Nathan Bush: Where do you see the future for these two?
Jason Anderson: They've been around for a long time and in software that means a lot. That increase in conversion rate coupled with that decrease in margin forfeit actually ends up with a lot of money on the bottom line. That Automation series currently has, I guess, an average conversion rate of about 19%.
Nathan Bush: You have just made a silly question. Really sensible. Well done.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of E Commerc. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello everyone and welcome to episode four of Add to Cart.
Nathan Bush: My name is Nathan Bush from e
Nathan Bush: commerce consultancy twelve High. Joining me today will be Jason Anderson from Email Marketing Agency and Zen that's A N D Z e n. He joins us to talk everything about email marketing automation. We're going to cover which email marketing platforms you should be considering for your e commerce business, what kind of scenarios or user flows you should think about when starting your automation journeys and then how to get started. Where do you start in setting up something that's really intelligent and lifts your ROI significantly by using email? All that is really practical and some great expert tips from Jason. But before we get into that, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has rated and reviewed us. We're up to 4.9 out of 5 out of 9 ratings on Apple itunes. That's amazing. Knowing the level of professionalism from myself, I put it all down to our producer Gil, who's getting us those results. One piece of feedback, which I thought was great, that I just want to discuss was from Renz, who said it's a great e commerce podcast, but he'd love to see it being less Shopify centric. So obviously we have partners, Shopify plus who sponsor this and make sure that
Nathan Bush: we can bring you this podcast.
Nathan Bush: But in no way are we just a Shopify podcast. We know that they make up a huge part of the e commerce ecosystem and are really important and doing some really exciting things, but we do intend on going bigger and broader. Renz, if that's just a way of you saying that you want less Josh Newport on the show, I think that's common and I don't hold that against you, but I think Josh may even be back. So hold tight. But yes, friends, we aim to give you a lot broader perspective than just Shopify in the coming episodes. So, as I said, thanks to Shopify plus for partnering with us to deliver this podcast. Let's get into today's episode which is all about email automation. So bringing it to us is Jason from Anzan. Hello, Jason. Thanks for joining us.
Nathan Bush: No worries.
Jason Anderson: Thanks Nathan. Glad to be here.
Nathan Bush: Pleasure. And let's get straight into it.
Nathan Bush: Today we're going to be talking about email automation. So it's an area that I know that you guys have been in for a long time. You specialize in it long before a lot of the latest e commerce hype. Can you give us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your organization?
Jason Anderson: Yeah, for sure. So my name is Jason Anderson. I'm the general manager at Anzen. Anzen is a email marketing and marketing automation specialist agency and we actually specialize in marketing automation for E commerce. So our background is over about 10, 15 years. We were actually the Australian office of an email marketing Software that's about 20 years old. And when that software was acquired, it was eventually acquired by GoDaddy. We ended up spinning off from the Australian team and creating Anzen and I guess offering consulting for marketing automation. And we started off very much the B2B space. But then as e commerce has grown in Australia over the last five to 10 years, we specialized more and more until today. Now where we've got offices around the world and we really do specialize in marketing automation for E commerce.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. So when clients come into your office and they go, jason, we need help with marketing automation or email automation. Do you find that most people understand what email automation is?
Jason Anderson: Yeah, actually a lot of people, when they come to us, you know, they're probably doing a big migration or maybe moving say from Shopify to Shopify plus, or maybe from Magento one to Magento two. So, you know, they're an established brand. They have grown up on really strong top of funnel acquisition strategies. But they're at that point in their brand maturity where they're looking at their brand thinking we really need to maximize our existing customers. We really need to get the most out of all of those ad dollars that we spent at the top of the funnel to really create long lasting relationships with our customers and not just have lots of first purchases, but lots of really strong customers with a really great lifetime value.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Awesome. And so do you see where's your view on the difference between email automation and marketing automation? Because they both get thrown around a lot, right?
