This week, Michael speaks with email marketing and paid ad expert Daniel Peleg from EmailComposed. Daniel shares some great insight into email marketing, whether you have a large list you email regularly or even if you’ve been slacking on using your current list.
Get Daniel’s email marketing online assessment at https://www.emailcomposed.com/ecom-email-revenue-report/
Get Daniel’s abandoned cart free workshop at https://www.emailcomposed.com/abandoned-cart-masterclass-reg/
Learn more about Daniel at https://www.emailcomposed.com/
TRANSCRIPT:
Michael 0:10
Welcome. Today we have with us Daniel Peleg from EmailComposed. He is an expert on email marketing, and paid ads. And so I’m excited to discuss about some some quick tips people can use on how to improve their email marketing, email conversions right away. And also the different ways that you can assess the value of an email list when you buy an online business. Hi, Daniel.
Daniel 0:43
Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael 0:45
Welcome to join. So we’ve we’ve actually been in touch for quite a few years now. Yeah, we’ve we’ve met a few times back in Chiangmai. And nice to reconnect.
Unknown Speaker 0:56
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a pleasure.
Michael 0:59
Tell us briefly about your, your main business, what what do you do?
Unknown Speaker 1:04
The business is called Email composed. And we work with ecommerce brands that sell physical products off Amazon, so selling on their own website. And in terms of size, we mostly work with businesses with an annual revenue in the seven to eight figure range. Now, a lot of ecommerce brands have serious challenges growing their market share in scaling because of things like ad costs going up or, or because of revenue leaks in different parts of their customer journey. So what we do is we have a done for you program that works with seven to eight figure ecommerce brands. And we build an email marketing strategy that covers their entire customer lifecycle. So they can increase their overall revenue by anything from 25% to 40%. And sometimes more, which also enables them to scale quicker.
Michael 2:01
All right, very cool. So I’m guessing for for E commerce, email is probably pretty important, right? I’m frankly not an expert on E commerce. So enlighten me, what’s How much would you say it’s like that? For an average ecommerce store? It’s in seven, eight figures. How much of the income is coming from email? Would you say how many of our what percentage of their sales.
Unknown Speaker 2:25
So it is usually so what we, what we see when, when many ecommerce brands first approached us, it’s interesting how email for them is almost like an afterthought. Or sometimes they know it’s a strong lever to pull, but they don’t have enough bandwidth for expertise to really make the most out of it. So if they, so what we usually see when they come to us is that they have around 5% of the revenue coming from email, sometimes 10%, sometimes a little bit more. Why what we what we aim for is usually anything above 25%. So it could be 30% 35%, or sometimes even more.
Michael 3:09
Okay, very cool. And if you look at some really big brands, do you have any idea how much of revenue comes from all their sales come from email? Like, like, like, I don’t know, I did, or e book or any of the really big brands?
Unknown Speaker 3:28
Well, it’s, it’s really it’s a whole different beast there. But I would say for, for listeners, mostly, I would guess they would be around a seven to eight figure range or sometimes nine figure than then the number side. I said we’re so so anything around 30 30% would be would be actually what we what we expect. Now. You know, it’s it’s a strong lever at 30%. And it’s both in terms of how much revenue you can generate, but it’s also with the customer experience that can be so much better with emails. We can we can talk about that if you want.
Michael 4:08
Yeah, sure. So that’s pretty cool. Federico, yeah. So that yeah, that is significant. And so right off the bat, give me like one quick tip. how most people what most people don’t do, for example, that that can quickly improve the milk conversions was like the one easy thing people can do for it.
