketers, she held a position of Head of email marketing at, I’m probably going to butcher this BAMF.com, B, A, M, F .com, I think is the URL. It’s one of LA’s fastest growing agencies, and she has extensive experience in email marketing, has worked with some really incredible clients, like Forbes,Outer Furniture, Thrasio, Open Store, Almond Cow, Bud.com, a bunch of other ones as well. She’s also the CEO of dad jokes.

It says on her LinkedIn profile. So I didn’t tell her this, but I’m going to ask her at some point during this interview to give me her best dad joke. So stick around for that. Melanie, excited to have you here, and you have an interesting story. You grew up in Germany. You kind of had this dream of ending up by the ocean, which you are now. You’re in Los Angeles in Southern California, so I love to see that. But your introduction to entrepreneurship was on the local utility level, local, local utility level, you sold water. I’ve never heard that before. And to your mother, true.

Melanie Balke 2:06

It’s true, yeah.

John Corcoran 2:07

Tell us about it.

Melanie Balke 2:08

Um, well, my mom had gotten me a book called money, which was a great book. It was about a dog. The dog was named Money, and the dog was teaching you about money. And I guess that inspired me to be entrepreneurial. And I watched my mom collect rainwater. Like, whenever it would rain, she would put out little buckets to collect the rainwater, because she thought it was, you know, good and whatnot, to put it on the balcony for the flowers. So I was like, Okay, well, if I just collect more rainwater, I can just sell her rainwater. And so I use her own buckets, her own balcony, and.

John Corcoran 2:50

Now this is my rainwater. You’re correct.

Melanie Balke 2:52

I’m like, No, I own this, and I would like for you to buy this for me. Mama was a good sport. She gave me a couple of euros. This was probably even pre euros. This was probably Deutsche Mac. Give me a couple of those, and I was like, Oh, cool. You know, I believe it is doable. And so that was the first, the first thing I ever did.

John Corcoran 3:12

That’s great, but that’s such great encouragement for kids, right? You know, I almost always pull over for lemonade stands every time I’m driving by, unless my wife is like, we can’t stop for another lemonade stand, but I will always want to stop, because I just want to give them that encouragement, you know? And then that led it to a neighborhood bread delivery that you did, yeah.

Melanie Balke 3:30

So we lived in an apartment surrounded by many other apartments, and in Germany, it’s very common. You could, you wake up in the morning, you go to the bakery and you get fresh bread, and it’s not like loafs bread, it’s like these little boy Tien that you eat. Everyone has their own individual one, and they’re obviously the best ones. They’re freshly baked. And so I went around and I put up, you know, little post or little note flyers in the surrounding apartments, and just saying, like, hey, I’ll, I’ll go and I’ll deliver you your bread in the morning, so you don’t have to go out and get it. That’s great.

John Corcoran 4:03

And of course, this is the natural progression. I can see the path here. So from selling water to selling bread to nightclubs, I skipped McDonald’s there, which actually has a lot of successful entrepreneurs. I believe Mark Cuban might have worked at McDonald’s. It might have been his first job. Have worked at McDonald’s. So what did you learn from, you know, over the fries at McDonald’s?

Melanie Balke 4:28

Yeah, It’s funny. I never, like, my parents, never were like, Oh, you gotta go get a job now, or anything like that. This was totally self motivated. I was just driven. I wanted a job. I wanted to be independent. I, like, wanted the job so bad. And in Germany, Germany’s pretty strict. Most jobs you have to be 18. So, like, I don’t know, fun fact, if you watched the Euro Cup, Spain had a player that was 16, and they had to pay the German government because the player had to play games post eight. PM, which you’re not allowed to so Germany’s pretty strict on child and young labor. And McDonald’s was the only place that hired people when they turned 16. It was like, one of the few places.

And so that’s how I got a job at McDonald’s. What did I learn? You know, that was a hard job. That was the first job I had where I was like, Oh man, I wish I was going to school right now and set it to work. It was fast paced. So I learned being in a fast paced environment, I worked at probably one of the busiest, if not the busiest, McDonald’s in my city. I learned, yeah, just fast paced. And how you know that working hard is working hard. And I’ll never forget when I saw this older lady, and she was cleaning up one of the trays, and I, like, had this real moment of like, wow. Like, she’s, like, in her 60s, she’s cleaning up trays. Like, this is a hard job. So I had a moment of respect, I guess so, yeah, respect for hard work and the fast paced life of, like, hospitality type businesses.