Jason Anderson: Yeah, 100%. So we see them obviously as going hand in hand, but really when we talk about email automation, we're talking about the fundamentals of automating and email sends. But when we talk about marketing automation, for us, what we're talking about there more is really the automation, the automatic transfer of data. So a really simple example is the automatic process of when someone is on your website and they're looking at a specific product and we're tracking that, and if they place an order, having that data automatically transfer through to your email marketing software, even through Facebook, into Google for maybe your ad funnels and things like that, the actual automated process of that data moving around. And then when we're talking about email automation or even advertising or automation, we're talking about really that specific niche delivery of that exact message.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, because it can be really confusing, right, because there's a lot of platforms out there that go, we're the marketing platform and you look on their website and it's full of jargon and you go, what are you? Are you a CRM? Are you an email blaster? Are you intelligence agency?
Jason Anderson: It's all kind of completely. Yeah, lots of, you know, we even see lots of companies will say, yeah, we're a marketing automation agency. But yeah, there might be a dev studio that just builds APIs for things right through to people like us, you know, and certainly that's part of our business. We have devs and we do work with APIs. But you know, really what we are is a marketing agency and we are looking at email specifically as a nation, how we can use all those philosophies and tenants of marketing and apply them really strategically in email.
Nathan Bush: Awesome, awesome. So you touched before on some of the journeys and we might come back and talk in detail around if we're starting email automation, what journeys should we prioritize? Before we do though, let's, let's get in the headspace of some brands that people might know about. What are the kind of top platforms that you see used for email automation?
Jason Anderson: So these days it depends a lot on your cms. So you know, what are you using for your actual e commerce site? We're definitely starting to see more and more lines being drawn between platforms where they're have a really specialist relationship with maybe one or two cms which really allows them to get that extra layer of data that can give you that cut through, which is maybe the difference between 5% or 10% conversion rate. So the main platforms that we're seeing these days that are being used are really Klaviyo and Dot Digital. Those two platforms I think have the most reach in terms of being affordable but also being able to generate a really, really high roi. They're generally attainable at a pretty small to medium stage for a lot of E commerce stores. And they've got a feature set that allows you to scale really right up until you're enterprise. And we often find that those two platforms really suit almost everybody's needs. And even between the two of them they can be quite comparable. Really what you're looking at when you're picking between the two is what you're looking for in a platform. Digital, a little bit more advanced, more features, probably has a lot more things in one place. Whereas Klaviyo much more about messaging. So you're really focused on email. They've just launched sms, very much focused on that rather than having necessarily sort of the deeper integrations with your ad platforms. But certainly as a tool much simpler to use than digital because it is so much more focused. And so it probably has its maybe easier to grasp if you're a merchant who's still doing a lot on their own or you've got maybe just that one marketing manager in your team and you need them to be really efficient, that can be a better option. Whereas digital, if you've got a team or if you're using an agency that you want to arm them with a really powerful technical platform that they then have the skills to go and implement, that can be a better option. But really for the two of those, you can start on those even if you're on a basic Shopify plan and you can scale all the way up to plus on Magento2.digital comes pre installed Magenta now I believe as well. So both of those platforms are really great. And then of course you've got your ones that have been around forever like mailchimp, which these days obviously they've had the big breakup with Shopify which we might talk about later but you know, probably much more on the entry level side. And then you've got other ones that are maybe your medium to bigger size like Amarsys as well.
Nathan Bush: Because I saw Amarsys just won or
Nathan Bush: they were just ranked in the Gartner quadrant right up high for dedicated email or independent email platforms, they seem to own that space really well. Where they're out there, they're going we just do this and we do it really well.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, yeah, they're definitely been around for a long time and in software that means a lot. You've had developers that have been there for a long time. It gives you a Lot of time to develop your platform and develop really great features. But I would say for something like a Masters, you know, it's probably. It can be on the higher level for some people to try and reach for. And again, being a bit more advanced, it can sometimes be a little bit more technical. So I think, you know, depending on it really comes down to what type of merchant you are, what maybe your team makeup is, who you're working with to make a decision. But I would certainly say for us, the two platforms that we've seen really outshining when it comes to the level of support they're giving their customers, the rate at which they're releasing new features, the integrations that they're building, and really, they're having their ear to the ground in terms of what the market needs and responding quickly. Klavion Digital have been doing for us.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. I just worked with a client who was going through a similar exercise, and we did an RFP with them. And in the requirements, both of those, Klaviyo and Digital came out very similar.
