Everyone. Scott Austin here. And for this week's episode, we're gonna talk about Klaviyo. And I wanted to bring in an outside expert on Klaviyo to give you another point of view on best practices for email. His name is Dan Negus and he owns Elite Brands out of Australia. Welcome, Dan.

Hey, thanks for having me on today. Great to be here.

Can you, give us a little background on your klaviyo expertise and why we should be listening to you?

Yeah. Look, it's, I'm a brand owner first, and that's a brand called bunch. It's been around since 2016. I was very, very good at advertising. Facebook advertising, as it was called back then. Over the years, we realized the importance of email marketing and how we'd sort of been leaving a lot on the table. Just going back.

And we just had a great birthday there. So I made a concerted effort to educate our internal team on email marketing, our preferred, platform is Klaviyo. Obviously, that's what we're talking about. The success from that with my own brand led to other people asking, can we help them? We built our internal team out further, offered as a service to other people now.

So we've been in that ecosystem now for about the last six years. And absolutely love it. And it continues to evolve, continues to get better, continues to get more intuitive. It's very data driven, which suits my personality. And it's.

The best that we've got out there at the moment. There's other comparable ones, but Klaviyo has the most innovation integrations and, options available to us at this time.

Yep, yep I agree. We put a clear view in all the stores that we build on our side. It's just, like, a no brainer for me to make that decision. Now, for the stores that are listening that don't have email yet today, what would you say, you know, is the importance of email for an online brand? And what's the benefit of implementing?

Yeah. Good question. So if you don't have it, you're losing money. Like, it's fundamentally that's all it comes down to. Email's been around since the beginning of the internet. It's not going anywhere. It's going to stay around. The other trends will come and go. But fundamentally, what we see with our brands that we manage and our own brand, on average, we bring in about an extra 30% attributed revenue from our marketing efforts.

So if you make $100,000 in a month, potentially on average, we'd be adding an extra $30,000 a month to your revenue. And the reason for that is, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think probably the biggest one is as a society, we have a lot of distractions. So we consume a lot of information.

We consume a lot of content. There's so many social media platforms out there. We can't simply remember everything, so we have to make sure that we stay front of mind to people. And if we just rely on paid media and we push something out there and someone buys or doesn't buy, and then we move on to the next prospect, we're sort of doing a social media disservice because we need to give people time to think about it.

People are busy. The product or service you're offering might take a little bit of consideration, and that's what email comes in. So we'd have to keep paying to go back to those same people to convince them to buy from us or to become a customer, take up our services. That's what email. We can automate it as well as campaigns, but we can automate a system that brings in consistent revenue for you on the back end without you having to go and pay for them because you already own that that data that you're playing in your own backyard.

You can message them however you like, whenever you like. And now it can dictate what you can or can't do. So it's and I mean cattle can't do not in a spammy context. I mean, as an example matter advertising. I'm a huge fan of it, but we can't share before and afters. We've got a lot of, health related brains that we manage, and we can't shop before and after, let's say on a basic level, for weight loss or we can't call that personal characteristics.

However, on email we can do that. And I'm not saying being discriminatory or disrespectful, I'm just saying we can show results in that manner because it's our data, it's our backyard. Instead of playing in someone else's backyard where they dictate what we can and can't show or say.

Having built many other websites with supplements, I understand exactly what you're talking about. There. Where they. They have all these restrictions. They have to work around, and all the all the stuff they're doing

in all of your experience, have you ever come across a brand that shouldn't do email? I don't think I have, and I'm wondering if you have.

I can't think of a use case where email wouldn't be beneficial. There are nuances to it, like there are some brains. As an example, my I'm Frankie Bunch where we email and we've trained an audience to receive emails from us every day. It's potentially every day. It's highly segmented. So you're not receiving just spam emails, your entire list the whole time.

It's very segment and very targeted and there are other brands that they're more of a long term investment brand. And the high end product that we that guarantee will last X amount of years. Well, we don't need to consistently email them over and over and over again about the same products. But there is a place for it in every brain, especially during the, and this is probably the misconception a lot of people have is that email is I have a list of 5000 people.

I'm going to do up a solid amount. I'm going to send it out. That is like a very, very small portion of what email marketing is. The more beneficial, the more sophisticated side of it is the targeting. And it's a bit of a it's not a cliche, but it's a very well known marketing term, sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

How that works in email marketing is depending on what stage someone is at in that consideration, or that buying journey that they're in. We can send them an email to educate them or build more awareness, build more trust based on the actions that they've performed, either in an app or on our website. As an example, very basic example, and this is one of seven automation slides that we build out.

You typical add to cart someone adds to cart and they abandon the cart. That is, as most or agents would know, is a very typical email marketing automation. So hey, you left something in your cart. Here's 10% off. Typical. It's been done today at every dropship. It doesn't every day. The way. But what if you could target the people who would call window shoppers who have just been to the website and look to the product, haven't anything to cart?

And then at the other end of the spectrum, we can set up an automation flow where we target people who, at the checkout stage. And there's a lot of steps in between. And the psychology of where that person is in that decision making process is very different. So the difference between someone who has just come and view the products compared to someone who's got to the checkout agent all their details and has not actually pulled the trigger, and actually become a customer, that is very different.

We need to talk to them very differently because they're two different style of that process. So the emails the person gets for being a window shopper compared to the person at the checkout, for whatever reason they might have got distracted. The kids needed them. They couldn't find their credit card at the time. The bus came around the corner in their office when they were trying to do some online shopping.

That worked on whatever the reason might be, it's a if they're in a different state of mind. So that's sort of about that right message at the right time.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Now, in klaviyo for. For the audience listening. And he's clearly for. They have two big buckets that emails fall, and one is flows, which are based on a trigger, like the abandoned car you just mentioned. And the other would be campaigns where they're doing something like a Valentine's Day campaign. And you and you mentioned, you know, the, the 30% number, I always say 25 to 33% of your revenue, if you're doing it right, should be coming from email.