Unknown Speaker 4:28
Okay, yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about cart abandonment, because it’s, it’s a very famous way of, of salvaging sales. So basically, what it means cart abandonment is when someone is just on the verge of checking out or completing their purchase, but they end up exiting without buying. So the goal of the cart abandonment, automated sequence or flow is to get them back to where they left off. So if they have Under checkout, get them back to the checkout stage. Now, one thing that stores tend to miss with it is that sometimes the customer only adds products to their cart, which is still high buying intent. But they didn’t proceed to checkout. So you want to salvage these sales too. But most stores aren’t aware of this distinction between checkout abandonment and added to cart abandonment. And so they they miss out on a ton of sales. So you actually need two flows, if you want to cover the the entire abandonment journey. And by the way, we have a free masterclass on our site that teaches off all of our abandoned car strategies, and you know how to set things up and really how to maximize the revenue that they generate. So if you want I can I can give the link for anyone who’s interested.
Michael 5:51
Yeah, sure, we can include the link in the nose. So if I understand that, what you’re saying is merge stores the only like food, like send some special email sequences to people who put the item in the cart and then clicked for checkout, but then didn’t pay or didn’t finish with their own selection. While a lot of people just add things to the cart, and then basically don’t go to the checkout. So then they they don’t that doesn’t trigger Themis, because that’s right.
Unknown Speaker 6:24
Yes, yes, that’s right. Yes, I
Michael 6:26
actually do that a lot. Now that I think about it. If I’m shopping on Amazon, I elsewhere, I often just like add something to cart, and then maybe get distracted, or decide to buy it later and don’t do anything. So that is an interesting idea.
Unknown Speaker 6:44
Yeah, yeah. Another thing is that, you know, with discount, because, you know, as he said, a lot of people don’t don’t realize it. But for example, with with popups, whenever you go into an E commerce site, you would usually get a pop up at some point, either it pops immediately or after you browse the site a little bit. And a lot of store owners ask themselves, whether they should give a discount at all. And if yes, then how much discount. So on the one hand, you might be concerned that discount would attract bargain hunters, you know, they just want to buy once and then move elsewhere, instead of potential loyal customers. And on the other hand, a discount is a very strong incentive to sign up to your list. Now, every business is different. But for the vast majority of brands at discount on the popup will at least double or triple the number of signups. So if you care about growing your list, it’s hard not to go for it. But it’s not only about the number of fleet, signups we’ve seen and Klaviyo research also supports it across different kinds of brands, that a pop up with a discount almost doubles the number of first time purchases, and the brands who offer the discount. So up to four times more repeat purchases as well. Now everything needs to be tested and split tested. And we do that, but we have a clear picture about how effective a discount offer is, over any type any other type of offer on the pop up. Now only issues with brands that don’t want to offer discounts because of branding reasons. Several of our clients are more high end or luxury brands. And so we need to work around that and and find maybe other incentives to sign up that don’t involve a discount, depending on what the products are. And this could be free shipping or a small gift when you place an order and things like that. But it’s the evidence is overwhelmingly high that discounts, double or triple, or even quadruple the results that you get.
Michael 9:07
And what’s the best timing for offering this pop up the dude after the person spent some time on the on the site after they may be added something to the cart? Or like right away?
Unknown Speaker 9:22
Yeah, we do. We do tests about it and make sure that the timing is right for that particular audience and type of product and industry and so on. But in most cases, you don’t want to pop it up immediately when someone enters the site, but rather wait at least for a few seconds. You can also check your Google Analytics and kind of understand the way that people interact with your site and how much are they spending until they buy or until they exit and then you can tune tune up the pop up accordingly.
Michael 9:57
What about all the people who would have bought without the discount, and, and they are going to buy and now suddenly there is a 10% discount, and they think, okay, that’s nice, I’ll just get the discount then.
Unknown Speaker 10:12
So that’s what I meant when I said that you, you might be concerned that you will be attracting the wrong crowd. But the research is very clear about it. While you do always get those people who are bargain hunters, you will net when you look at your net profit, it would always be higher.
