Aug 11, 2020
On this episode of the Quiet Light podcast, we talk to Phillip
Rivers (not the quarterback). We get into why email is the unsung
hero of E-commerce businesses. In his experience, thirty percent of
your revenue should come from email connections. Tune in to her
more on Phillip’s thoughts about the power of email in E-commerce.
Topics:
- Phillip’s background in E-commerce.
- Why email is still powerful despite expanded advertising
options.
- The misstep of shooting from the hip.
- How to start out on the right foot.
- Offers
- Trust-builders.
- Content
- The efficacy of social media advertising.
- Getting past personal biases.
- Sharing a name with a famous quarterback.
Resources: Phil@gotetra.co Phillip on Facebook
Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com
Transcription: Joe: Our buddy
Mike Jackass did a presentation not too long ago on his product
campaign product with Color It and what he does with e-mail in
Klaviyo and did a presentation to I think it was the eCommerceFuel
folks showing how much of his revenue came from his e-mail
campaigns. And a lot of people were blown away because they felt
like it's something that is dated and not an area that's strong in
e-commerce anymore. Maybe those folks are doing mostly on Amazon
and actually can't e-mail the customers. But in this case, when
it's an off Amazon business, Mike presented a case, that e-mail is
an important component of any campaign in growing up SaaS business
or content business whatever you’ve got if you've got a list of
customers to reach out to them. I understand you had Phillip Rivers
on the podcast talking about this very same thing. How did that
call go?
Mark: Well, you can imagine my delight
when I got an e-mail from Phillip Rivers. I thought he's finally
returning my fan mail. All the e-mails that I sent to the
quarterback of now the Indiana Colts as opposed to the San Diego
Chargers; I'm sorry, Los Angeles Chargers. I was like I finally
met; no, it's not that Phillip Rivers. I did have to ask him about
that at the end. He has a funny story about people not believing it
was his real ID when he was going into a bar thinking it was a fake
ID. But that's at the end of the podcast. The bulk of what we
talked about instead of football is e-mail marketing and the fact
that it's the unsung hero of e-commerce marketing. And for all you
buyers out there, this is one of these opportunities for where you
can find opportunities for immediate gains after you acquire a
business. Phillip Rivers at this podcast argues and argues very
well that in his experience, an e-commerce business should have at
least 30% of its revenue mix coming from e-mail. So if you're
looking at where customers are being acquired from currently with
an e-commerce business and it does not have a sizable portion
coming from e-mail, this is an opportunity. And there are ways to
do this with Amazon as well. I've known plenty of Amazon sellers
who have healthy e-mail lists and use it to launch products. And
that's a great avenue for getting those products to rank well on
Amazon very, very quickly. So we talked a lot about his experience
with this; with e-mail marketing, some of the best practices he
follows and then some of the metrics you should be following in
here. I joked at the end when you have a name like Phillip Rivers
your open rate probably naturally gets higher than if it's just Joe
Valley. Well, probably not Joe Valley, Joe Valley is recognized,
right?
Joe: In a very small circle of people, yes.
Mark: Yeah, right. Anyways, good point. I think
it's a bit larger than that. I open the e-mail when I see it, but
no, good episode for just learning about identifying these
opportunities for quick wins and opportunities that you're
evaluating for businesses for sale.
Joe:
Excellent. Let's go to it.
Mark: Phillip, thanks
so much for joining me on the podcast here today. I'm really
excited to have you on because you reached out to me. You talked
about e-mail as the unsung hero of e-commerce and I have a special
place in my heart for e-mail as I built my first business on the
back of e-mail marketing. So welcome to the podcast. I’m really
glad to have you here.
Phillip: Thanks for having
me, Mark.
Mark: Hey, why don't you give a little
bit of a background on yourself and why you reached out to me about
e-mail as the unsung hero as you put it of e-commerce and why this
is something that you want to talk about?