So we're in the same ballpark there. What do you see as the the mix of revenue from campaigns versus flows? Just so people understand the importance of, you know, prioritization or how balanced those those efforts should be.

In a perfect world, would be 5050. It's never. The world's not perfect. But. So again, the answer is it differs. Comparing, a difference between brands. When we look at brands that have a longer consideration time. So we've got one brand that sells, machinery that we that we work with their consideration. Time is, is quite large because the products retail anywhere from about 4000 to $8000.

Now that person more than likely if we send them a campaign and go, hey, we've got this, they're not going to turn around, make an impulse buy for $8,000 tomorrow. There is a consideration time. They're going to compare competitor's products. They're going to look at the warranty. They're going to see what other people have said. They're going to look at possibly where it's made possibly a how to video on how it's used.

We find those products that have the longer consideration time. The flows do bring in a lot more of the attributed revenue campaigns, not so much campaigns. We use for those companies are more to educate as opposed to try and get a transaction, because there's a lot of education that needs to go into a higher cost transaction for other brands that we, run campaigns and blow the the flies out of the water in terms of the balance.

And that's because a lot of them klaviyo works on the last click attribution model. So it's whichever email you last had a touchpoint with is going to be attributed with that sale. And sometimes all it takes with some brands that have a little bit more of those discretionary products. So more of an impulse buy, they're a lower price point.

You don't have to think about it as much. A campaign might be all it takes to get you across one. It might not need a, you know, a seven email deep automated flow to get you to convince you to buy. So the flies still have their place and they still do mop up the people that are indecisive. But we do get a lot of, a lot of, conversions coming through on the campaigns, especially when you'd like you said you run something out for an offer, a sale around an event like Valentine's Day, and it's already pretty much a nearly an impulse buy.

And then all of a sudden there's a great deal and one get one free or buy one, get one half price, specific discount off or free shipping, whatever it might be for that brain. That's enough to convert someone straightaway. So does that make sense in terms of the consideration? Time will dictate, you know, where in those flows or campaigns they'll talk, will tend to see the conversions.

Oh, it totally does. You know, one is. You know, the longer consideration is you have to educate them, and the other is. Well, there's. You know, people are already warmed up, let's say. And we're just going to push them over the edge with a special offer. And for me, what's really important in that is for store owners to understand that, you know, you know, flows.

Most people think of as like free emails, right. They set it up once and they should always improve upon them and iterate on them. But they set it up and it just it runs for the next few years and makes you money, which is awesome. But half of your money is coming from campaigns, which is effort. You have to apply on a regular basis to your email set up to get them running properly, and you're going to see the benefit if you put that effort in.

You definitely going to see the benefit. And it's more than just the actual content in the email as well, like you need to be. And this is why we use Klaviyo as opposed to a lot of other service providers is they have granular. We can get the segmentation in there. So, you know, we don't need to very simply, we don't need to send an email to our entire list to say, hey, buy this product.

If we know that person bought that product in the last week, like, there's nothing more annoying, hey, look what we've got. Yeah, I know, I pulled it off last week. Why are you sending me this email? That's on a very basic level, but we can look at isolating people out through geographical locations, how engaged they are with our system.

When was the last time they purchased? Did I have a birthday coming up? You know, have they bought a product? Product X and product Y complements it really well. You know that there's that there is I wouldn't say it's an endless amount of options, but it is really and it sometimes surprises us with some of our clients now come to us with an idea that we hadn't thought of before about a potential segmentation or a strategy.

And I'm just wondering, is it possible that we could do this? And we're like, oh, we don't know. Actually, let's dive in and we'll get our team together and we'll get around and we'll figure out a way to do it. And it's it's good fun because then we go, well, that works. Let's get tested on my brand, which is a bunch.

And then if we say it works again, then we're going to we go out to all our other brands and we go, hey, we've got something really interesting. It's working at the moment, so we'll roll that out.

So you know what I love in Klaviyo? You know, being an agency that has access to all my clients implementations, I can take a flow from one store. And with a click of a button, apply it to another store and then just update the branding. And really easy to share those best practices across my clients, which is, you know, thank you, Klaviyo for those tools.

it's a it's a it's a huge time saver. And it's a bit of a game changer as well. And look, even the I don't always like them, but they do have a really detailed library of flows in there as well. Now, I wouldn't go in there and just go and plug and play with one of them, but it is some good inspo for you in that as well.

Like it's something that you might not have thought of, something you thought of or ran a year earlier. Then you go in there you like, oh, hang on, we could probably test this, this brand. It didn't work for that one, but let's try it on this one and see if we can get some cut through there.

Yeah. Yeah. And let's let's talk about flows for a little bit. You know, for a store that's, you know, got klaviyo. They've got a couple flows in place. What do you think are a set of, you know, the must haves at every brand. Does the comment flow. You already mentioned abandoned cart. And then what are the let's call them fancy flows or the more intricate flows that they're maybe aren't thinking about that they should be.

Well, what we've got is we've got a core seven that we set up to start with. And this is like our stride out the gate. We're going to do a build out for brand. If they don't have this, we need to implement this. And this is what this is our jump off point. And very rarely do we come across a brand who has already these already built out.

And we start and we just sort of follow the, the flow of a customer through that journey. So we start off with what we call that welcome series. So someone comes to the website, enters their details into a pop up or sign up form or a giveaway, whatever it is that we're running as our lead generation strategy.

So we've got a welcome series. We've then got one that we call our abandoned browse. So that is our window shoppers. People who've only viewed products. Then we go on to abandon cart, which is as it says, it's the cart. This isn't the checkout stage. This is a little bit of extra code snippet that has to be put into Shopify, or that they are changing a little bit now, so it becomes more standard without having to put the extra coding.