John Corcoran 6:01

I often say that I think we learn as much from the bad jobs we have early on as the good jobs, or rather the jobs that we don’t like, or that are really hard, not easy. And you also went and worked at a nightclub which your parents were not too happy about. So from working during the day over the fries to cleaning up liquor bottles and things like that. Tell us about that experience and what you learned from it.

Melanie Balke 6:27

Yeah, not a bottle girl, but the girl who actually cleans the glasses after the bottle girls, which I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.

John Corcoran 6:33

So is that like you, like aspire to become a bottle girl or No, no, no, I was just that’s the career path.

Melanie Balke 6:39

I’m inspired to become a bottle girl. I didn’t even really know what I aspired to be. It was just like the hottest new nightclub I was at, when I was like, 18 ish, which is like, going out was cool at night. This was like a cool job to have in my mind back then. And my parents did not think so. It was a huge, huge point of arguments in my family that came up multiple, multiple times. But yeah. So I started, and you start kind of, I guess, as the girl who cleans up glasses and cleans the glasses, and that was also a hard job, because that’s when I learned that working at night’s not fun. Like, that’s when I learned that when I look at DJs now and people are like, Oh my god, they have such a great life.

I’m like, Oh yeah, those would be my worst nightmare to have to work at night. So, yeah, I learned that working at night’s not super fun again. Also, it was definitely hard work, right? It’s both physically and mentally hard work because it’s loud, it’s late at night, it’s fast paced again. And I guess the reason I left there was that it was like, my first contact with something that didn’t feel super kosher, like they paid me in cash. There’s like, no official, like, work agreement or anything. I once saw them fill in, like, higher quality liquor, lower quality liquor into higher quality liquor bottles. So kind of my first touch point with that shaggy.

John Corcoran 8:06

Yeah, stuff happening, yeah.

Melanie Balke 8:09

Andmaybe that’s even more common that I know or that I knew back then, but it was like my first.

John Corcoran 8:14

It’s an eye opener when you first see it and you’re 18 years old, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I waited on tables during high school and college, and what that taught me is that I didn’t like working when everyone else was relaxing and being in a restaurant full of people. It’s a barbecue ribs restaurant, and I didn’t even eat ribs. And, yeah, all these people are enjoying themselves. It’s a Friday night, it’s a Saturday night, it’s the end of the work week. They’re enjoying themselves, and I’m working as hard as I have all week long. And I’m like, this sucks. Like I want to be relaxing when everyone else is relaxing.

Melanie Balke 8:43

I agree. I mean, like, I think those experiences were part of why I believe working in the hospitality industry, whether it’s a restaurant or a nightclub or a hotel, are the hardest jobs you can have, and also the hardest businesses to run. Right? Like, I think agencies are some of the harder businesses to run, but I still don’t think they compare to a nightclub or or a hotel like those. Are very, very difficult businesses to run, right, right?

John Corcoran 9:09

So you graduate from college and you make your way over to you and have some family in the LA area. Was it hard to make that leap? Because, you know, today in the news, it’s all kinds of stuff about immigration, and I don’t know, you know, it was easier then, if it’s harder now, what was it like?

Melanie Balke 9:31

Um, I mean, the It wasn’t hard in terms of immigration. I think the hardest piece is, you know, leaving your family behind. It wasn’t even as hard as in leaving Germany, because I always had a feeling I wanted to leave and explore. I did a semester abroad in Hawaii. I did a semester abroad in Sydney. I worked in New York after high school for a bit. So I always had a, you know, a call. For the wild, or a call for getting out of Germany.

So that wasn’t so hard, not even really leaving my culture behind, because I knew I knew America, and especially LA, where I moved very well. I have a lot of family here. Think the hardest part is, one, leaving your family behind. And two, this was, you know, still the beginning of my career, I would say, and I graduated from one of the best business schools in Germany and Europe. Think what was hard was coming here with a CV that in Germany would have been very, very good, and landing in the United States.

John Corcoran 10:35

People don’t know it, right?

Melanie Balke 10:38

Yeah, getting my footing here was a little bit more difficult, yeah? Like the cost of living, right? The cost of living in LA in particular is insane.

John Corcoran 10:47

Especially compared to the Frankfurt area, yeah, yeah. And what were some cultural challenges for you? Or did you feel like you had fewer because you’d already lived in the States a couple of times before?

The post Why Email Marketing Still Dominates in 2024 With Melanie Balke appeared first on Smart Business Revolution.