Ep 165 – How Melanie Balke Turns Email Into a Retention Engine for E-Commerce
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Featuring: Melanie Balke. The Email Marketers
In episode 165, I sit down with Melanie Balke, founder and CEO of The Email Marketers, an outsourced email marketing department that helps e-commerce brands build deeper customer relationships and grow revenue.
We talk about how her business evolved from freelance work into a full agency built around pods of specialists, and how the scope of retention marketing has expanded well beyond email into SMS, subscriptions, loyalty, and referral programs. Melanie breaks down the real difference between underutilizing email and underoptimizing it, and why SMS engagement often beats email even though it comes with a lot less room for error.
Agency owners will walk away with a sharper view of how to use AI for deeper customer research instead of just faster output, why a simple monthly newsletter can keep you top of mind with B2B prospects, and why protecting a slow morning might matter more than an early one.
Key Bytes
• Underutilized and underoptimized are not the same problem — one means you aren't sending email at all, the other means you're sending it without a strategy behind it.
• SMS can hit open rates near 90%, but that trust is more fragile, so every text either earns the next one or costs you a subscriber.
• Between 2023 and 2024, Melanie's team had to send double the emails to hit the same revenue for the same client with the same offer.
• AI isn't replacing the creative work at The Email Marketers — it's replacing the research that used to be too time-consuming, like mining Reddit and testimonials for the exact language customers use.
• A referral program you set up once and never touch again isn't a referral program, it's a checkbox.
• Most B2B agencies are still underutilizing their own email list, when a simple monthly newsletter is often enough to stay top of mind.
• Melanie doesn't take a call before 11am, and protecting that slow morning is part of how she runs the business, not a luxury she fits in around it.
• If you're on the fence about texting your customers, the real question isn't whether you like getting texts — it's whether you like money.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and introducing Melanie Balke
01:16 From freelancing to building The Email Marketers
02:41 How the pod system runs strategy, copy, design, and delivery
04:19 Why retention now means more than just email
07:18 The real difference between underutilized and underoptimized email
09:10 Email versus SMS: engagement, risk, and where each one wins
15:12 How The Email Marketers uses AI for research and creative
19:58 Melanie's shift from freelancer to founder and her day to day
22:03 What B2B agencies get wrong about their own email marketing
27:01 Rapid fire: books, debunked advice, and protecting a slow morning
This week, my guest is Melanie Balke, Founder & CEO of The Email Marketers, an outsourced email marketing department helping e-commerce brands build deeper customer relationships and grow revenue. Before launching her agency, she led email marketing for one of LA's fastest-growing agencies, was the first marketing hire at Apt2B, and consulted for brands like Mercedes-Benz and SMART.
Melanie Balke is the Founder & CEO of The Email Marketers: Your outsourced email department helping e-commerce brands to build deep relationships with their customers and grow their revenue. Before she started The Email Marketers, she was the Head of Email Marketing for one of LA's fastest-growing agencies and the first marketing hire for Apt2B (acquired), as well as a marketing consultant for conglomerate brands such as Mercedes-Benz and SMART before that.
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Steve Guberman (00:01.698)
Welcome to Agency Bytes. your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I help founders turn their firm into an asset that they can grow, sell, or actually enjoy. This week, our guest is Melanie Balkey, she's the founder and CEO of the Email Marketers, an outsourced email marketing department helping e-commerce brands build deeper customer relations and grow revenue. Before launching her agency, she led email marketing for one of LA's fastest growing agencies. She was the first marketing hire at Apartment to Be and consulted for brands like Mercedes-Benz and SmartMe.
Melanie, super happy to have you. Thanks for joining me.
Melanie Balke (00:34.571)
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Steve Guberman (00:37.002)
Email marketing is still very much an active channel for so many brands. I'm super pumped to dig into it because I feel like we live in a world where the you know, spammers have forced device o device manufacturers and and software developers to be more defensive and here you are fighting the good fight for brands to infiltrate email boxes in boxes everywhere. So
yeah, I'm excited to dig in and kind of learn learn about what you're up to and how it's helping brands drive more revenue. how long have you running your agency for? Give us the backstory on launching it and everything like that.
Melanie Balke (01:16.087)
yeah, by the way, I love that you said fighting the good fight. That makes me feel really good. we launched in like 2020-2019. So in 2019, I left the agency I was working with and then really didn't know where I wanted to go next. The goal was, you know, I wanted to freelance a little and travel and you know, see build a personal brand and and see what I was gonna do next. And
Steve Guberman (01:19.406)
Ha ha
Melanie Balke (01:42.797)
freelancing, I got more clients and more clients and then hired some help and then hired more help and then eventually went, okay, I think based on the fact that I'm hiring a bunch of people, I'm building an agency. And so how do I do that right? How do I create a, you know, not a churn and burn machine, but really a high quality fulfillment team. And yeah, that's how the email marketers started.
originally we did I freelanced across different functions, not just email. And so when I realized I wanted to start an agency, the idea was okay, let's focus on one thing and one thing only and really be the best at that.
Steve Guberman (02:23.682)
The name tells the story. It's no there's no ambiguity. What do you guys actually do? but there was a there was a tipping point where it was no longer freelancing with help. I've got a business, this is an agency, we are the best at email marketing. What's the team structure and and a operations look like now?
Melanie Balke (02:41.631)
Yeah, so we operate in pods. the fulfillment team, there's a strategy pod, which are the people who essentially do the analysis on the data, develop the strategic direction for the client's retention marketing. Sorry, I don't know where this beeping is coming from. I'd love to know, but I have no idea. they do they develop the strategic back end essentially. And then
They also ensure that the creative comes back and fits the strategy. And then you have the copywriting department, the design department, and the implementation department. Copywriting and design is self-explanatory. Implementation is essentially the technical aspect of getting these emails into your ESP. And then a project management department. They make sure that we're on time and that our brands are on time and deliver us what they need to deliver.
Those are the departments, and then we have the pods. A pod is basically made up of five specialists with from each of those departments.
Steve Guberman (03:41.432)
So based on the client or the vertical or wherever they are, you pull in the related people or s you're ex experts from each of those teams to build a pod for brand A, brand B, brand C, et cetera.
Melanie Balke (03:54.326)
Yeah, and the pods usually work together and stay together. They don't actually change. because they're just an efficiency, right? If you always work with the same copywriter, there's an efficiency. So the pods are usually more specific to the industry, for example. We might have a pod that does more health and wellness. We might have a pod that has experience with B2B. So yeah, that's basically what it's based on.
Steve Guberman (04:19.98)
And the and the strategy work that you guys are doing for the brands is customer engagement, reengagement, abandoned cart, drive revenue, all all the things that a brand needs to move the needle. But all the things also that consumers are just like super overwhelmed with. And so you're starting with strategy and helping them say, Here's here's how often we're hitting, here's what we're saying, here's when we're saying it.
Where wh what are some of the things that you found over the was it six years you're running this thing now where it's like you you make some inroads in progress and then technology shifts and you've got to kind of rethink where you' how you're coming at things for your customers.
Melanie Balke (05:04.789)
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest shift was when we started, it was just really email, right? That's what we did. And when we built the strategy, we looked at what are you doing on email and like exactly what you said, like who should we be talking to? What's the content cadence? What's the content pillars? What, you know, are the segments? What's the deliverability strategy? What is the creative? now that is very different. Now it's really all of retention. And what we're looking at is
How do we bring the customers you've acquired back more frequently, get them to spend more money and do so over a longer period of their lifetime? And so it's not just email that we're looking at, but we're really looking at retention strategically, holistically. And so SMS is a huge piece now, of course, but also really talking about subscription programs, membership programs. How do we utilize direct mail? How do we utilize a loyalty program that actually works and gets people excited? How do we bring in a referral program? So
You know, the scope has just increased because I think it was really easy to do email. For a while, all you needed to do was just send more emails and you generate more revenue. And because of what you said, you know, bad senders have forced these devices and email service providers to just have stricter deliverability rules so not everyone can make it into your inbox. That has made email a lot harder on on
Steve Guberman (06:13.432)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Guberman (06:30.734)
Mm-hmm.
Melanie Balke (06:31.711)
on our front. So it's a lot more holistic. And then the other thing is, you know, because in particular in our industry, e-commerce, meta ads are so much more expensive. So many more brands now really aggressively rely on email. So when I started an email, you know, the email is dead thing had been around for a good 10 years already. But email then was still very much not dead and still like really underutilized by brands. And now I honestly rarely find that
a seven or eight figure brand is underutilizing email. it'll be under optimized, but it won't be underutilized. Back then you could really still see like a seven figure e-commerce brand who's just been pumping money into ads and it's been working really well and that's how they grew. That's very rare nowadays.
Steve Guberman (07:18.39)
So all right, so that's interesting. Talk about the difference between what you use, underutilized and underoptimized, right? So they've got this audience, whether s whether they gained them through an existing transaction or they bought a list, hopefully not. Like underutilized versus underoptimized. What what are the differences and what are some of the best practices there?
Melanie Balke (07:39.148)
Yeah, I think underutilized is just like you're not really utilizing email or SMS. Like you're not really, you don't really have a retention strategy. Like you don't really think about how do I get the second purchase? You're really focused on just like that first initial purchase. in terms of emails, like you're not really sending email frequently. You don't really have an email flow setup. You're probably not using SMS at all. Maybe you have a loyalty program, but you know.
More likely than not, you don't. You have never even thought about a subscription or membership program. That's really underutilized. Now it's underoptimized, where like people will be sending emails, but they won't be strategic, right? They will have a flow that's focused on getting the circuit second purchase, but they haven't really looked at any of the data to ensure this flow is actually hitting people at the right time with the right messaging. They haven't really talked to any other customers to find out.
Steve Guberman (08:12.622)
Mm-hmm.
Melanie Balke (08:36.959)
why those who only buy once don't come back and buy again. They have a referral program, but it's just a standard referral program. They set up once with an app and they haven't even gone in to really think about how do we make this sexier for our customers. They might have a subscription program, but they're just really focused on getting people to, you know, take their second subscription and not really thinking about how do I keep them in this program long term and actually make this a program people want to stay in.
So I think that's really the difference between underutilized and under
Steve Guberman (09:10.638)
Do you find and maybe it's demographic or industry specific, but email versus SMS, which one do you find is has better engagement or better conversions?
Melanie Balke (09:22.837)
I would say engagement. I mean SMS has like a ninety percent open rate, right? Email has like, you know, on a well optimized account, you'd want to see like a sixty percent open rate. That doesn't mean sixty percent are opening. because of Apple privacy opens, emails are marked as opened even if they are not open sometimes. So it's over inflated, but even if you take that number at face value, sixty to ninety is a big difference.
Then then think about how many texts you open that you get and how many emails you open. so engagement, I would say SMS beats email, but with email, we can also be a lot more lenient on who we email and how often we email them. So with text, the unsubscribes come a lot faster. And only a certain type of demographic, or that's not true, not a certain type of demographic, but certain type of customer wants texts, right? so we have to be a little bit more mindful with.
How frequently we're messaging, what we're messaging, who we're messaging. but engagement is better on text. And the one thing, you know, a takeaway if you're thinking about email and SMS right now, I don't think it's either or. It's always gonna be both and. But what we are seeing, if you're like, I don't know about text, like most people they come to us and they go, I don't wanna send texts. I find them annoying, I hate getting there, I don't want to put this on the brand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What we find is I always say, you like money. If you like money, then you should be texting your customers. and we saw now, you know, as just as an example for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, talking about the effectiveness of email over the last two years. So the year twenty we're in twenty twenty-six now. So in twenty twenty four, we had to send double the amount of emails compared to twenty twenty-three.
For the same client growing business with the same email agency, us, with even the same offer. And they wanted to even recycle some of the exact same emails. So we did that. So 2024 to 2023, we had to send double the amount of emails with every other thing staying the same, of course, except for maybe economy or whatnot, to achieve the same amount of revenue. 2025 to 2024, we had to scale email. It felt like
Melanie Balke (11:47.904)
Indefinitely. Like we went extremely hard on emails. And there was really a point, you know, for the longest time, people would see like just say, like, just send more emails. The more emails you send, the more money you'll make. And it really was like this: like emails and sends. And what we hit last year's Black Friday was like there was a point where it just like didn't matter how many more emails we'd send. The the return just wasn't there. But with text, we still had this like constant upward trajectory in terms of revenue and send numbers. So
That was really exciting to see. And I think if you're on the fence about using text messaging, you know, do you like money?
Steve Guberman (12:26.634)
I do, but God, I hate text messages and I can't stand when I get random text messages. I and I'm not the only one. Maybe I'm just in that demographic, but I know for B2C communicating through SMS is absolutely lucrative. It's gotta be a younger demographic that it works best on. I'm only fifty. I'm not even old. older than me, I'm sure they can't stand it. Like boomers absolutely can't stand it.
Melanie Balke (12:45.995)
You'd be surprised.
Melanie Balke (12:51.147)
You'd be surprised. boomers in particular tend to reply back. So I think it's really important.
Steve Guberman (12:58.198)
They think it's their grandson, they don't know any different.
Melanie Balke (13:01.271)
Well, I mean, like if they think it's their grandson, your text messaging is not doing a good job. But I think most people they when they think about that the fact that they hate text is they've just experienced really bad text programs, right? it's like saying you hate email because spammers have been emailing you. So there are some really fantastic high value text programs out there. we're not really strangers is a great example. Like they grew their text list from, you know, fifteen thousand to over a million subscribers. And
Steve Guberman (13:17.282)
Yeah. Fair.
Steve Guberman (13:29.678)
Wow.
Melanie Balke (13:30.997)
That's just because people wanted to get those texts because they were so high value. So yeah, I think there is something there. Don't write it off.
Steve Guberman (13:39.087)
Yeah. All right. I yeah, I I just transitioned to a new CRM and it and it it goes pretty heavy on pushing for SMS and I'm not doing it. I'm B to B and frankly I don't need mass, you know, millions of customers. You know what I mean? So it doesn't it doesn't make sense for me. But for for you, for your audience or your your customers audience, it's B2C primarily and in the mass it makes the most sense. Do
Do you as a business, as an agency, do your own email marketing or do you do email marketing?
Melanie Balke (14:11.573)
Yeah, I mean, you know, the cobbler's son doesn't have any shoes, or what's the saying? we do do email marketing though, thankfully. Like we have a newsletter, we just send it once per month. We basically aggregate the best case studies from that month, the best learning, the best industry news, the best tests we've run so people can run them themselves. it's called the Retention Newsy. It has about, I think like 15,000 subscribers now. So it's it's fairly small, but still pretty good. We have
Steve Guberman (14:15.532)
Yeah, that's it.
Melanie Balke (14:38.795)
Some really exciting people on there from some really big brands who are, you know, reading and engaging. And so we send that about once a month. I, you know, if I had really strong content every week to send, and honestly, bandwidth, I we probably do have the content, but if I had bandwidth, I'd I'd send it more. We definitely want to, you know. but our own marketing team is fairly small. So we do do email.
We have a bunch of automations we run for when people book calls with us, you know, or if they cancel a call or they don't show. So we have that as well.
Steve Guberman (15:12.374)
Interesting. So you're leveraging AI for operations and for your team and for efficiency on the email side and I think it's interesting to see how agencies are leveraging AI. a lot of them are pushing back on we're not using it to create stuff, we're using it to optimize processes and automate f functionality and things like that. Can you talk about what you guys are using AI for?
Melanie Balke (15:36.088)
Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, when AI came out, the the whole term was being an AI native agency. And I personally believe that, you know, two years from now, maybe, agencies that don't utilize AI will not just get left behind. I don't know if they can exist anymore. we look at AI and we go, first and foremost, how can we make
Are deliverables or service better for our clients? That's the first lens we look through. So, like, what can we do now with AI that we couldn't do before? Is it like deeper data analysis, creating sexier reports? You know, like because just like these things were time prohibitive earlier. and then the second lens we look at it from is how can we do things more efficiently in the business so that we can, you know, two, four, six, eight, 10x.
Our time input to our deliverable output. And so we're a lot less looking at like, how can we use AI to write copy faster or design faster? I think there the quality is not quite there yet, but we use AI a lot to go, how can we make the emails better? For example, how can we utilize AI to do deeper customer research?
That would have taken us way longer before. And now we can aggregate everything your customer's saying about you on Reddit thanks to AI. Now we can present that to you. And as our clients are usually very surprised by this, right? Like the things they're seeing, or how can we download all your testimonials and do a really deep sentiment analysis of like exactly what do people love about your product? What language do they use? What do they not like? So we can bring that into copy.
And then for for design, it's just, you know, a lot of our clients have a ton of assets. a lot of them want to have more assets. And so and a lot of assets, we just like we have a crazy idea where like we want the hot sauce to basically come from a chili exploding into the hot sauce bottle, right? Like they're not gonna have an asset for that. So how do we use AI to create this asset that we couldn't create before? So on the creative side, it's really more like how do we do it better, not just faster?
Melanie Balke (17:57.388)
yeah, but with everything else, it's how do we better do it better and how do you make the process faster? How do you streamline things? Even if it's little things, you know, like it's a people business. So a big piece of what we do is holding people accountable, especially as we're growing. How do we have AI help our managers do that by like, you know, keeping a cadence on things and and reminding people? So yeah.
Steve Guberman (18:17.518)
So are you building agents? Are you do you have company wide automations? Do you have a roadmap internally of these are the things that we are leveraging for and things we do and do not do?
Melanie Balke (18:30.047)
Yeah, we have so we have a roadmap of well what we want to build in Q3 right now. but things also always come up, right? Like we encourage people to submit ideas all the time. And if an idea comes up and we say like, hey, this is something we should tackle right away, we tackle it right away. We have the whole team is trained on AI. So they're trained on not just how to use, you know, chat GBT or or Claude, but actually like Claude Cowork Claude Code specifically.
To be able to build full systems and automations. They do have to get signed off by me just so people aren't building the same thing twice, and just so we're building things that actually work within the context of the full business. And then yeah, there was another question in there. I forgot what it was. But we use it across the whole business. There's automations for the whole business, like in sales, in marketing, in sales handoffs, in the fulfillment and reporting.
There's we have a ton of automations across the entire business, yeah.
Steve Guberman (19:30.668)
Love it. Very cool. Yeah, and I agree. next year or two, if you're not, you know, not necessarily all in, but there's various stages of AI integration. And if you're not on one of those more advanced levels, you're gonna be run over. So you've gotta be leveraging it pretty hardcore. And it's gotta be increasingly greater integration over time. You are s someone who's ascended through employee freelancer and now founder, owner, operator, and that's a rare
Ascension, most people either well, not most, but it's it's more often that people will become employees and then become founders. The freelance mindset is a very unique mindset where people st stay stuck there intentionally sometimes. But the talk about kind of what your progress from employee into founder role and what your day to day looks like now as a owner operator.
Melanie Balke (20:25.323)
Yeah, my day to day you mean compared to previously or just in general?
Steve Guberman (20:29.89)
Just in general, yeah. What do you what what do you what's Melanie's role as the owner to these days?
Melanie Balke (20:34.643)
Yeah, so I still own the sales piece predominantly. So that's a big piece of what I do, you know. take the sales conversations, do the audits, and really ensure that when we do close the deal, it's handed off properly to the team. The team has all the context and then the client is on their way. I'm not fully out of client fulfillment. I mean I I don't do I don't own any clients myself anymore.
But you know, I get reported the performance of our clients every week. And I'm in all the Slack channels, I monitor everything. We have an AI system that actually goes through all the messages, the calls, the emails, and reports if there's a problem to me. So I look at that. So I do still have oversight on fulfillment just because quality is very important to me. And I want to ensure all of our clients are happy and successful. and then you know, managing our department heads. That's the other piece. I manage the department heads, which manage their departments.
And then I still do some pieces of operations. So with our operations manager, looking at the capacity tracker, he does all the hiring. So thankfully I only do final interviews for some positions there. and then I do some of the marketing just because I enjoy it. we just had we had a fractional CMO who left this year, so we are looking to fill the marketing role. And so right now I do some content just because I like writing content, so I'm active on social.
but yeah, we're looking to fill the marketing position and expand that even more.