But that's the abandoned card. Then we've got your abandoned checkout. That's the one where people type all their their information in there. We then have our welcome new and welcome returning customers. So that's we say, you know, when someone becomes a customer for the first time, we have a series of emails that go out to them. If they're returning customer, we talk to them a little bit differently and then we have, what we call that win back slide.

Some people call it sunset flow. Some people call it a re-engagement flow. So this is for people who have in the past been engaged or with us or been a customer. They've been disengaged for a little while. We're trying to get them back in, get them reengage because they've already paid for their lead. We've already had them already built that trust with them.

Let's try and get them back into into our system. So that's our core 7 or 8 foundational seven that we start with. And within that there's a lot of intricacies. So, you know, we once we build those out, we didn't want to go into more detail within them. We'd like to split up different collections, different products, different services within each of them.

So that we can talk to that person in the right way at the right time. Really simple example. We run, the email marketing for a really big furniture brand in the, in the States. They sell everything from sofas to bait. We don't need a series of emails going to someone who is interested in buying a sofa that educates them, a man habits.

So on a very simple level, within all those flows based on their behavior, what they were looking at on the website, did they look at a bed or did they look at a sofa? They looked at a bed. We're going to talk to them about beds. It's a looked at a sofa. We're going to educate them about our sofas.

So that's you know, there's a lot of intricacies in there. But those seven floors initially is where we need to start.

Yeah. I love that. And having that core set now on the welcome series. Do you have any, like, philosophies about welcome series? For example? I think you should have lots of emails. You're welcome series. If you have lots of content and build that brand over time, what sort of best practices do you have for the welcome?

Probably our biggest point of difference that we have compared to a lot of other, people that manage email marketing, is we like to find out of the potential customer or prospect what it is they're interested in on our sign up or pop up form. So as an example, we run in our marketing for a paid brain.

Now, very simplistically, they have products for dogs, cats and, dogs and cats. So on the signup form we run, are you interested in products for dogs, cats, or both? That then dictates what channel they go down in that welcome series flight. We make it really deep, but it's very specific because dog people don't always like cats. Cat people don't always like dogs.

Somewhat both. So we will they will go on the go if they click on I'm interested in dogs or I love dogs, they click on it. We then put a custom parameter on that profile so that in that flow, they're always going to be saying going down the channel that talks about dog products and dogs and dog health and, keeping a dog cool in summer and keeping his teeth clean.

And how to, you know, groom your dog things along those lines, whereas the cat one is very, very different. Again, the beauty of that is, is that it's not this once only hit where we get drop a week in the welcome series. We know they like dogs, cats, or both. Guess what else we use? It comes time for campaigns.

A dog person is not gonna be interested in a discount on a cat brush, but if you're a dog person and we've got some new whiz bang cooling mat for your dog to lie on during those hot summer times, we send it to the people that we know have been tagged by us as saying they're interested in dog products.

Yeah. That's really good sophistication for a brand to be thinking about. And that data enrichment of your, you know, of your your customers data. You just mentioned the example of you're doing that at a signup form. And my first question is going to be, you know, what percentage of people actually give you that information. And then the second question is what other ways do you collect that information about the customer?

Yeah. So we make it so that it's it's it's guided for you to be able to, with those radio buttons, we make it that you have to select one, and it's not really giving us. It's not giving us any more personal information. As you mentioned. Dog kettle both. It's very simple. We do it with, a pain relief company that we have as well, you know, a suffering from pain in your neck, back, arms, knees.

We know what they're looking for. Then it just gives us a little bit more detail that the other place that we do it is we run, Quizzes on the website, and you can see this if you go to my brain. This is where we tested this strategy initially. That's gibbons.com. Because we've got a wide variety of products in there.

We've got leggings like full length, we've got Capri length leggings which are a bit shorter. We've got bike shorts, yoga shorts, yoga pants, sports bras. And then within each of those categories we've got so many different designs. Some are really bright, some are very specific themed around, I don't know, let's say Halloween or Valentine's Day or Christmas.

So what we do is we run a quiz on there, and when we run them through the quiz, we're redirect. We're directing them to the collection that we think they'll be most interested in. But for them to be able to see what their results are, they enter their email all the time during the quiz, they're getting custom parameters attached to them that feeds that thing, connect it back in via an integration into Klaviyo.

We know what products they're interested in, we've got tags on them, so that then makes our job easier when we're putting them into flows. It also makes our job easier when we're deciding to send emails out. If this person is interested in, men's leggings, which we do carry, I'm not going to send them a email about a discount on sports bras.

It's just there's not a congruency. They they've already told me what they're interested in. Well, why don't I just why don't I communicate with them about what they're interested in. The other real. The other great part about Klaviyo is all of these segmentations that we're creating all these custom parameters, we can connect it back up to meta as a custom audience.

So let's go back to the pen example. If I know someone's interested in dot products or if someone's interested in cat products, I've got two different segments. I can create a custom audience on the back end of, matter, which we're able to do within the terms of service because we own that data people have giving us consent to use that email.

We'll create a custom audience of people who are interested in dog products. Guess what? Ads we show them products they end up products they dogs. Guess what else? We don't show them cat products. So it it extends beyond what we can do that within that system, we can actually connect it up to other paid media platforms and be more targeted.

There.

Yeah. And just to get, you know, once again, the audience thinking about this. You know, Klaviyo is more than an email tool. It's your customer database, right? So people call it a CRM. I wouldn't go that far, but Klaviyo knows more about your customers than any other platform that you're dealing with, especially way more than Shopify. Because as you mentioned, the quiz app connects to Klaviyo and feeds that information in the same thing the review app it collects to collate and it connects to Klaviyo.