Nathan Bush: In the end, it came down to
Nathan Bush: Digital won the business because of a better support model. Because they were so similar for how it fit their businesses, they kind of went well. These guys are on the ground for us in our area, and we feel that we'll get that input because it's so important for us to get the intelligence around it, not just the technology, but, like, input for our team on how to use this well. And we felt that they would do it completely.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. And it's a big advantage. You know, have two offices here. They've got an office in Singapore, they've got an office in London. You know, they've got a really good spread around the world in terms of support hours and having dedicated teams. And that means a lot for a lot of people. Completely understandably. Right.
Nathan Bush: Yep. So what about. Let's. We kind of touched on it last time in the last podcast with Josh Newport. The Shopify and the mailchimp breakup, which seemed to come out of the blue because I think. Exactly.
Nathan Bush: I think anyone who kind of grew
Nathan Bush: up with the digital era in the early 2000s probably got on Mailchimp as one of the early ones because it was so easy to use, grew up
Nathan Bush: with it, knew it, and they're kind
Nathan Bush: of going on their own journey now.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, very much.
Nathan Bush: Where do you see the future for these two?
Jason Anderson: It's interesting, I think, look, mailchimp, I think, is doing something pretty clever in their space, but I think they're probably moving towards Isolating themselves a bit. And I don't think they have a problem with that. I think where mailchimp sees their future really is, if you can imagine, we've got things like Salesforce, Commerce, cloud, right? You know, these all in one big enterprise platforms. Adobe have theirs as well, Oracle has theirs. I think mailchimp have really done a good job of identifying at the bottom end of the market. There is nothing like that. And if you're a merchant trying to get started today, the onus is on you to learn how to use Shopify, learn how to use maybe Klaviyo or something, you know, learn how to use Facebook and all these platforms just to get your brand started. And I think they've identified that there's a niche that available for some someone to come in and offer a single source set of tools for you to be able to get started really quickly. That's going to have a lot of appeal to a lot of people I think. But you know, the drawback of that is if you get started on a platform like that that's catering to that end of the market, you really have to ask yourself early, is that going to trap you or you know, what is it going to mean if you scale and you quickly outgrow this suite of tools, where is that going to leave you? But having said that, you know, I think there's absolutely a place in the market for it, you know, for people that are just testing out a brand. You know, these mom and dad businesses that we see that have an idea and they want to give it a go. I think melchream have done a good job of creating a product that can cater to that tester, you know, that very early stage market. My big fear for someone like them is that while they're putting a lot of dev resource and a lot of their capital into developing all of those tools, the thing that they're really good at, which is email and the automations and everything they have, is the development on that side of the platform going to continue and at what rate and are we going to see it improve or is that going to maybe sit where it is as they develop out these other tools? Because it is a great platform but it really lacks a lot of the functionality that platforms like Klaviyo do. And when you're talking about the price gap, I've never seen an instance where someone's moved from mailchimp to Klaviyo, started paying more, started using those more advanced features and not made an ROI that completely justifies the migration. So I think that's the challenge. I think mailchimp are doing something very smart and I think they're going to cater very, very well for the market that they're going after. But I think that they're going to sit very much in their own spaces. Product offering.
Nathan Bush: Can you give us some examples around where you see people move from a mailchimp into a Klaviyo or a Dot digital? And you talked about that increased roi. What are the specifics around that that really lead to that roi?
Jason Anderson: Yeah, so there are some really simple examples, to be honest. And actually we've had merchants before who have made the ROI back entirely on just a single flow. And this is something that we'll talk about later. But discounting is obviously very common in E commerce. Right. We talk a lot about if you're going to build an abandoned cart flow, at what point might you offer an incentive? A lot of people that we see on mailchimp, they'll set up the standard three stage flow that only has a sort of a relative amount of intelligence in it. And that sort of leads to them saying, well, at the point of email three, we're going to put 10% off in there. But it's very easily abused. Once people figure out the first time that they get that they can just abandon their card every time and they're going to get that email every time. When you use something like Klaviyo, it's really one step to add something in that says if they've ever placed an order before, don't send them the email with the discount. And then very quickly you plug that hole in your brand and you're offering that incentive to get people over the line the first time. And the people that don't get over the line, you might just send them a basic email that says, hey, don't forget this is your card's going to expire and then they're more likely to come back and check out at a full price. Or obviously you can get more intelligent with it.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Jason Anderson: You know something that we often do. If they're coming back for a second order, we might look at their cart value as well and have another split and say, well, if their car value is enough to get free shipping, why don't we send them an email to say hey, you qualified for free shipping. And if not, why don't we send them an email and say, hey, you're only X dollars away from free shipping. So with just that tiny, tiny little addition and feature set we've had people Take their abandoned cart flow where maybe by changing the language that they've used in the emails based on where the customer is in their journey stage, they might go from converting at say 8 or 9% up to 15%. But also a big fraction of that 8 odd percent increase is now checking out at 100% margin instead of only 90% margin. So you can imagine that increase in conversion rate coupled with that decrease in margin forfeit actually ends up with a lot of money on the bottom line.
Nathan Bush: And that's a big difference I suppose between a platform that is built like mailchimp, that is built for opens and reach versus something that's built for retail and E commerce. Like.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely.
Nathan Bush: Cool.
Nathan Bush: All right, so let's get into some
Nathan Bush: of those journeys because I know this is something that you guys saw specialize in. So if it comes to you and goes, hey Jason, we're ready to do some email automation. We've just bought the best Whiz Bang version of Klaviyo Digital. Where do we get started? Where do you guys look for the journeys that you've got to create?
Jason Anderson: So early on there's really three key stages that we look at. The first is obviously capturing data in that nurture series. So what are we going to do to make sure that we're getting subscribers and then once we've got them, how we going to nurture them towards their first purchase? So that's step one. The next thing that we'd look at is abandoned cards. So that's obviously just a huge leap for almost everybody. It's generally the highest grossing automation that they have. So very low hanging fruit. We tackle that quickly as well. Which is funny.
Nathan Bush: I've never met anyone who likes an abandoned cart email. But they work.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, yeah, they work. I've seen people with abandoned cart flows that net, you know, more than $100,000 a month. Yeah, you know, obviously that depends on the size of people that you've got abandoning cards and maybe that leads into you have a conversion problem, but still. Yeah, so those two and then the third one that we often help people with, that's one really, when we're talking about customer journey that flies under the radar is having a dedicated automation series for taking someone from their first purchase to the second purchase. It's such a crucial engagement with a customer to get that engagement right. Generally you find if you get someone from first to second, it's much more likely that you're going to get to third and fourth.
Nathan Bush: Whereas if sounding a lot like a dating analogy at the moment absolutely right.
Jason Anderson: If you can get someone onto that base. But this is the thing, like it sounds like a no brainer. Of course if someone comes back a second time, they're more likely to come back three or four. Four times. But you'd be amazed at how many people have this steep, steep drop off. You know, maybe 90% or more will check out once and never come back. And they'll put in place some like a generic repurchase automation and the stats on the surface might look good, but when you dig into it, it's actually because they've got a really good core set of returning customers that are engaging with that automation. But they've got this massive hole in people that have gone through the first time and then completely disappeared.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, gotcha.
Jason Anderson: So that's the other big one that we try and tackle. And those would be my three, I think if the match it was to say to me, I've got nothing. What first three should I look at? It'd be those three.
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Nathan Bush: On that last one, what are some of the techniques you've seen to really convert people from that first purchase to the second? Because I'm assuming the first one is done out of necessity or a price or a big discount. What are some of the techniques you've used to go to the second base?