Michael 10:36
Alright, very cool. So that’s interesting. And then let’s talk a little bit back. So when it comes to building and list, let’s say you have an established or like a new ecommerce store, how would you? How would you kind of start warming up and building and less sick events where where do you start basically, when you when you look at it,
Unknown Speaker 11:02
at the beginning, if you don’t, if you have no traffic and no sales, probably email wouldn’t be the first thing that I would set up. So you start, you know, you start putting a pop up on your site, when you have a few 100 subscribers, you build the basic, the basic automations that would either greets new leads to sign up for the pop up or, or people who abandon their carts, or people who purchase and you want to, and you want to get them kind of have a nicer experience nicer customer experience, you will do that. I’d say if you’re thinking of hiring someone, like our team to build advanced flows and manage campaigns, then you should probably be already having at least around 10,000 subscribers or so. But if that your subscriber base is smaller than probably basic automations would, would do the trick. I think, you know, in general, when we talking about e commerce businesses, it’s really important to to have to have this in place, especially if you’ve already got the traffic, and you already got subscribers. It’s a really strong lever. And and the reason that is so effective, I think there are a few a few reasons that we shouldn’t, we should be aware about. First of all, it’s very predictable. So if we’re talking about brands, who are also who are already doing social media advertising, you never know when your CPA is gonna shoot through the roof for some reason, or there’s an iOS update or Facebook decides to arbitrarily shut down your account. But with email, because you have so much control, you can plan exactly what messages you’re going to send. And we will look at historical data of an email account and what’s the subscriber growth and what are the conversion rates of email campaigns and so on, we’re able to predict with high accuracy, how much revenue we’ll be getting from those from those emails in the next month or the next quarter. Now, the second thing that you got to remember with emails is it’s owned main media. owned media means you don’t have to pay anyone to get in front of your audience, unlike Instagram, or Facebook or other platforms. And because it’s an audience that you exclusively own. You don’t need to abide by the rules and twist your creatives and messaging to fit what works best for Facebook algorithm. You’re free to express your messaging and your brand in any way that serves you best. And you’re free to contact your audience anytime you want and without paying for it. Now, the third reason why I think email is so successful. And this is crucial in today’s marketing, personalization. For every person who’s on your list, you know what stage they are in your journey, such as right before a buying decision, or right after their first purchase, or when they made a repeat purchase, things like that. So you also know what they’re interested in, and what actions they’re taking and a lot of other data points. And with all that you can customize your messages in in a very granular way to be able to send them the right message at the right time, which is what we what we always want. Now another thing to note is that it’s very cost effective mechanism for getting repeat sales. Especially now with rising CPAs. Often the first purchase isn’t where the big money’s and with emails it’s pretty straightforward and automated to get someone to come back and buy again. And again, we can talk about it later if you want. And the other reason is that the return on investment is so much higher than anything out out there anything else, your expenses are basically the email platform, which you pay according to the number of active subscribers or sends usually, if you’re new, then it might not make sense to get like the most expensive platform. But as soon as you are in the six to seven figure range, and you revenue,
Unknown Speaker 15:32
the email platform costs are quite negligible. And then you have the cost of the team that creates the emails, the copywriting, graphic design, scheduling, the emails, and so on. So whether you have a team in house that does it or you hire an outside team for that, now, if you’re in the seven to eight figure range, you can probably get these monthly costs are covered within literally the first days of the emails running. And anything after that, throughout the month is pure profits. So the ROI is so obvious and high. So if you look at at how the email channel is so profitable, and predictable, and has a high return on investment, that’s what excites me so much about it. And I believe that this is a channel that every ecommerce business should be put putting their focus on as soon as they have traffic, if they really want to grow and grow quicker.
Michael 16:25
Yeah, absolutely. That That makes a lot of sense. It’s, it’s free, you own it. Everyone should be using email more sure. And so, yeah, and it’s, it’s easy, and it’s cheap and predictable. I agree. And so, can you walk us briefly for what would a typical campaign look like? Let’s say for an ecommerce business, that’s like, like a million dollars in annual revenue or a couple million, and maybe has a list of like 10,000 subscribers? What would How often would you send it? What what would be the sequence? And then what will be some things that you add periodically? Some kind of discounts? How would that look in terms of the emails sent out?