Phillip:
Yeah, man. So I've been in e-commerce for quite a while, about 15
years now, highs and lows. But in the early days, there was none of
these wonderful tools that we kind of now take for granted. And so
I sort of skid my teeth on e-mail; building audiences and nurturing
them and figuring out ways to monetize creatively. And this dates
back to; this is pre-Shopify, Facebook Ads, and all that stuff. And
over the years, as the industry matured, I just got really leaned
into and sharpening my sword on building audiences and
communicating with people. And in doing so, I've had some
successful stores and some unsuccessful ones. It's kind of how it
goes in this game.
Mark: I've only got successful
stories. I've never had a failure in my life.
Phillip: That's not true. I heard on another
podcast a business you bought that didn't work out.
Mark: All right, I have more than one of those.
Okay, let's move on from my failures on to your successes.
Phillip: And so, in any event, I think that to my
time in e-com I notice that e-mail is this very unique special
channel that the brand or the individual business has complete
control over in terms of how they build that audience, how they
connect with them over time, and what messaging they put in front
of them to get whatever action they aim to get out of it, whether
it be engagement or revenue or whatever it may be and so much so
that in talking with friends or now clients that are in the
e-commerce space, it's just e-mail is one of those things that kind
of gets kicked to the curb or neglected in lieu of kind of faster
or sexier channels. And so really, I'm here just kind of standing
on a soapbox and tell people like this is an important channel for
longevity and to have a clean, healthy business long term and an
asset that you can own and control. E-mail is very important and
vital to long term success of any business.
Mark:
And I would agree but let's go ahead and play some of the devil's
advocate here with the different channels. Obviously, social media
is where a lot of people are putting their attention. You’re on
Facebook for a long time some people are kind of weighing in on
Facebook and saying Instagram advertising works really, really well
for them. Influencer marketing, it’s a matter of time before we get
to the next big social media. I was just talking to somebody
yesterday who was like I'm trying to figure out TikTok. It's the
latest thing out there to try and figure out. With all these things
happening, why does e-mail continue to hold a seat at the table in
our marketing mix? And then later on, just for those listening, I
want to get into the how later on. I think that's the mediary topic
but before we get to the how let's talk about the why. Why is
e-mail; why does it deserve a seat at this table?
Phillip: Well, it's the one channel that you own
outright. I think that gets kind of discounted or forgotten a lot.
Any other social channels you're borrowing that audience and
technically Zuckerberg or one of the other power players is who
owns that audience and you can be sort of de-platformed or the cost
can go up or the algo can change and all of a sudden you can't
reach the same amount of people. So it's just they're not bad and
they're amazing tools, you just don't have full control like you do
e-mail. So I think for me that's the biggest thing. And the other
way that I look at it is all these social channels are great at
engaging folks and driving traffic but if you look at the
analytics, at any store or any e-com store, the conversion rate;
let's just say it's 5% which would be on the higher end of the
spectrum. But that still means that 95% didn't buy on any given day
and if you're not thinking about how you capture leads from as many
of those people as possible and how do you communicate with them to
communicate your value proposition and products etcetera, then
you're really relying on luck and kind of paying for impressions to
get people back again which is it leaves too much up to chance, in
my opinion, or for my liking. And two, it just is a very expensive
long term proposition and it's hard to build something sustainable
that way.
Mark: Yeah. With that, though, and again
I’m still playing the devil's advocate here, should we own the
channel? We own somebody's e-mail, we can hit them up but Google's
gotten better at filtering that out. Our updates here at Quiet
Light got thrown into the updates folder. Another company I have,
things are getting thrown over in the promotions folder which is
like spam with an asterisk; it's spam, but you should probably be
looking at it. At least that's what I look at that promotions
folder. Do we really have full control over e-mail do you think, or
are we losing control, and what about the future of that? Is that
something to watch out for in the future?
Phillip:
I think that strategy is the most important part. And so I think
that this goes kind of back into the how, but based on how you set
forth in terms of once someone pops in and you start to communicate
with them, how do you do it and what actions do you ask them for.