So Claypool is going to know everything about your customer through all your touchpoints, and you can use that information to deliver better messaging, more appropriate to their needs at the right time. Like you're saying.

you become a welcome addition to their inbox as opposed to. Well, it's every third email from them that I'm actually interested in. And that's that's the difference between I think if we were on the clock back ten years and what am I marketing was it was you just send an email out to everyone and let them know what's going on.

And you did get cut through there because there wasn't this there wasn't these a lot of e-commerce stores who were email marketing. I mean, you see Black Friday now like it is. Just brace yourself for all the emails that are coming because everyone knows how to do it. Now, the smart companies that were doing it all year, and they're doing it really segmented and they're really relevant to people.

So by the time Black Friday comes, they know that well, if I get an email from this brand, it's something I'm going to be interested in. I'm going to keep an eye on it. Or because every time I get an email from them, it's something that interests me. And I know a Black Friday is going to interest me, and there might be an offer attached to it as well.

Now, we talked about your core seven flows. We talked a little bit about additional flows. Are there any you want to give a couple of examples of let's just call them sexy flows or, you know, something unique to a brand so people can get their mind thinking about what they can do with flow automation and klaviyo for their brand.

Probably the biggest one that has the most cut through still is incorporating, whether you do it separately or whether you incorporate it into your existing flows. Get some Sims in there as well. People tend to sit down once or twice a day and check their email. There's not too many people that feel a buzz in their pocket or, you know, something pings through on their phone.

Or for me, it comes through on my watch as well. I don't ignore those. If it pops through, I tend to look at if I know it's nice to miss because it's much more personalized. So I would encourage you to include that in it. Well, that's not some, you know, fancy, sophisticated flow. It's just another medium that you can use within Klaviyo.

That is very, very, very effective because it gets good cutthroat. Good. Click right. Simplistically. A lot simplistically, if we're looking at other flows that we can add in there, birthday flows work great. Anniversary flows also work great. So, you know, an anniversary of when they made their first purchase. Birthday flows could be offering them, a particular, gift offer incentive to celebrate their birthday.

One of the biggest.

Game changes that we had when we're looking at, you know, what moved the needle with email is that we've incorporated giveaways into our strategy as a lead generation strategy. And I'm not talking about giveaways where it's like you're you're old school social media ones where it's like this post and share it with your friends and you get this.

We actually, use an app called glean, which plugs in nicely to Shopify. There's a few that that that do it claim that works really well. It gets people through on a giveaway page. On that page, we can ask them on a very step one process, their email, their name to get entry into it. We then redirect them to another page where they can get bonus entries by entering other questions or taking other actions.

What that does then is we know more about them. It tags custom parameters to them. They might get to the website, look around, do those sorts of things. What we have on the back into that is a giveaway flow. So that giveaway flow runs for the time that the giveaway is live. And it just it constantly encourages them to go back and to get more entries, because what we're doing is to get to get those bonus entries.

They have to do things like visit our schedules, visit our website, share it with a friend. Give us your SMS or your cell phone number. All of these actions fire off other pixels and scripts everywhere else. All the while we're moving them through this, flow. About the giveaway. But what that could potentially win. And do you need more entries?

Eventually we get to a point where, like, we've got a winner, genuinely have to give away a prize. There's a lot of dodgy companies that don't do that. We make sure that we do have a really good prize. It's a really good offer. We push that out. And what we do is we offer a runner up prize to all of the, the people that entered that didn't win the runners up prizes, usually an offer or a discount that's exclusive to people that entered that competition.

And that works exceptionally well for us because I think the psychology is a lot of people have already got it in their head what they're going to do with that product or service if I do win it. So when they don't win it, there's that disappointment. But there's also that potential to still get up with the offer or discount that we've got.

And, people tend to eat it up and it performs exceptionally well for us.

Yeah. You. You're answering the questions that I had, right? So you mentioned SMS and my. My next question was going to be, well, how do you collect SMS numbers? Because they have to opt in specifically to that. So then you just explain what we do, you know, these these raffles kind of thing. And you know, I've actually seen research in the past that shows, you know, the conversion rate of people signing up for like a 10% coupon versus the conversion rate of people signing up for the 1 in 1,000,000 chance to win $1,000.

Right. And the 1 in 1,000,000 chance to win $1,000 is like five x the conversion rate than a guaranteed 10% off right now kind of thing. That raffles are a huge driver of customer behavior, and that's what you're using as the carrot to get that data that you want to have that enriched profile of your customers to do all the segmentation that you're doing so well.

Yeah. And it's not just a case of an auto fill in your details and your entry in the competition. You the. We came out with the bonus entries, and those bonus entries enrich our data, but also get people to take actions that we want. Go to the website, visit this collection, visit that collection. And what we're doing is we're getting someone to do something that we want them to do, but we make it think it's their idea, which is I think the key sometimes to marketing is that we don't want to.

People aren't being told what to do. But if we say, have you thought about doing this? Because if you do this, this, this part and the decision is theirs thing, so we can say, do you want an extra five bonus? We can give you an extra five bonus points if you visit this collection page where we show all of our, Christmas themed leggings as an example.

And then I'm like, you know what? I'm I'm going to go and visit that collection post because I want the bonus points and I'm making the decision to do it. So why they go? It's enriching our data, not just for email. Then it's in reaching out dot up for every other pixel and script that's firing on the back end.

It does enrich the data and about which is great custom audiences segmenting them out. It's this full ecosystem, this omni channel presence that we have that it's not emails. Let's collect emails for email. Let's find matter and submit. And you know, they've all got to work together and incentivizing people to take certain actions and have them think that it's their decision to make whilst whilst they're doing what we're asking them to do.

That is the perfect win for everyone. And that then also gets rid of a lot of the, I guess, freebie seekers as well, because it's not just a matter of doing the automated filling your details and wait to see if you get an email at the back end. We encourage you to become part of the brain during that flow.

We educate you about the brain. If you're not interested in the brain, you're not going to take all these extra actions. More than likely, it's not to say there aren't freebies because it's still coming to the systems, but eventually that one that will sell for to themselves out of those systems as well, by unsubscribing or becoming disengaged. And we just don't send them anything anymore.

Yeah. And to just say what you just said in a different way. Because I really want the audience to think about what? What I'm taking away from you. Right? Which is what always impresses me about sophisticated brands is how well they know their customers. Right? And they do that in a whole bunch of different ways. And what you're doing is not just sending emails.

You're building the knowledge base of the audience through a whole bunch of different methods, and then using that to send email and other marketing efforts that you're doing. But it's really the customer knowledge that you're gaining that makes it a more powerful process.

I look, it's it's beneficial to us as well in terms of it's extremely beneficial to the brain because the brain owns that data, whether we're working with them or not. The brain owns that data. But as someone who's engaged to do our very best for a brain and to get them the best results we can, knowing, knowing more and more and more about these prospects will lead.

It makes our job a lot easier. We're not guessing. We're not saying, well, this should work. We're saying, well, this person is interested in this. This is the action they've taken. Let's send them an email about that, because we know exactly what they're interested in. What stage of this maybe consideration journey they're at. And that's, that's it's so much more specific and it's so much more valuable to a brain to be able to communicate in that way than it is just sending out 100,000 emails to everyone.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it just. It just reinforces what you're talking about. This whole, you know, really knowing the customer game, the right time, the right place, the right message. You know, you're just it seems like you're consistently doing that, which is awesome. So let's get off of flows and let's move on to campaigns.

And let's just pull up a random let's pull up Valentine's and next holiday as we're recording this in January, how would you work with a client to structure a Valentine's campaign?

Ultimately, we want the campaign to last more than a day, so there's two things to consider it. Does the brand offer a product or service? That would be a good gift for Valentine's Day? The second is, we just going to use the event of Valentine's Day as a reason to brand email creative and make an offer so that that's then the two points of difference.

If it is, it needs to be gifted. Well, then we need to sit down and have a chat with the brand owner and say, well, how long? What's the cutoff for this? How long do we have to promote this? Until we have to stop because we can't guarantee delivery in time as a gift for Valentine's Day? From there we're like, okay, so what gifts do we have?

What's our target audience? If this particular product, what's the target audience for that? And we can go through and look at the data and we can come up with a schedule. Let's say you've got ten days prior to Valentine's Day that allows plenty of time for the product to get delivered. We can even segment it by areas they might.

As an example with me, once we produce manufacturing shift in the US, we can get a product to someone in the US within five working days. To Europe takes us a little bit longer to Australia, takes us about two weeks. So we can segment those different people out based on where they're located, about when we can send these emails out to them and we can stagger that based on those geo locations.

But fundamentally, we'll come up with a plan and we'll say radio the these are the these are the products that we're going to promote. Is there an offer in there? Yes. No. And we will work out how many email campaigns we're going to send it to. We're going to send it to. So there's no one hard and fast rule.

We're going to consider things like how how how large this list has segment is this how much data we have on these profiles within this list. We then have to also consider things along the lines of, well, how much? How many emails of this is this list used to getting? Because we don't want to go from being a brand that, is sending one campaign away as we do with some of our brands, with a lot of automated flows in the back end, to all of a sudden we're sending two emails a day, seven days a week.

We're going to get a lot of negative metrics. Then we're going to get a lot of unsubscribes. We're going to get a lot marked as spam, which is really detrimental to the brains of the brand. If the people haven't been trying to receive consistent emails from you, we're going to increase the volume because we've got something to tell you about.

But it's it's going to differ from brand to brain. If we then look at the alternative when we're looking at a promo running up until and including Valentine's Day, I like to build up that. We've got something coming. Check your email list. We've got a special Valentine's Day offer for you, and we'll theme everything around that Valentine's Day.

I like to run countdown timers for when there's cut offs that could be both for shipping and for the offer expiring, to create a bit of urgency in the Or. If we only have a certain amount of products, we can actually say how many of those are left, create some scarcity. I don't like to extend offers beyond where we're saying that's probably that's a I don't know if it's an ethical thing, but it's it's something that I think if we're going to create a long term relationship with these potential customers or late or, or existing customers, we need to be true to our word.

So if we say, hey, you can get 20% off up until midnight on is a February 14th of Valentine's Day. I better check about that. But February 14th on Valentine's Day, you've got till midnight. Well, you need to make sure that that offer turns off thing because all you're doing is trying to create false urgency or false scarcity that the offer when if they log in on the 15th 16th, that off is still valid and active.

Well, the next time you come to and say with the countdown timer, time's ticking, you've only got three hours left, they're going to get it doesn't matter in the next two days. I'll still have it on anyhow. So if you're planning to save for future campaigns as well.

if you would. Can you give me a couple of best practices for offers? Right. Because, you know, there's a thousand different options brands can do. You've probably got some, you know, best practices that you prefer. You know, get some store and or some guidance on how they should be thinking about offers.

Okay. It depends on margins with the brand. It depends on what they've offered previously. We don't want to have an underwhelming offer if, Christmas they had, let's say, 50% off and you come in and Valentine's Day with 5% off this, there's too big a gap there.

So we need to look at historically what's worked for them. We do like to reframe what will effectively be the same offer and, and split test to see which works. As an example, let's say what I'm going to offer for my brand 25% off all orders. Great. Let's put 25% up. But what we're also going to do is we're going to run a split, test it.

We're going to say buy one, get the second on 50% off. My my prices are very similar. So effectively you're going to get a 25% off. And it's interesting to see the psychology of how people respond. But some say 25% off works better. Some say, well, I'm going to buy I want to get 125% off. I don't like to I do like to have a dollar amount off at times as well, just to see how that plays out with the brand.