Jason Anderson: So it can be pretty broad and usually what we do is incorporate a few things depending on the type of store. So if it's someone like say fashion, particularly if they appeal to two genders, we'll generally try and be a bit clever about how we launch into that automation. So if we identify that somebody has, let's say it's fashion. We've got an active wear client as a good example. They have men's and women activewear. We can see where they purchase a collection from. Was it from the men or women's range? So straight away at the start of that flow, we're branching people off, depending on if they purchase from men or women and if they purchase from both. Because some people buy for their partner or whatever. And then from there we've got different product recommendations throughout the flow. So we might use slightly altered language to talk about the products that we're offering. Initially, we'd usually start off with a thank you. You're trying to ingratiate people into your family and into your brand. So it can be a really strong time to give a little bit of history about the brand story, maybe talk about where the brand came from and what the brand stands for. Thank them for placing their order. From there we might look at trying to get a review for the first time. So send that off. The great thing about asking for a review is you can usually offer an incentive. So if you do have those price sensitive people, you can get a little bit of good user generated content in return for giving them an incentive. And that may then lead to a second purchase organically, which is great. The next thing that we often find can be a great thing to do is to offer an incentive for people to refer a friend. And it's really important that you're timing that email similar to your email depending on what your shipping time is. If you know that standard shipping, let's say in Australia, you know your customer's going to have it within say five days. If you time that for seven days, give them a day with the product. You know that their affinity, assuming that you've delivered on your product promise is going to be an all time high, right? They're never going to be as happy with your brand as when they've just got their product. So that's the perfect time to hit them and say, hey, do you love your product? Tell a friend about it. They'll get 10% off and you'll get 10% off immediately. People are probably thinking, particularly if it's fashion like perfect shirt to go with the skirt or the perfect jeans to go with that top. So you're getting the right message in front of them at the right time and then from there. Usually what we do and platforms like Klaviyonda Digital make this really easy is we start doing some intelligent cross selling. So both of those platforms have the ability to put a block into an email and just, you can basically say just display the top three products that they're most likely to buy based on what they purchased before. And Klaviyon Digital, their AI engines will do the math and they'll look at every customer that's ordered, what your customer has and everybody who's what else have they ordered and then drop that straight into the email for you and you can tailor that to being if it was popular in the last 30 days or the popular products that were popular all the time or whatever. So it can be really relevant, really recent and obviously mathematically or statistically going to be the most likely to convert. But it also helps your. If you imagine as a customer because you're using that data driven content, it's very likely that you're going to nail it and it's very likely that customer is going to open that email and think like, oh wow, this brand actually this is personalized, this is tailored to me. And personalization is something throughout really that post purchase that initial one. That's probably a more overarching thing is you know, even doing simple things like I mentioned before about breaking out by gender or you know, if you notice that they purchase a certain MVP product from your line, if you're tech technology company, for example, be really smart about that first interaction and try and make it as personal as possible because that's really what's going to build that relationship and push people over to the next order. And people love to love brands. You know, like there's a reason we all shop and there's a reason why most of the time you see someone walking down the street in a Nike shirt, they're also wearing Nike shoes. When people find a brand that they like, they like to be loyal, they like to feel like they're part of a community and a tribe. So you really got to be thinking about what is it in my content, in my product range, what that I can put in front of these people to make them feel like they're included and that we've got a community. The other big thing that we see working really well these days is private Facebook groups. So obviously we don't do much of the Facebook work, but we'll often build automations particularly in that first purchase training to say thanks for joining the community. We've got a private Facebook group that's only for our customers. Click the secret link, go apply to be invited. You can even put an email. We've had people will actually say we're going to double check to make sure that you're an actual customer once you request to join and once you are like, we'll approve you, and it adds that level of exclusivity. And then people feel really engaged. And then you again, you open up a new marketing channel as well to be able to communicate with them by having a private group on Facebook.
Nathan Bush: That's a really good tip. And I think I'm showing my age here, but I bought like a hose link. Like a retractable hose goes on your hair.
Jason Anderson: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: I'm like, man, I'm so old. But I bought it and I was really pumped about it. And then I got the email following saying, come join our Facebook group. And I ended up doing it. And now I'm like this member of a hose link group on Facebook where I see sprinklers and stuff all the time, and I love it. Yeah, I never thought I'd turn into that guy.
Jason Anderson: Yeah, yeah. We've got a client, Eco Modern Essentials. So they do essential oils, right? And they have blends for, like, diffusers and things like that, but they do a whole range of things with essential oils. And they have a Facebook community. And it's incredible. The people that are in that community creating their own blends with their essential oils, posting their recipes and sharing them amongst each other, they've really built. And they've done a lot to nurture that, but they built an incredible community. And that's a core part of the email strategy that we have for them, is when someone becomes a customer, really pushing them into that community to say there are people here that are as passionate as you about these products and come and find people that you can relate to.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, cool. So the two key integrations to do, a lot of the stuff that you're talking about there is obviously into product, which I'm assuming klaviyo and digital. If you're integrated through the Shopify plugin or the bigcommerce plugin or Magento plugin,
Jason Anderson: they've all got really tight native integrations, which is obviously really helpful. And this is not stuff that you need to be a developer to do. This is point and click and it'll get done for you, which is how you need it to be.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. Then the second integration is with your source of truth for your customer.
Jason Anderson: Yes.
Nathan Bush: This is, I think, probably contentious one because we've got customer data platforms making a move in the old school. We've still got CRM systems out there. Some people manage customer records within their e commerce platform. Where do you see the central source of customer. So if you want to go, I want to know which customers open what and what products they're interested in. How do you pull that together?
Jason Anderson: So it's an interesting one and I guess I think it comes back to the merchant. Like I said before, you know, if you've got a really strong bricks and mortar presence and you have, you know, you have your ERP and then you have your strong online presence and you need all of that to be syndicated somewhere so that it's all reconciled, then you probably are going to be looking at one of those bigger data platforms. But some of those have integrations as well, or at least they have APIs. And Klaviyo and Digital both have open APIs, so you can integrate that sort of stuff. We've worked with both and we've integrated a fair bit. We've done ERP integrations with both Klaviyo and Dot Digital. So it's definitely possible. We'd be selfish and say, for us, it's always great to have it in the email platform because obviously it puts a lot of data at our fingertips. But that isn't to say these days, with the way that APIs work, it's really up to you and what you're most comfortable with. Most of this stuff can be pushed around, if not live very close to. So for me, we generally like it to be an email platform, but I mean even that now, you know, Klaviyo released a feature now where they can actually push data back upstream to Shopify. So if you want to use, you keep Shopify as your central point of truth, you can have us be recording data in Klaviyo. So a really good example is if you've got a complex product range, we might sometimes do something, something with, say in your welcome email, you might say, hey, here's your 10% off email. Let's get you to the right place and put a couple of category tiles in front of you. Then whichever category tile you click on first, we'll tag you in the background and say, okay, they're probably more likely interested in this product collection. We can add that as a profile in Klaviyo and we can push that upstream to Shopify automatically. So it really comes down to your appetite.
Nathan Bush: That's a really smart way to do it. And it's like an advancement on the old when you used to sign up for an email form and it used to say, tell us what sports you're into, rugby league, netball, whatever it is. And you'd have to click dots of what you're interested in. And a lot of time what you clicked isn't actually what you're interested in, your behavior. That's it.
Jason Anderson: Exactly. And you know, we do a lot of similar stuff like that, even when it comes to data capture. Even further up the funnel. Right. We'll be looking at was the pop up on a male product page or a female product page in terms of what the collection they're looking in and we might pursue have a tag that assumes that they're probably one of those two genders based on where they signed up from. Oh yeah. If it's more collection based, which collection do they come from? So there's a lot that you can do intelligently these days, which, you know, back in the day you would have to do manually. And like you said, it can be very sketchy.
Nathan Bush: Yep, absolutely. Touch on loyalty for a second and email automation for loyalty. Where have you seen email play a critical role in loyalty programs? I'm talking about loyalty programs, not the overall concept of loyalty in terms of driving that engagement beyond just discounts for members.
Jason Anderson: Yeah. So eco is maybe a good example as well. EcoModern. So they have, they use a loyalty program and currently the data capture is really just structured around signing up. But we're looking to make a shift from that towards being much more points orientated. So. And it's actually a great way to gather data as well. So a really good example is a lot of people in the loyalty program. You know, you're sort of sacrificing saying get 10% off when you first sign up to rather be get 200 points when you first sign up. You kind of rely on the customer to do the maths and figuring out that that's going to get them a discount. But what we generally see is actually you can almost survey a customer and give them a few points that total up to that discount and get quite a lot of good information out of them to get that 10% off more than just signing up from a form. So for example, you can have that pop up, say get 200 points for signing up. When they go through and they sign up, then the next page says, great, now that you've signed up, get an extra 100 points for giving us your birthday and an extra hundred points for filling out your first name or some extra data or something like that. And if you have it very clear on the screen, that amount of points that they've got is going to total that next discount here that they look for. Yep, great. You know they're going to hand that over, they're going to get that extra discount and that's going to allow you to have a much richer engagement with the subscribers straight out of the gate, try and nurture them to their first
Nathan Bush: purchase, which is nice too, because it probably allows you to take less information upfront, knowing that you can get down the track.