Doing some of those things kind of at the outset can dictate where
your e-mail goes in terms of the Gmail inbox, for example, long
term. If people aren't engaging with it, it'll be routed to promo.
But if people engage with the early e-mails, that's kind of a way
to work around it to land in the inbox. But to go one layer deeper,
I think from an e-mail perspective, I don't worry too much about
the mailbox tab or the promo tab. The only one I really want to
stay out of the most is Spam and that's the one I can control.
Whether it ends up in promo or one of the other tabs, there's
nothing that I can do about it. As a marketer, all that I can do is
think critically about how do I create the most incredible
experience for the person that's going to be consuming this
message? And if I think about them and value them, then the things
downstream that I don't really have control over will tend to work
out.
Mark: Sure and I think this is a point that
might get lost sometimes with e-mail, right? And maybe we can talk
a little bit about the how, because I think we're just going to
naturally end up there anyways.
Phillip: Can I add
one more point before we get there, Mark?
Mark:
No. No, I'm just kidding. Please.
Phillip: I was
going to say that the other thing is like you mentioned the dynamic
changing or Google changes things meaning how that affects us in
deliverability in the inbox. Facebook or the players and social are
changing algorithms every single day and so increasingly of all of
your audience there, fewer and fewer of them see your message
unless you pay to play. So e-mail, if you look at them side by side
on engagement metrics, e-mail would win far and above every single
time from organic social versus e-mail. But the state of play on
all platforms is always changing. But I don't look at that as to
say like we shouldn't play the game. It's just like what are the
rules and kind of where do I have to get creative and that to get
the best result possible?
Mark: Sure, yeah. And I
think talk about a multiplatform approach makes sense as well. It's
not an either-or sort of proposition. We can definitely enhance our
e-mail marketing with other platform marketing. But for anyone
curious as to what's the winner when you are looking at these
different channels just do a Google search. I mean, the open rates
and the attention that gets paid to e-mail versus social media is
significantly higher with e-mail. I'm going to stop playing devil's
advocate because it hurts me to do so. Because I do have a soft
spot in my heart for e-mail but people do it wrong all the time.
People really don't understand how to do e-mail right. And I mean,
I go through every day and I unsubscribe from; I have no idea how
many people I'm unsubscribing from every day. It just feels like
I'm constantly unsubscribing because they're not offering me value.
But there are some people in my inbox that I don't remember signing
up for but they're adding value so I keep them in there. So let's
talk about that. Let's talk about doing it wrong. Let's talk about
doing it right, especially from an e-commerce standpoint where
you're selling products. I'd love to hear where you start that
conversation with people.
Phillip: Well, I think
that through the lens of e-com, what most people miss, Mark is the
strategy first and foremost. So I talk to a lot of business owners
on the phone and most of them when it comes down to e-mail, they
have no clear roadmap or kind of treasure map, as I like to call
it, in terms of what they're going to be doing week to week from a
messaging perspective, whether that's value, whether that's offers
or; not offers at percentage basis but talking about a product and
offering something for sale and also segmentation. So pretty much
what most brands do is just shoot from the hip, which is really
hard to build a successful channel when you're just guessing and
playing with borrowed time all the time. And so that's kind of the
biggest misstep that I see a lot of people making. And then it's
important with this channel just as any other just like with your
Facebook ads where you're putting a lot of budget behind the ads
that you're running is like, okay, how do I kind of think about
what do I want to communicate to the audience and based on kind of
where they are in the lifecycle so that one, I create a good
experience for them, but two, I get to little by little move them
along the lifecycle to ultimately converting or re-converting or
whatever it may be. But that's the biggest thing that I see missing
is starting off on the right foot.
Mark: What is
the right foot and what’s the wrong foot?