Unknown Speaker 17:14
Okay, yeah, great, great questions. So let’s see, it’s, it’s quite a big, big topic. So let’s try to kind of break it down a little bit and unpack it. So let’s first look in terms of flows and campaigns. So we have, before we start working with an E commerce brand, or when we audit their email accounts, we usually see that there are sending some emails. And as a result of those emails, they see a small bump in revenue of around five to 10%. So what we do is we plan and execute a strategy that’s typically able to double that or more. And after several months of working with an econ business, we usually see the revenue from emails, anything from 25 to 40%, of the overall business revenue. And the way that we’re able to achieve that is by using emails throughout the entire customer lifecycle. That’s how we look at it. And we do that with several elements that all work together. So first, we set up a complete area of automated email sequences, what’s called flows. And these flows, they get triggered in response to events, such as a customer purchasing a certain product, so we want to upsell them related products, for example, or someone placed an item in their cart, but didn’t complete the checkout process. Or if we want to convert someone from a first time buyer into a repeat buyer. So all these examples are for events that we can, we can take care of using automated flows. Now that’s only part of the overall picture. We also want to send one off campaigns on a regular basis, for example, once or twice a week. And we make these campaigns highly targeted and personalized. I’ll unpack that too, in a minute. But it’s just it’s not just about sending promotions by email. That’s that’s an important thing to note. We don’t just, you know, send sales emails, what we do is we work on nurturing the leads in a way that creates a relationship with the audience. So they keep that brand, top of mind and thanks to that relationship, they keep coming back for more. So if for example, we’re able to bring a business to a point where 30% of their overall revenue is generated on the email marketing channel, then typically half of that which is around 15% will be generated by the automated flows and the other Half is attributed to the one off campaign emails. It’s not a hard and fast rule on anything. But it’s a phenomenon that that I’ve observed. And it also depends on how deeply we have the opportunity to work on the different aspects of the customer journey. For example, with flows, it’s very achievable to have automated flows generating 30 35% additional revenue. And that’s even without sending a single manual campaign. But of course, if you don’t want to leave any money on the table, then sending campaigns on a regular basis is a must. Now, if we dive deeper and see what kind of email automations or flows we would send, so there are a few that that consider the must haves. The first one is the welcome flow. This is what you send someone who’s a newcomer to your ecosystem, when they sign up to your email list. And it’s it’s a crucial flow because someone new has expressed interest in your products. And now you have a chance to strike while the iron is hot, and to convert that interest into a purchase. Now what happens in such a flow, you thank them for the for joining and give them a coupon if you promise that you show them your best sellers, social media testimonials, and so on. So a basic welcome flow is a must. But you can also dig deeper. And for example, if you have different categories of products, you can branch that sequence. So if a subscriber was interested in a certain category, then the emails would feature information and offers relevant to that category. Another thing you can do is you can collect email preferences. So you ask your new subscriber to indicate what types of messages they would like to receive product updates, tips, sales, so on, and how frequently. So do do they want to be mailed on a weekly basis or maybe by weeklies, okay, maybe once a month, you collect this info upfront, so you avoid bombarding them with messages later on. And you also make sure that they would feel that your content is relevant to them.
Unknown Speaker 22:16
Now cart abandonment, we already talked about that. That’s also a must have and may source habits. But some may not know that browse abandonment is also one of the highest revenue flows you can have. So basically, browse abandonment is when someone who’s already on your email list, they decide one day to visit your site to look for products, but they end up exiting without buying anything. So this flow brings them back to complete the purchase. Another one, that’s also a must have is what’s called the post purchase flow. And I’ll be talking about post purchase flow that’s meant for first time buyers. So when someone buys from you for the first time you want to make you want to make the customer feel great about the purchase, and perhaps get a review at some point. And also do what I called turbo charge that purchase. So you turbo charges versus with things I can upsell or cross sell a subscription if you have it or a review request. So you can do all that with the sequence depending on what you’re selling, of course. But the main thing is being able to delight the customer with a great communication experience after they have made the first purchase. And also to possibly increase their lifetime value by generating an additional purchase when they’re still in hot buying mode. Now I can go on and on. Let me know if if you want more of that.