Steve Guberman (22:03.138)
Nice. Yeah. I think you gotta have somebody in that role. And the more the more you're able to get off your plate as the owner, the better the operations will probably roll or continue to roll and continue to grow. Talk about what are some of the things that you see from an agency? So it's more of a B to B stance, agencies doing wrong with their own email best or worst practices.
Melanie Balke (22:28.565)
I mean, agencies, yeah, great question. I think agencies underestimate the power of running email on B2B. A lot of and it's the same with B2C, right? A lot of sales is just being in your customer's brain, right? So that when the right time comes, you're the first name they think of. And email is a really great way to do that. If you send a really high value newsletter, even if it's just once a month like us.
You're gonna stay top of mind, right? And the second they think of, I need someone for paid ads, I need someone for email, I need someone for X, Y, and Z, you're the first name they think of. And so I think that is, you know, just the biggest thing. It's just like not like most agencies don't use email and don't write a high value newsletter. on the automation side, you know, I think there's a ton of automations that you can run.
Not just for the sales moment where it's like they've booked a call and now we're gonna run them through an automation, but also once they actually sign with you as a client, right? It can be a really strong drip campaign that helps you onboard this new client onto your business and how your processes work step by step to ensure that their relationship with you is more successful. so that's how I would think about emails. Like I think agencies are very much still in the underutilized department. So it's not the underoptimized, like they're just not even using it because they can't even think of
what the benefit would be. but really it's the same, you know, if you're getting a welcome flow from a B2C brand that encourages you to be successful with their product, or in this case, sorry, a post-purchase flow, why not have an onboarding flow for your agency client that helps them be successful?
Steve Guberman (24:09.656)
Would rather see them do that than not do something. And too many like, we're not gonna do it. We we don't do onboarding. Like, why not? You have the ability to do an onboarding call or in your point do an automation. And I feel like if it's the more personal it is, you can personalize that. So why the heck not? all right, so minimum cadence. Go ahead. Say that again.
Melanie Balke (24:25.707)
Yeah. And if you
Sorry, I just gonna say you can do both, right? Like the the thing we're learning with our clients is like they've got a lot going on. This is one of the pieces of the pie of a very big pie that they're managing. And they're working with us so we can take stuff off of their plate. So these are new processes we have for them. They have to learn these. Sometimes there's maybe even a new platform. sometimes someone gets thrown onto email that.
Don't even manage email, but now it's their thing. How can we make it as easy as possible for them? And I think re repetition is a big thing, right? Like, here's exactly how working with us works. Talk to them about it on the onboarding call, but remind them in those emails, just as a reminder, you have X many days to give feedback. You have X feedback rounds. This is when you're gonna receive this thing. This is when you're gonna receive that thing. It's just like reducing uncertainty, bringing clarity, making them feel clear, and also.
avoiding that they forget certain processes because that's gonna be a problem for you because now they miss the process. Now you have to redo it. So I think, you know, repetition is important. Like people remember by repetition.
Steve Guberman (25:32.3)
Love that. I love it. All right. So minimum once a month, as a cadence, is there a a maximum that's too much? And is there a best best day of week or time of day for B to B?
Melanie Balke (25:43.17)
I mean, I think you would have to have really extremely strong content to send more than once a week, if it's like a recurring newsletter. Of course, if you have a certain thing, like let's say whatever, you have a deal for whatever reason. Hey, we have two slots left this month. hey, it's our one-year anniversary. So for everyone who enters this giveaway, we're gonna give away six months of free service. Those are like campaigns that I would say.
They have a specific reason to be sent. It's a time sensitive thing. If you have a lot of those, hell, I'm fine with like two times a week, even. I I doubt there's a lot of agencies that would have I'm talking about the average agency now, right? That and I doubt there's a lot of agencies that would have good content to send more than once per week, to be honest.
Steve Guberman (26:30.136)
Right. Yeah. Unless it's super braggadocious, which they shouldn't be doing anyway, right.
Melanie Balke (26:36.663)
Yeah, but like if you do for whatever reason, there's a use case I can't think of and you have a ton of time sensitive stuff, just look at your engagement rates, right? If your engagement is good and you're seeing people are staying subscribed to the list, there's a strong open rate, like sixty percent plus, you're getting a strong click rate, like one percent plus, then you know, keep sending. Why not?