Phillip:
Well, I think the wrong foot is sale, sale, sale all the time or
just running with offers to people and just mass discounting to get
sales which is the strategy or tactic a lot of people use. So I
think the right foot is looking at what does your audience care
about? The way I like to break it down is into kind of three
different high-level kind of categories; offers where we talk about
the product, trust builders, where we can pull things from social
media or reviews, testimonials, maybe how our brand, our origin
story or how a product is created, where we can tell a story. To
me, that builds trust or connection. And then also content. That
content, again, could be Instagram content, or a blog content, or
just things that are important to the brand and they know it's
important; the avatar that they can talk about. It doesn't have to
be a blog post necessarily, but content. So ultimately, if we take
a step back, that's a mixture of offers and value add stuff in one
way, shape, or form. And they all sort of cross over it’s like a
then diagram you can make a content message and offer message and
so it's kind of a hybrid, but you're still in that context leading
with value and you're offering something for sale but the main
point of that isn't an offer or a product. It's you're telling a
story around some angle or narrative. So I think the right way to
start is to; what we often do is group what things can we talk
about from an offer perspective that apply to our brand, our
avatar, same thing for trust builder, same thing for content ideas
and put all those on paper as wild or crazy or simple or
sophisticated as you think those answers or your ideas are. Get
them all there and then it's a lot easier to cut things or group
them together once everything's sort of out of your brain and onto
the piece of paper. That's oftentimes the first step that I take
and I recommend people take because that way it's a lot easier to
see it. Kind of like akin to Minority Report.
Mark: Throwback there to an old Tom Cruise movie
for anyone that hasn't seen it. Don't watch it. Actually, it's an
okay movie. Well, let's try to actually break this down into an
example here because a lot of theory here as far as this. And what
I've often found when we talk about marketing, whether it be e-mail
marketing or any other type when we start talking about segmenting;
it sounds great in theory, right? The idea that, hey, you want to
segment your audience, you want to understand and kind of meet them
where they're at and like, yeah, that's great and then you sit down
and you do it. So how do I know where my audience is at? How do I
know what they want to hear from content? And how do I move from
that content to the offer? So let's make-believe a brand, we got a
pet business here. It sells dog collars; custom dog collars, let's
say with nice little chains around the neck or something like that,
I don't know. We'll just say a pet brand we don't have to get that
specific. You talked about breaking up into these three different
levels. I mean, how would we do this with a B2C sort of brand for a
hobby niche or a passion just like pets? What are some things to
look at there?
Phillip: So I'm talking through the
lens of campaigns, not flows, just to be clear. And so through this
sort of pet leash or pet brand that you mentioned, it's like, okay,
what are some offers that we could talk about around the product?
So there's obviously discounting, there's maybe product releases,
back in stocks. There's a few ideas. There's design inspiration,
why they built this product this way. That could also be kind of
like a trust builder sort of thing. And again, reviews, even just
pictures of dogs wearing your collar. Pet owners love that type of
stuff and so that goes a long way. Again, this could also be
content or slash trust builder. But I know it's hard to stay
organized talking about this and through the lens of the people
that are listening now, this is all over the place. But like
pictures of other dogs wearing the collars, that could be used in
all three of these categories; offer, trust builder, or even a
content idea. So the way that I look at it, Mark, is you have these
three overarching categories. In a month there is four weeks that
you're going to be communicating campaigns to folks. And not to get
too into the weeds on segmentation, but let's say you're going to
send five campaigns throughout the course of the month. So one a
week plus some sort of like wildcard campaign based on whatever's
happening in the calendar or in the world that you could sort of
ride the coattails of in any given month. So I would say two of
those should be offer related e-mails. Two of those or three should
be content or value-added. To make it simple it’s something that
people can sort of sink their teeth into. Like, okay, now I have a
clear go forward in terms of what I should be doing each week.
Mark: Yeah, you don't want to get into the weeds
with segmentation. We're going to do that in a bit. But first, I
want to know, does this change when you are going B2B or B2C?
Phillip: The only thing that changes when I go B2B
is it depends; like what's the underlying product that's being sold
and what's the sales cycle and how is that product consumed? So if
you're selling cloud hosting solutions for law firms, which I've
done before…
Mark: That’s exciting. I fell asleep
while you were saying that by the way but I’m awake.
Phillip: So the sales cycle for that is long and
they don't really repurchase it. They’re repurchasing services from
whoever installed the cloud hosting stuff for them. And so for
them, one a week might be a little bit too aggressive. It might be
a bi-weekly or monthly thing, but I think to answer your question,
it's all circumstantial based on the underlying business and what
they sell and how it's consumed. And so there's not a hard and fast
rule that you have to send once a week even for e-com necessarily.
It's what applies for one business won't necessarily apply to the
other and I think a lot of people get sort of tripped up on that
where they seek advice online and they think they have to do it
that way. But it's not necessarily best suited for them or their or
their leads or customers.
Mark: Yeah, you do
consulting for this, right? This is part of what you do.
Phillip: Yeah.
Mark: Okay, so
let's say a new client is coming to you. And I want to just talk
about the average client avatar that you have here, like the
average client coming in. What do you often see with people's
e-mail setups when they first come to you? Assuming that they have
something set up what is kind of the most common approach they
take? And then the follow up to that's going to be what do you do
next once you see that and what are the steps to try and get it in
shape?
Phillip: Yeah, so what I often see most is
there's no strategy like it's just sort of thrown together
piecemeal and they send when they send. And therefore they don't
know what they're doing with campaigns. There's no plan and there's
no measurement because you can't track what you don't measure. So
that's big mistake number one. The other thing that I see is people
that do use flows; again, this is through the lens of e-com
especially, more often than not they kind of just use like the
templates that are given to them by whatever ESP they're using so
it's like they put forth the least amount of effort just to have
something there to cross it off the list. And oftentimes they do
this because people don't realize the potential to e-mail has for
their business and so because of their; what's the word I want,
lack of experience sort of in this channel, they think that if they
get 2%, 3%, or 4% a month from e-mail they think that's; their
outlook is, oh, we're doing okay. I'm happy with it. Not knowing
they should be doing at a minimum 30.
Mark: 30%
what?
Phillip: Of revenue per month attributed to
e-mail.
Mark: That's a high percent. Okay.
Phillip: So without a solid strategy, I would say
it's like building a house on quicksand and if you do that, it's
not going to be around very long. And so what they do is oftentimes
there's no strategy. They do a little bit here and there, and
they're quite happy with the results because they don't know any
better. But they're also inclined to say e-mail doesn't work for my
business. But it's not because the channel is inherently bad, it's
because there's no strategy in place to make it successful.
Mark: Right, that makes sense. So what's next for
you then after you see this? They don't have a strategy in place.
Is the strategy that you start putting together just what you were
talking about; this kind of planning out the next month and these
three different types of e-mails that you would send out or how do
you go about dissecting that that strategy and building something
for them? I mean talking flows, let's just make a quick point of
clarification. Flows would be like automations, there's e-mail
sequences, there's a lot of different names for these, but it's
e-mails that are sending based off various triggers in sequence. Is
that right?
Phillip: Correct. So when I'm sort of
looking at an account and I'm diagnosing what's currently
happening, what are the holes in their funnel, if you will, or what
are the pitfalls within an e-mail and how can they improve as fast
as possible to start making; squeezing more juice out of this
lemon? I look first at how are leads being captured on-site?
Traffic is coming from paid social, organic social, TikTok, or SEO,
whatever the traffic sources are. But they're coming in. Most
people don't buy. So how effectively are leads being captured so
that you can communicate with them? Most people don't track these
at all. And just for those listening on the low end, anything that
you're doing on-site with, like a pop-up, for example, should be
converting at minimum 5%. We always sort of measure; our goal is to
get to 10% conversion rate. So impression to conversion is 10% and
if it converts to 10% percent I'm not touching it. It's like I
found the unicorn. I just let it ride until it starts to diminish;
the performance starts to diminish. But most people don't even know
how the pop-up is performing from a lead gen perspective. So that's
the first thing we look for. Second thing is in parallel, what's
happening with campaigns is they're sort of a strategy or a
framework in place for communicating with the audience, period.
More often than not it's no. If they do have a strategy in place,
it's like, well, how is it performing? How are they using
segmentation to at least be sort of more precise with their
messaging, making sure that it has audience message fit to move the
metrics that they want to move. And parallel to that on the flow
side, again, as you mentioned, Mark, these flows their purpose is
to nurture people throughout the customer lifecycle based on their
behaviors, attributes, or lack thereof. So if someone comes in and
gives their e-mail; they come from paid social, they give their
e-mail, they don't buy, you put them through a series of messaging
that starts to evangelize them. They learn what's important to you,
form some sort of a connection, a deeper one, than you had when
they got there in the first place. And so these flows, by and
large, there's four, I would say, critical or key flows that any
business needs first before they start adding a bunch of sexy stuff
afterwards; that being the welcome flow, like when you start to
sort of indoctrinate or evangelize folks, browse abandoned flow, so
someone's been opted in, they’re shopping around, but they don't
take an action to add to Cart, abandoned cart flow, which there's a
lot of people that add to cart and never buy. So there's just low
hanging fruit there. And then the other one that I think is the
most important to have at the outset is first time customer. And so
at this point, the reason I think that's so important, Mark, is
getting someone to buy the first time is one of the hardest things
in the world. But once they've converted they're five times more
likely to buy a second time than a new person is to buy a first
time. So this is really our first opportunity to start to make an
even deeper connection with someone that's converted once and to
communicate our values and what lies ahead for them when they
receive their product in the mail, so on and so forth, so that we
can start to then be in a place to position something else for them
to buy at some point down the road based on what makes sense for
the underlying business and what they sell, obviously. And so
usually when I'm a buyer, those are all the things that I look at
like is the core infrastructure of flows in place yes or no? If it
is okay, is it performing well or are there holes in it that should
be improved before moving on to something and moving on to kind of
more sophisticated flows?
Mark: I got it.
Phillip: I know that's a mouthful but is that
helpful?
Mark: No, that was great. I mean I
purposely was just not talking because I was soaking up a lot of
what you were saying here. With flows a couple of just practical
application issues here that I want to go over, one is do you
recommend interspersing campaigns with flows and if not, how do you
work in holiday specials and stuff like that? And my follow up to
that is going to be how do you do this without interrupting things?
For example, I've seen this flow set up before where you get the
introductory e-mail, and then the next week you get another e-mail
that's kind of more trust building, and then week three you have
something that's sent out that's more of a promotion e-mail. And
this is going to be everybody's experience when they become a new
customer, right? They're going to have this sort of experience.
Their clock starts the day they buy or the day that you capture
them as lead depending where their starting point is. Do you
recommend using campaigns as well and how do you not have competing
offers or campaigns disrupting that flow?
Phillip:
So I think, quite honestly, I don't worry too much about
cannibalizing flows with campaigns or campaigns with flows. Most
businesses aren't to the point where they're that sophisticated
from a marketing perspective, where there's that much going on,
where it's going to hurt them to have a campaign sent and someone
also receive a flow. So I think a lot of times they start; it's an
outlier and people worry about it and it takes up time, energy, and
ultimately it becomes a barrier for them ultimately taking action.
So then what happens is they get into the weeds thinking about it
and like oh, they end up not doing it because they're worried about
somehow buyer implications that might happen if they were to do
this. And they don't do anything, which is worse than just doing
both. So I think it's a lot easier to keep it simple. But again,
this is one of those things where it all depends on the underlying
business and what they sell and how they communicate and all of
these things. But to answer your question, I don't worry too much
about if someone's enrolled in a flow sending a campaign. But what
I will do depends on the ESP that's being used. But I'll talk
through the lens of Klaviyo because that's where I spend most of my
time. If someone is in abandoned cart flow, which is very high
leverage flow and they're close to converting. And I also have
campaigns going out that generally disperse; these people that are
in the abandoned cart would also get this campaign. If I'm
hypersensitive to it, or I want to make sure that people enrolled
in flows don't want to see this particular; let's just say it's a
deep discount, I'll just suppress that segment or anyone that
received an abandoned cart e-mail in the last 16 hours from getting
this campaign. So it's like an easy sort of fix but if you don't
have to go write it all out on a whiteboard and see where all the
dependencies arcs is it just becomes too confusing. It's just
easier not to do it if you're going to go about it that way.