Michael 23:54
That’s good. So the main flows was the welcome flow and cart abandonment flow and impulse purchase flow. So that’s, that seems about Yeah, enough. And in terms of the campaigns, so I imagine you would have some campaigns for holidays. Like our here is a Valentine’s Day discount or shopping holidays. What else is there in terms of regular campaigns.
Unknown Speaker 24:24
So some of the campaigns are promotional campaigns, but I believe that it is much more important to actually utilize campaigns in order to develop that relationship with the customers to nurture them and make them feel that this is a brand that doesn’t just sell but rather give important information give value. And we can also talk about what makes an email great Why would people actually wants to receive your or emails, as opposed to, you know, this is this is a promotion. So, yeah, what so yeah, so I guess when we send an email, there are a few things that that we that we might be looking for, it’s either to nurture the relationship with our customers. And we do that with with, you know, with the value, valuable information, tips, ideas on how to better use the products and things like that. And we also want to kind of send them back to our sites, and I can talk about it a little bit later. And then we have the promotional emails. Now, in any case, what you want to make sure is that you take care of three things, the value, the visual and the verbal of the email. So we call it the V trifecta. So value, it means that this is where a lot of people get it all wrong. By the way, most of the emails are more like a brochure that shouts sale sale, what if my email after the other by if we want people to keep our brand, top of mind, and if we want them to know like, and trust us, the way to do it is not short sales, but rather, it’s to send an email that’s super relevant. And it’s personalized, and it’s helpful, or even fun, by the way. In other words, you give them values, so they would be looking forward to your next emails, and they want to open them. So we follow the motto of sending the right message to the right people at the right time, and make sure we add value instead of the usual, you know, push for sale that that ours others might be doing. Now, the second elements is the visual, making sure that the brand voice is expressed accurately, and congruently with all the other channels that you’re communicating with your customers. So there’s a lot of work being done on the graphic design side of each email. So they all look and feel Brandon and also set your brand apart and just look pleasing to the eye as well. So we have value in and visual. Now the third element is the verbal, the quality of the copywriting the message, you know, the choice of force approach, and also being in the brand voice. And it all comes down to how we make the copy to be the most effective. So the reader performs the action that we want them to, whether it’s complete a purchase, or click to our site, leave us review and so on. Now, so I know it’s all taken. But to summarize, the value, most important than the visual and the verbal, that makes an email, work and converts. And a quick tip here, we mentioned the the relationship and generating a purchase. But actually, when you most people don’t know that. But when you send traffic to your site from your email list, you’re actually getting a serious boost of Seola from Google. And that’s because Google values repeat visitors, and also visitors who stay longer on your site. And that’s exactly what you get when you use emails for traffic. So turns out email is a powerful SEO tool as well.
Michael 28:30
Right, very cool. So I’m thinking how can we apply that to our own newsletter domain magnet? How? How can we develop a better personal relationship with our subscribers? Got any tips that might be applicable here? Because we don’t sell any ecommerce products? Yeah, we don’t there.
Unknown Speaker 28:55
Yes. So when when you’re not an ecommerce seller, but rather in your case, I would first of all I would do I would direct less of my attention into the design parts and more into the copywriting and the value and with value I mean, you have to kind of get into your readers mind and try to understand what would they find valuable what types of information what kind of tips and ideas that you can that you can you can share with them and and definitely work on that
Michael 29:35
so yeah, yeah that’s what we tried to do the provide value through covering some some reason news in the industry through sharing some some interesting information articles as well as our own articles and podcast recordings and like my personal industry falls things like that.
Unknown Speaker 29:57
Yeah, so definitely when when you are posting a new article on your site, you can, you can email your list and then you get the SEO love, of course. But you also get them realize that you’re that you’re actually putting out there information that that could be relevant and valuable for them. But you can also use use an email just just as a standalone information unit. So, you know, short email doesn’t have to be long, 300 words or less, and tell them something you’ve recently learned or something that that could be valuable stuff.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai