Improving your email marketing strategy: The Ecommerce Influence Podcast Episode 280 Summary Notes

The Ecommerce Influence Podcast: The 2 Hour Makeover: Quick Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing and Drive More Revenue

• Common Email Marketing mistakes

1. Is everything integrated correctly? Double check your web tracking code and review active on site and viewed product metrics – may have been set up correctly at one time, but code may now be broken. If not working, you need to update your tracking code
2. Checkout is not connected to correct newsletter
3. If you’re using 3^rd party app, are they integrated with email service provider? Really common where 3^rd party app is not integrated with email service provider – when you integrate other services, it will pull them over as events.

• Improve your email template

1. Don’t use out of the box email templates. Spend time to improve them
2. Rather than starting from scratch, use an email template but customize it. Use one with lots of whitespace, and you’re going to build 2:
   • 1 plain text
   • 1 photo heavy
3. Flexible, readable, etc. You can change the font, add a white background, brand colors, changed the text size and spacing – something that matched the brand

• How to increase email lead flow
• If you’re not capturing 5 to 8% or more of the visitors going to your site, you should work on your lead capture
  • Question 1: Do I have a good offer? This is the most important thing that you’re looking at when capturing leads
  • If you’re not capturing 5 to 8% of the visitors, ask how can you improve your offer? Consider revamping your offer – maybe from percentage off to a giveaway. Maybe from 5% off to 10% off.  Test between couple of different offers to see if you can increase the percentage of people taking the offer
  • Question 2: Am I using the right tools? Depends on what you need to do and deciding between the following options:
  • Tools that are good and cheap but not customizable (ex. Suno and Klayvio)
  • Tools that are cheap and customizable (usually don’t work that well)
  • Tools that are customizable and good but not cheap (ex. Privy and Justuno)

• Ultimately what it comes down to is this: Success comes from a really good offer and spending time thinking about your offer to capture email is really important – if offer doesn’t make you feel a  little bit uncomfortable, probably not a good offer

• Follow the money
  • If you’re just starting, build the flows that will have the biggest financial impact (drive revenue)
  • If you’ve already built, optimize the flows that will have the biggest financial impact
  • Don’t spend as much time on those that aren’t going to drive revenue
  • New subscriber and cart abandonment are generally going to be the biggest levers – get these things working and spend most of your time on these
  • Then focus on browse abandonment and replenishment
  • Then focus on cross sells and first purchase welcome series
  • Winbacks/VIPs/feedback, review – not as important

• Run tests if you’re larger – 1000+ transactions per month
  • Will take time to run tests
  • Allows you to track results
  • For ex: cart abandonment test
    • 10% off offer vs. $10 off offer
    • Conditional splits, sequences, updating profile property

• 5 easy money wins that you can implement
  • Improve your copyrighting – if there’s one value that can drive revenue, it’s improving copyrighting. 
    • Conversational subject lines work really well, i.e., think about an email from a friend that you would want to open
    • Subject lines like: “I need your help” or “hey” or “quick question” or “I need your opinion” – these work better than traditional
  • Conversational subject lines combined with plain text emails that are super conversational right after people make purchase – lots of high open rate
  • Driving more clicks – use soap box to create animated GIF
  • Merge content with commerce – email consistently about your product about the people currently using your product and how they are using it and how your customers can currently use your product better than they currently are
    • How are people using your product in a way that some people who are using your product may not expect?
    • Food companies send out recipes – valuable benefit to the customer and it drives more revenue
    • If you own a furniture stores – how are people using furniture in beautiful ways that your customers might not expect
    • Unusual uses of your products
    • If you’re selling clothing, sending lifestyle clothing shoots, aspirational imagery
    • A supplemental company sending out a recipe for a smoothie, for example
  • Be more creative and send more emails
    • Be strategic
    • Provide value
    • If you’re emailing once a month, send an email 2x a month
    • If you’re emailing 2x a month, send an email 4x a month