Jason Anderson: Exactly. But another example, an active work client of ours, Muscle Nation. So before they launched, before they went considering doing loyalty program, we did a little trial for them where we basically created some tiers that we didn't tell anyone about. And the customer was kind of, if they spent a certain lifetime spend, they would just get hit with an email that says, hey, congratulations, you're in the secret club. And once they got in the first time, we sort of told them about the different levels and told them what they were aiming for, what discounts they'd get when they got to these new levels. But getting in in the first place was completely secret until you did it. That Automation series ultimately currently has, I guess, an average conversion rate of about 19% when people receive it, which is great. But when we actually launched it, we backdated it and launched it to existing people to introduce them into their tiers and basically say, we're launching this thing. When we launched it, it actually had a 31% conversion rate. And one of the emails in the flow actually converted at 37%.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant.
Jason Anderson: And the most interesting thing that we found when we launched the program was some of the discounts were quite heavy that we were offering. If you're in some of these top echelons of, of discount, what we saw was that even though we were giving a fixed dollar amount and people with these high coupons could have checked out and just had a completely free order, free shipping pay, nothing, just got their products for free. Almost none of them did. Almost all of them spent an equivalent amount of money, if not more, because they had that discount. So some people were getting discounts of $75 and previous to that, they would have had an average order value of about $75. They would have come to the store and spent $150 and use that $75 voucher. So they actually ordered what would have been worth $225. But they were so, I guess inspired by the discount and the loyalty that the brand was showing to them that they just went on a massive shopping spree and splurged. We did a product release about two weeks later, like a new collection launch, and a lot of people had hung onto their discounts when we did that launch, we saw people order the exact same amount that they normally would and then they just use the discount to get all those same products in a different color. Yeah, but they still went out and spent that money. They weren't just abusing the codes and abusing the discounts. Like, you know, it's easy to just assume that people are just going to take advantage, but actually what it was doing was building such brand loyalty that these people weren't thinking about it like, oh great, I'm going to get a free extra order. The way they were thinking about it was great, I should go and sell, spend some money and I can spend even more because I'm going to have this extra discount. And that's the whole point of these loyalty programs. Right. The point isn't to just necessarily give them more discounts. The point is to educate a customer to say, hey, don't just shop with us three times a year, shop with us five times a year.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And you know what I'm loving about
Nathan Bush: your approach and it's gone through the whole episode here is that you haven't had a purist view of engagement in terms of just hit them with the right content, the right story, the right time and the rest, and the rest will take care of itself. And also you haven't gone just rely on pricing and promotions to move the needle every time you've kind of used both together. And I think it's usually a really telltale sign as soon as you speak to a retailer in how they use email, whether they use it as the needle in the arm to inject sales quickly whenever they need it, or whether they see it as that long term relationship building. But you've got a nice approach that we're blending them both together.
Jason Anderson: That's right. Email is a part of your marketing ecosystem. Right. It doesn't sit on its own. And you need to be thinking about when you're doing your marketing. It's a bit of a cliche, but you need to be thinking about all of your marketing and all of your brand and the role that email plays in that. And email plays a crucial role in our opinion, really in everything. If you want to have a good social strategy, you need to have strong email strategy that is directing people there at the right time in the right place. If you want to have a strong loyalty program, if you want to be generating lots of reviews, we build integrations, even subscription platforms where we have something like Recharge integrated with Klaviyo so that we can ensure that when we're setting up Automations we're actually tracking those people that have become a subscriber and then sending them emails to thank them for becoming a subscriber. On top of also checking out. Then we might even build different segments around, you know, when we're going to run a promotional campaign we might talk to those people a little bit differently or if we have a loyalty program, we might talk about the subscription very differently and say look, if you get a subscription we'll give you double points every time your subscription order comes in and you're going to sit in the special subscriber tier where you're going to get these, this many extra points per dollar spend and things like that. So email is great because it's really the only one to one email tool other than messenger that's available and it allows you the amount of data that you can automatically pull into your email platform and drop into an email when it sends. Actually allows you to have really authentic one on one conversations with people where you can build that brand loyalty.