And again, this is, you know, there's such a wide range of offers and, incentives out there that you can use. You really need to test what works well for the brand. As an example, we ran an offer we and this is for that machinery company. And they're a very heavy it's a heavy item to, to ship.

But we offered them 10% off and we split test that against free shipping. I thought for sure the 10% off would win tonight. Thousand dollars for a 10% off your $900 off shipping cost about 200. The free shipping won by a landslide. So even though we're offering more monetary value off the psychology of will, how much is it going to cost to ship this heavy piece of machinery?

They went for the free shipping won by landslide and I, I thought if I had to put money down or not, I would have said that the discount would have worked better. But we needed to test to see what worked.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, back in 2004, I worked for Amazon shopping. And this is going to sound like no dollar today. But back then, this was revolutionary. And we figured out that the free shipping was so important. We added a toggle to our filters for free shipping. And we were like one of the first places in the world to do that.

And because we had seen that free shipping drove so much behavior over sale prices kind of thing, and it's just that it's that psychology of human beings who are emotional creatures. They're not logical and rational. You have to understand how to tap into those emotions and and leverage those best practices.

Yeah. And I think the fact that it's. It's free people got, or complimentary, they're like, okay, I'll take that. And then there's probably a percentage of us that struggle with maths and they're like, I can't work that out. Like, he's 12.5% off. I don't know what that is. I'm going to take the free option.

So on the offer side of things for campaigns, because I totally agree with you. It totally depends on every single brand I have found with my brands. What's working well for us, right. For the brands, not for the customer as much, but for the brands is things like free gift with purchase or, you know, hitting a threshold and then getting the discount kind of stuff.

yeah. Things that can increase that average order value is grown. Free gift with purchase is a good one. Many stocks, especially with seasonal products. If you're stuck with a product, you got too much stuff there. Product that you know is going to be going out of season. That's a good time to offer it as a free gift purchase because there's no you don't just have to write it off and it's not a loss, or you have to hold onto that stuff until the next time it gets cold, warm, or whatever it might be.

You know, it might be seasonally themed, like Christmas or Easter or whatever it might be. But yeah, it's a good time to push those little extras. The other thing with gift with purchase is it's, it's a it's good with those products that have a very high perceived value, but they don't cost you much as a brand to have.

So it could be a branded, let's say you're in the health space, it could be a branded protein shake or something like that. The perceived value of that could be $20. The reality is about only cost you a dollar. So it's probably a bit extreme, but you get the idea. You're giving something away for a very low price point, but the perceived value of that value for that customer is a lot higher than it actually costs you.

So it works out really well, especially when you've got complementary products that you can do that with.

Yeah. We've done a lot with my brands. With merch. Right? Like. Like you said, the shaker. We do tee shirts. We do custom printing of t shirts for that event with the brand on it, because then that person becomes an evangelist for your brand. And all that word of mouth kind of benefits. And people love those. Right.

exactly. They join the tribe. It's great.

We have a lot of clients who don't sell t shirts, but we give free, free t shirts away in the campaigns that are relevant to you know, their ecosystem.

Perfect.

So we talked a little bit about, flows. You talked a little about campaigns. What else are we not talking about in in email that we should be covering.

Look, I think fundamentally how you're getting those leads in and at its core level, I see it done really poorly. Lot ball up a lot of brains for. I'll just have a pop up or a sign up form this. Like how you get 10% off your email and that's nice, but everyone does it and brains tend to turn them on to maybe five years.

And you like that wondering why they've got like a submit rate of under 1%. Ultimately, we want to be can you submit rates for around 3%, which means that three in every hundred people that come to the website sign up instead of one in every hundred, and you can see how that can compound really quickly, especially as you scale your paid traffic or paid media.

You can capture more leads that way. I would suggest split testing a lot of things. Mystery discounts we find work really well at the moment. So you don't know what you're getting until you actually sign up. That increases the conversion rates.

I. I hate those when you say that. It makes me cringe. I get it, it works. But from a brand standpoint, that one. That one makes me cringe.

Yeah, but it works. And we just need to test and, another one that works really well for us is we call them binary. Yes or no. Sign up form. So, do you want a discount tonight? Do you want today's discount? Do you want do you want to receive 10% off today? Whatever it might be, I don't know, whatever the offer is.

Say, but we put a binary radio buttons on there, yes or no. And the idea is to get them to say yes. They want the discount. Then the next stage is they get to their email and then they submit it. Then we can have another step in there. Which would you like a bonus discount if you provide us with your estimates, then we say, okay, we've just sent it to you and away they go.

But we get him into that stage of saying yes to start with, instead of just clicking and shutting it down. Otherwise that work other things with it is test the format that it comes out. It is it a pop up? Is it a full page? Is it slide out? And also keep in mind a desktop experience is very different to a mobile.

On a mobile, what works on a desktop might be really super annoying on a mobile, mobile device, so we tend to split those out as well. So we'll have a mobile only, sign up form, and we'll have a desktop on this on a phone because they behave very differently. We do find the optimum rates on mobile are a lot better.

Than desktop just across the board. But it doesn't mean that we can't improve the way that they appear on both.

Do you ever do, like a free digital gift as an incentive for signups?

Sometimes. And that's always part of our testing process. We'll have everything from, you know, do you want to join? Do you want to join a giveaway to a free gift to you for purchase? Mystery discount, standard discounts. We will test everything, and we continue to test. And that's probably okay as well, is that it's not like for one brand, one thing works.

And then we'll roll it out to all the other set of work and just leave it at that. Like we run every month. We'll run another test, we run a 30 day test, or until we've got enough statistically significant data to say, well, this one's definitely the winner. But every as a rule, we said projects that every month we're going to split test something on those signup forms, because the more leads we can get through the traffic that they already have coming in, the better we can perform, because we've got more data, we've got more segmentation, we've got more custom audiences.

We can put them into different flows because we know more about them.

If you have a good email system. Right. With your flows and your, campaigns, when someone comes to your site, capturing the emails is so much money because, you know, you're going to monetize it down the road, or, you know, there's the whatever, you know, percentage of them are going to monetize, but you've got that automatic communication process set up.

You want to engage them in that all that work you've set up, you want to amortize that across more people.

Yeah, exactly. And remember what we touched on earlier as well is that it's not just the email, it's that that data is then used across all of your other networks as well. So creating lookalike audiences in creating customer needs is pushing that audience across to your Google advertising. You can manually export them, an import them into so many different paid advertising platforms to give that system a better understanding of who your customers are, what customers like different things, what customers have bought from different collections of different products, what customers have obtained in the car, all of these different metrics that we can not just keep within the Klaviyo ecosystem, we can push them out,

you know, brand wide across all of their marketing efforts. It's it's so much more than just email marketing. Fundamentally, the more data we can put into the system, the better results we're going to get out for people.

It makes total sense. Now, let's talk a little bit about, you know, a couple different sizes of brands and how much effort they should be putting in email. So let's just say a brand that's making, you know, $10,000 a month. How many campaigns should they be doing? You know what I'm what I want to lead up to is people understanding how much work it takes to do this, and how they should allocate resources towards it.

Yeah. So it's a good question. And again, it's going to come down to it depends. So if you're making $10,000 a month, I would probably not look so much at the revenue. But I would look at the size of the list and how much data you have on that list. So you can you might be able to send out four emails a week and you think, oh God, that's a lot.

But the reality is they might be four different emails to four different segments of your audience that are very or very specific. And you can see that effort reward, equation very, very quickly and clearly. You can see the attribution to those campaigns that you're pushing out very, very quickly. So you can see where you should be concentrating your efforts in not having to pay to send to those people.

There is a subscription fee, obviously, with Clive you have, but it's not every time you send an email there is a cost associated with it. You're paying a monthly subscription to pay for it, so you might as well utilize the emails that you have at your disposal, and you can start to see what works really well. Or if I send one email away to everyone, this is the result I get.

What if I split that up into let's go back to the pitch scenario. Why don't I split that up into two emails awake? One two people that have interesting dogs on the table have an interesting cat, and let's see the results so we can get back there. All right, well the dogs one didn't do very well, but the cats one did well.

So we're going to stick with one email with the dogs. Why don't we try to emails for the cat list. Look, the segment of people that like cats and then you can see that evolution there of how it works. Again, not a concrete answer. As with everything online, there's no one way to do anything. Well, not that I know of any here.

Yeah. No. It. Yeah. I don't expect a precise answer. In any case, I totally agree with you. It always depends, right? That's always the answer. But I like giving people a little bit of context. And you're doing that right? What I'm wondering is. So you do step back right. Your email process is fairly sophisticated. More than fairly sophisticated.

Right? I'm struggling to see a store doing that themselves, unless they're a very large brand with a dedicated team doing that for them. Not just one individual, but like a team. Right. To, you know. So the way I think about it is, you know, when a brand starts out, they're going to do their own email most likely. Like most, you know, small brands are doing things on their own.

There's gonna be a point where they outsource it to get that expertise, and then there's gonna be a point where they're so big they bring that back in-house again, because they're just going to take that over themselves. And I'm wondering, where do you think those thresholds are for a brand?

It needs to come down to the cost of that agency. So if you're going to pay someone to do it for you, whether it's an agency or a freelancer, you need to look at that equation of the average being about 30% of your revenue is going to be what contributed for me in my marketing. Then if you look at you taking a at knowing your numbers, take out your cost of goods.

So if you're only generating $10,000 a month, we add an extra $3,000 on with email marketing. But just hypothetically, and then let's say you cost upwards of 50%, well, emails only adding in an extra $1,500 back into your pocket if the agency costs you $3,000 a month, well, then it's not worth it. It doesn't make fiscal sense to create an extra $1,500 in revenue after cost of goods, but it's going to cost you $3,000.

It doesn't make sense if you're looking at it and you're making $100,000 a month, and it's going to add another $30,000 in revenue, which in turns an extra $15,000 in profit a month for you. And the agency is going to cost you $3,000. That makes much more sense, because a good email marketer will be able to push it even further for you and do things like we've talked about together today to enhance other media channels that you have.

So it'll come down to the the economics of it for you. I would, however, encourage brands to be involved in the process themselves. To start with, I would say have a go. And what I mean by that is try and understand, have a basic understanding of the system before you outsource anything. I like to have an understanding of something before I pay someone else to do it, because I like to have an idea of I how much time I'm going to be saving by bringing someone else to do it, be how complicated the task is.

So I've got realistic expectations about what they can and can't do, and see if they're telling me something about a problem or a barrier they're facing. I need to have some understanding of the system to be able to intelligently converse with them about it. So I would suggest start yourself. There's plenty of resources out there on a podcast like this that we can you can listen to, and you get some ideas and concepts around, what I would suggest is doing that, starting a little bit yourself, being really involved.

If you do bring someone on, making sure it makes fiscal sense to you. So if we operate on knowing your numbers, okay, we can add 30% in. We're going to lose 50% of that cost of goods, whatever it might be. The agency or the freelance is going to cost this much. Does that make sense? If it's any way of not making your profit, the answer's no.

If it's breakeven, I would say the answer is no. You'd want it if you're going to invest in someone else to help you with your brand, you need it needs to be. I need to be saving you time and be making you more money.

More money at the profit level is what you're saying.

Correct.

And I would if I someone come to me and they're making $10,000 a month and I want an agency to run an email. And I had this conversation with them a lot. Right. I think we can confidently say we probably get you an extra 30%. What? Your cost of goods. It's half. It's not worth having an agency for you.

You're not ready. I can help you. Like I can punch in the wrong directions for a few things, but I think it's something that you should manage yourself until such time as it's going to make sense to you, and it's going to actually bring more money into you. Because at the end of it, I know you're probably much the same like we were.

Well, we all start out as small business owners ourselves. Whether it's you freelancing or we get your own brand, whatever it might be. I don't want to be an agency that comes along and put your hand out at the end of the month to take money off a small business when you know in good faith that your cost is going to outweigh the benefit that they're getting from you.

So yeah, I wouldn't sit right in many hands. So I would turn around and say, I think you really need to do this yourself. We'll get someone who has to have a look at it and instead just provide them a little bit of guidance in that regard. I guess it comes back to you when they do grow and they do become successful.

I come back to the honest people who gave them a bit of help without an expectation of anything, and in fact, they actually turned away business that time because I say it's not. It doesn't make sense right now for you to do this. They trust you. They like you. I know you're honest and and that's something that I think across the internet, across the business world, but especially on the internet.

If you can gain someone's trust through integrity and ethics, then it's a much easier proposition to do business with them. It's something you can't hide, something you can't fake. Once you lose it, you lost it.

I totally agree. And, you know, as a, you know, I'm a one person agency, and it's all about the relationship with, you know, my clients kind of thing, which is a pure joy, which is why I only work with small stores. Because it is. It is more of a of a relationship with a human being as opposed to corporate entities and process and red tape.

And it's really nice.

team and you're helping them out. And you celebrate the wins with them. And when things aren't going great, you're like, right, well, how do we fix this? This isn't a corporate entity that can just absorb losses. Like, you know, you're invested in it. You want to make it work for them.

Yep. Now let's one more question on this. And then and then we'll start closing up. Let's say you're $1 million, month brand. And you're doing email marketing. Forget all the margins and stuff like that for a second. I just want people to understand how much effort this takes. Is that a full human body? Is it three people doing it?

Like, how much human capital are you putting behind that ongoing email process for your million dollar a month brand?

Look, it's going to be it's going to be a full time role. But I wouldn't suggest that one person does all of that. I would. We're very big on peer reviewing internally with our with our teams. And we're very big on getting people to do what they good at. Some people are very good at data. Some people are very good at what we'll call the plumbing or the back end build outs of the, the, the email marketing system.

And some people are very good at creative. Some people are very good at copy. So we like to have small teams operating within the brands, especially with the larger ones, because I know I'm not very good at creative, I'm not very good at design. So we've got a good designer, we've got someone who does copy. We always have someone peer reviewing because if you're at that scale or whenever you don't want to send out something that's got spelling mistakes, the grammar is terrible.

The layouts crap. You want to make sure that what you send out is good quality. So we peer review everything internally before it goes out. So the answer is at that scale, it would be a full time round, but I would chalk that role up into much smaller roles. One, to leverage people's expertise and what they're passionate about and to to have that quality control in there as well.

Because we're going client facing we're putting something out this representing the brand. We don't want Arizona.

Yeah. And, you know, just to get people thinking about it, like $1 million a month. You know, 30% of that is from email. That's $300,000 a month. Anybody's going to put a full time head behind, you know, a $300,000, you know, revenue stream. So, you know, the return on investment is really good. It takes a lot of human capital to make it happen, but it is positive ROI.

At ease. And we're jumping to that extreme into the equation there. But it's it's definitely where your brains can end up and why some brands like us. Well, let's circle back to the beginning of the call where you said, you know, there's brands that don't have it doesn't work for everyone. And I know, in fact, I would say do not run paid traffic until you have at least your automation system built out on the back end of, your email marketing platform in Klaviyo, even if you have zero subscribers to start with.

Because if you try to tap on with paid media, it's like you're pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. If you don't have a backend system set up, because as soon as if you have the backend system set up, as soon as someone falls through the cracks and doesn't convert on that first or second touchpoint, you've got to pay media.

Your email marketing system is going to start firing and beginning to go into action and start messaging those people. So you will start to build. You don't wait until you spending, a ridiculous amount of money go, oh, maybe we should try my marketing as well. I would suggest setting it up because it doesn't cost much to get it set up.

It's time. The subscription plan for Klaviyo, I think, starts at like $20 a month. And if you've got zero subscribers, have it set up and ready to go, and you upgrade your plan and you upgrade everything as you start to gain more leads,

Yep. Yeah. It's a nice. It grows with you. Your expenses grows as your revenue grows. And I call it operationalizing a business. You don't want to be investing too much money. That isn't going to return yet.

So if people want to outsource this to to elite brands, how would they reach out and contact you guys?

Look, the best thing to do would just be go to our website. Elite brand small. That's elite eight brand desktop allergy. On there you can see case studies that we have. You can see clients we've worked with. And there is a contact us form there. We do offer free audits of complimentary audits, for brands so that we can actually see how can you actually benefit from me in my marketing.

And is it something that you should consider working with us with and that that that gives you a really good health check of your email marketing system? And I encourage people to do that. In fact, even if someone insists on working with us, which is very flattering, we will always still do the audit so that we've got a good picture of where we can help them, where we can help them, and and what direction we think we can take them in.

No. That's really nice that you offer the audit. That's awesome. And then. So thanks for your time and expertise on this today. Do you have any closing word of wisdom for store brands around email marketing?

And it goes for pretty much everything that we do online or in the real world is that perfect? Is the enemy of done. So just get started. If you get started you can continue to refine it and make it better. If you're waiting for it to be perfect, you will still be sitting here listening to this podcast a year, ten years time and you will not have done anything.

Just get started. I'm not saying push absolute garbage out there. You know you're not going to push garbage out. There is a system going to be perfect. No. Is it going to be better than not doing it at all? Definitely.

Sage advice. Thanks for your time today, Dan.

No worries. Much appreciate it, made.