Steve Guberman (27:01.016)
Yeah, love it. Melanie, this has been an awesome conversation. I'm grateful for you sharing the experience that you've gathered over the decade or so that you've been an email marketing expert. so thanks for joining me. I'm gonna h wrap it up with a couple of random rapid fire questions. the first is man, I didn't prepare for this one. What's what's one of the best business books you've ever read?
Melanie Balke (27:25.557)
Ooh, there's so many. I really like start with why. I know it's such a cliche one, but it really helped me think about why am I even in this business and like what is at the core of not just this business, but any business I'm ever gonna build, right? so that was really helpful. I mean traction by EOS is a good starter book for any kind of like startup. It's what we built the system operations on. I really like alchemy by I
Steve Guberman (27:29.315)
Mm.
Steve Guberman (27:39.971)
Mm-hmm.
Melanie Balke (27:54.56)
what's I think Rory Sutherland. It's a great marketing book. he's the CEO of Ogilvy and essentially talks about consumer psychology and has some great case studies in there. So I would say off the cuff, probably those three.
Steve Guberman (28:08.418)
Good rip. I like it. All great books. Rory's a such an engaging guy. I got to meet him in Miami earlier this year and yeah, really dynamic presenter and just kind of a ad ad man character, if you will. what's what's a piece of early marketing or business advice that you used to think was like biblical and now you're like totally debunked?
Melanie Balke (28:21.674)
Yeah.
Melanie Balke (28:31.223)
Wow, that's a good question. Hmm.
Melanie Balke (28:38.443)
I mean debunked.
I would say I wouldn't say a lot of things have been debunked. I think things have just really changed, right? like for example, an email, a 15% open rate would be good. And you could just send more emails and print more money. And it was fine to just send to as big of an audience as you could. Now it's not that that was debunked, but now you just really cannot do that anymore. yeah, I think that's that. I think
You know, there's no such thing as bad press. I think that is a debunked thing for me. I think there's certainly bad press and like you know, look at the SeaWorld stock after Blackfish came out, right? so I think that's debunked for me.
Steve Guberman (29:28.44)
Love that. Finally, I just had it on the tip my tongue. What's a what's a daily ritual that drives your success as a founder?
Melanie Balke (29:37.975)
Slow mornings. Yeah. I I'm I'm a night owl, so I work pretty late usually. And I would always beat myself up that, you know, I didn't have this 5 a.m. morning or whatever. And I realized that one of the things that really allowed me to do what I do is having slow mornings. And so I I still plan to wake up even earlier than I do now. But like when I wake up in the morning, I don't touch my phone. I don't go on Slack right away.
I don't take morning calls as much as I can unless it's avoidable, which, you know, in PT zones sometimes can be hard. But I really try to take my earliest calls if I can at like eleven. I think I have one 930 call a week. and then, you know, every now and then there's there's earlier calls. But that's because I know that I function the best if I can I can have a slow morning, then I can get to my desk and actually, you know, my team is a lot earlier on than I am.
Steve Guberman (30:25.198)
Mm-hmm.
Melanie Balke (30:34.155)
Go through like urgent slacks or emails and kind of fire that away, do a little bit of deep work and then start with the calls. That is my ritual. Now, I don't know if this works for everyone, but for me, like being able to wake up, relax, have breakfast, start my day, not stressing that my next call is happening right away, that's really supported me.
Steve Guberman (30:59.582)
Need to work for everybody. If works for you, golden. That's all you need, right? And if you protect it, that's so so vital. I'm the same way. I have a morning routine, prayer, meditation, a shower, gotta do my hair. But I started reading non business related books in the morning. And I just fell in love with it. And so I protect that like ferociously. Unless I'm fishing. Then I bury a but yeah, protect it at all costs.
Melanie Balke (31:29.205)
Amazing, yeah, I love it.
Steve Guberman (31:30.242)
Yeah. Melanie, thank you again so much for joining me. I'm grateful for your your expertise and your time and sharing everything that you have with us today. And folks, check out the email marketers for your email marketing needs.
Melanie Balke (31:43.126)
Thank you.