Nathan Bush: Yeah mate, thank you very much.
Nathan Bush: You've been so generous with your knowledge in what you give out to your clients to make it available to our audience. We've talked a lot around the different technology and especially the Dot Digital and Klaviyo platforms which is used by many E commerce retailers. Talked about some of the journeys that you would start with and then we dived into a little bit more around the strategy especially with loyalty and ongoing engagement. So hopefully there's something that everyone can take at least one or two tips out of and apply to their business.
Jason Anderson: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: But I have left the last question and probably the hardest question till last.
Jason Anderson: Sure.
Nathan Bush: What makes a good subject line?
Jason Anderson: What a question. Yeah, it's interesting the old subject line debate and I think like not to cop out a little bit but it does come down to your brand. I think these days you need to be considering when you're writing a subject line, who you're talking to and where you're talking to them in the journey. It can be really helpful to segment if you're talking about a campaign like Black Friday is coming up. Right. A really simple piece of easy advice. If you're going to send a campaign around Black Friday, go into your email platform and create two segments. One segment for people who placed an order before and one segment for people who haven't. Everyone who's placed an order before, you'll have their first name because that will have come through from your CMS integration. Put their first name in the subject line for everybody who hasn't placed an order before. Keep it simpler, keep it short, have a discount. If you want some emojis, if they fit your brand, do that. Just measure the difference even in doing that. But that's what I mean about, I guess, being intelligent about the relationship that you're having with the customer. When you're going to run a campaign like that, think about what data you can use in that subject line that's going to make the most out of it. If you launch a new collection, think about how you can pull something in. You get a lot of data when someone places an order these days. A lot of that you can pull into subject lines and preview text by using the shortcodes.
Nathan Bush: Mate, you have just made a silly question. Really sensible. Well done.
Jason Anderson: No worries. Thank you. I thought you're gonna ask me the question I always get is which day and what time is the best to send an email?
Nathan Bush: Well, I think there's a whole episode coming up on that so we'll wait.
Nathan Bush: Yeah mate, where can people find you and Anzen?
Jason Anderson: So just Google us and Zen A N D Z E N jump on the website. We've got case studies up there if you want to have a look. It's some recent client work, otherwise obviously get in contact. We do audits for free, so we'll happily just jump in for a merchant, have a look at what they've got, set up and provide some advice. And if we can work together then that's always great. And if not, we've got a blog that's full of really rich content on how to get started, how to set things up, how to take things to the next level. So please jump on the website, have a look and reach out.
Nathan Bush: Legend.
Nathan Bush: Thank you so much and hopefully we
Nathan Bush: get to have a chat again soon.
Jason Anderson: No worries. Cheers mate. Have a good one.
Nathan Bush: How good was that? Despite my efforts to throw Jason off with some stupid jokes about getting to third base and asking silly questions about the best subject lines, he remained the Zen master and really answered every question with something that was really practical and useful and I really loved his balance. Balance of an approach around generating instant sales versus a long time loyalty and brand approach. So I think some really great points there. Hopefully you've got one or two things that you can take out of it for your business and for setting up your email automation journeys. As we said, Jason can be found in LinkedIn and also on his website, so feel free to reach out to him there. If you're after more e commerce news insights and information. Sign up for 12High's email hi mail. You can go to 12High 12H I g h.comau forward/highmail h I g h m a I l and sign up for the newsletter. Every month we release a this Month in e commerce newsletter. We'll even do one just near the end of December and it goes through everything that you need to know from that month. It's a bit of a 10 minute read, but we think that you'll get a lot of value out of it. Okay guys, if you haven't finished trading, go. Well, there's a few days left before Christmas. Other than that, I hope that you, your website stay up, that you have a successful period, and that you come back in the new year feeling a little bit refreshed and ready to go. All again, thanks guys. Merry Christmas.