Mark: Sure, and you don't think people are paying
enough attention anyways to; not paying enough attention but you're
not to worried about cannibalizing and having one interrupt the
other not as problems.
Phillip: Not really. A lot
of what happens to is we have like our own world view, our own
biases when we're thinking about stuff as the business owner market
or whatever like I don't like this or I'm worried about that. But
at the end of the day, to answer your question to this specific
example, I'd rather look at the metrics of the e-mail to tell me
what's working or what's not working or what I'm doing wrong or
right. So, for example, if I just let it ride, people get flows,
people get campaigns, and I start to see there's an uptick in spam
complaints then that tells me, okay, I need to pull back a little
on the aggressiveness of the campaigns. That's the first place I
would look. But I'd rather know in black and white than me, just
come up with something, not know what the upside or downside, but
then I don't do it. But I also don't know how it affects my
business in a positive or negative way.
Mark: I
got it. What's a good opening, in your opinion?
Phillip: That's a loaded question because there's
so many factors but what I would shoot for, at a minimum, I would
say 25%.
Mark: That’ll be great. I mean, again,
it’s a loaded question and it's difficult. Every business is going
to be a little bit different. If you're not at that, let’s say that
somebody is listening and they are 15% right now or 12½% or
something like that, which I think is kind of common, depending on
how long and how old your listing is. Lists in my experience tend
to get old and sometimes get a little bit tired, especially with
the older people on there. What are ways that you can increase that
open rate and is it something that they should really be worrying
about as well, in your opinion?
Phillip: I think
it comes down to a lot of the underlying business, but also like
what do they care about most? From my perspective, revenue is the
most important thing. The audience is important. I don't want to
blow up a list and degrade the engagement metrics in favor of
revenue because ultimately revenue is just a lag indicator of the
engagement metrics anyways. So that's going to start to diminish
over time if that's the approach that you take. And so to answer
your question, if the open rate is 15%, I would look at how old is
the audience to your point, how long have they been around for,
what other behaviors or actions have they taken since they've been
on the list that would tell me that they are interested in
receiving more messaging from me. Sometimes I do this, too and you
probably do also but I subscribe to lists. I open their e-mails. I
don't necessarily consume them, but I don't want to unsubscribe
because; this is e-commerce but I don't want to unsubscribe because
there might be something I want to see in the future so I stay on
but I also am not really engaged. So I think that on the one hand
it's looking at kind of the age of the audience and are people
engaged with your site overall? Like when was the last time this
cohort of people has even been on your website? At some point, this
is one thing that a lot of people don't think about is like, how do
I start to clean my list or my audience or where do I draw the line
in the sand to determine these folks who want to be here, these
folks don't, and come up with a strategy to either ask them
finally, do you want to stay or just suppress them or remove them
altogether? But to get the open rate up, that's one place I would
look. Also, if it's a new, relatively new audience, and your open
rate is only 15% what that tells me is there's misalignment between
the message and the audience. So there might be a bad resource or
another example that a lot of people do these days in e-commerce is
they run giveaways, but give away enrollees aren't necessarily the
best subscribers because they're not there because they want to
hear from you. They're there because they wanted something for
free. And that has its own sort of implications and how do you deal
with that but from my experience, the list that I see that are at
12%, 15%, there's a combination of not the best audience, not the
best message for that audience, and also an audience that’s
probably decaying because the strategy for e-mail isn't buttoned up
and so the audience doesn't know what to expect. Therefore, they're
relatively unengaged.
Mark: Yeah, let's close out
with this question here, because we're getting up against the clock
here on our time. What are some key metrics that you do look at
with your list? Obviously revenue, and obviously open rate to an
extent as well, depending on some other circumstances. What should
people be looking at? If there's going to be one thing that
somebody is going to look at as soon as they stop listening to this
podcast and leave in a rating on iTunes because I know everybody
does that; a cheap plug there. What is one thing they should go
over into their ESP and take a look at to say, am I doing well
here?
Phillip: Okay, so I can rattle off a bunch
if that’s helpful.
Mark: Please, yeah.
Phillip: But I think starting with revenue at the
top just to be able to assess overall performance of e-mail as it
applies to revenue for your business is just look at what is the
revenue contribution like from Klaviyo, for example, the last 30
days, 90 days and then breaking it up. What did flows contribute to
that? What campaigns contribute? That'll give you a really good
idea in terms of the heartbeat of the performance of e-mail
overall. Like I said, I would strive for 30% so if that's at 6%
there's a lot of room for improvement. If they’re at 25% they're
still upside but again, I don't like to quote higher than 30
because there's things about businesses. But let's just say you
still have room to improve, but obviously not as much as the folks
at six. So that's what I would look at first. On the campaign side,
I look at open and click. I look at click to open ratio, which
really tells me of the people that open how engaging was this
message for them? Did it resonate with the audience? I'll look at
revenue on a dollar perspective; dollar amount, and then also the
percentage of the people that received the message that bought just
so I can see kind of a take rate and placed order from this
particular campaign.
Mark: I got it. That's great.
Anything else that you'd like to add and if people had questions or
wanted to bounce some stuff off of you regarding e-mail marketing,
where can they find you?
Phillip: I don't have
anything to add other than just think about adding e-mail to your
marketing mix if it's not something that's a focus right now,
that's all.
Mark: Can I double down on that? I
mean, if you're going to buy a business, we talk often about doing
an acquisition, finding places where business is weak, and bringing
a strength to that. That's an easy way to get a fast return on your
investment. If somebody is not doing e-mail marketing with their
e-commerce, then that is an easy opportunity to add more revenue to
a company, especially if the target is 30% revenue mix. I mean,
that provides a nice metric to take a look at to see what is
somebody doing right now and maybe where can we grow this company.
I agree with you 100%, e-mail is the overlooked channel. One of the
few areas where I keep harping on this is and frankly if I see a
business; if I'm selling a business that has a good, solid e-mail
list for somebody to optimize that, I typically give it a higher
valuation because I don't worry about the algorithms changing like
I do on Facebook or any other social media network or getting
overly crowded. E-mail is going to continue to be a champion for a
long time and I know that other marketers agree with this,
especially some seasoned marketers. Where can people contact you if
they have questions about this?
Phillip: You can
find me on Facebook, just Phillip Rivers with two L's or on my site
on the contact us form or something like that. But my e-mail
address is at
phil@gotetra.co.
Mark: Awesome. Phillip Rivers with two L’s not
one.
Phillip: That's right. Not the quarterback
either.
Mark: Not the quarterback. You probably
get asked all the time. Are you a Chargers fan or now Colts fan is
it?
Phillip: By coincidence when he got drafted I
was going to school in San Diego and I also turned 21 at this time
so I would always get double takes by the bouncers. Like who is
this guy with his fake ID.
Mark: You don’t look
like Philip Rivers.
Phillip: And I'm only six
feet. He's like 6’7. But I was a Chargers fan for a long time. I
kind of like just don't have as much time to watch sports. But
yeah, I'm a Chargers fan, but I always appreciate him just because
he's my namesake.
Mark: And there you go. And I'll
tell you what, it gives you a higher open rate because when I saw
that I have an e-mail from Philip Rivers, I'm like, sweet Philip
Rivers is contacting me. Hey Phil, thank you so much for coming on
the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Phillip:
Thanks for having me, Mark.
