- Dylan Kelley
- Founder of Wavebreak
Bio:
Dylan Kelley is the founder of Wavebreak and host of the popular Wavebreak Ecommerce Podcast.
He helps to lead eCommerce brands to maximize their email revenue and stop leaving money on the table.
Sponsors:
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- Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation
Links:
Transcript:
Charles: 00:00 In this episode of the business of e-commerce. I talked with Dylan Kelly about the best email marketing strategies for 2020 this is a business of eCommerce episode 101 welcome to the business of eCommerce. They show the helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles
[inaudible]
and I’m here today with Dylan. Kelly. Dylan is the founder of wave break and he’s an email marketing expert. I asked him on the show today to talk about what marketing strategies you should be using going into 2020 so, Hey Dylan, how are you doing today?
Dylan: 00:36 Doing well. Good to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Charles: 00:38 Awesome to have you back on the show. You are repeat guest. You were here in, what about about a year ago? Episode 60. I think, right?
Dylan: 00:47 Yeah, we’re getting here. We’re getting on almost a year. So it was last January, well, January, 2019
Charles: 00:51 January. Okay. And at the time we talked about email strategy, email marketing strategies for 2019. So now, almost a year later, we’re talking about 20, 20, so
Dylan: 00:58 20, 20 emails still a thing. It’s still making money. And I’m going to tell you how to make more of it in 2020.
Charles: 01:05 Awesome. So a year later, and what do you, what do you know, email still works? How about how about bash?
Dylan: 01:10 It still works, you know, and despite all the fear and EV, everyone, you know, freaking out like, Oh, this and that email’s dying. But no, I mean it’s still, I mean it’s still crushing it for our clients and I mean, it’s going to keep doing that. It’s not going to be like this thing that just one day it’s like, Oh, email just completely dies. Yeah, I mean,
Charles: 01:28 And I feel like every year this becomes, this is a thing, right? Where they’re like, well, social and you can like it, you know, you can build like a Facebook following and like everyone starts doing that and then all of a sudden Facebook kind of locks it down and makes it so well you need to actually pay it every year and followers and like, okay, well, and everyone moves back to email and then like something new comes along and it just, it keeps, it just keeps going around in a circle. But email ever. That’s the one thing that everyone keeps coming back to, it seems
Dylan: 01:54 Right. Like literally over the last 20 years, right? Like basically entire history of, you know, e-commerce on the internet as no a email has been there and you always own your email list. So it’s this asset that just like unlike, I mean, you think about all the social networks that have come and gone, you know, in the beginning, Friendster, MySpace, all these random ones that don’t even exist anymore. I mean, back then you could just rank and bank and it’s not the same anymore. If SEO that changes, you know, every few months you get Facebook doing, you know, their whole, like the whole law with Cambridge Analytica and all these things. Like if people start freaking out, like, you know, they have their new Netflix documentary on it, even I was watching and I was like, wow, that’s pretty crazy. And I know,
Charles: 02:32 Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.
Dylan: 02:33 Yeah. It’s a, it’s a really good movie and it’s actually really freaky because like part of me is like, okay, like, you know, I don’t want Facebook to do anything because like, you know, the industry we’re in, it’s crushing it for everybody. Like a lot of people depending on it at the same time, you know, it is kind of freaky to know that like how many data points they have on people to use to decel. And as people get more freaked out about this and as the government gets involved, like we saw, you know, things happen. Like, you know, Facebook isn’t, at the end of day, you don’t own Facebook. Right. But you do own your email list. Which is really, really important. And, and it’s not going to go anywhere. Like you even see people like talk about, you know, Oh, messenger marketing, right? Like, Oh, this is, this is the future.
Dylan: 03:11 Well, like you don’t even own that list. Because once again, that’s Facebook and I mean we’re starting to see in the messenger landscape too, like, you know, raising prices, like they see people getting insane. ROI is they’re going to want their cut. Same goes for SMS, right? Like people have even been talking about like last 10 years, you know, SMS is the new thing, right? And it’s finally starting to catch on now and now there’s finally, you know, good technology to do that for eCommerce and for retailers. But at the same time, like it’s one of those things where it’s like the, you know, the cell phone company is the people who are, you know, sending these, you know, the ROI is insane, right? And any time a company sees that, like, Oh my goodness, this is so profitable, I bet people would pay, you know, if people are getting 130 X ROI, you know, 60 X ROI is great.
Dylan: 03:53 So why don’t we just double our prices? And then it’s like, before you know it, it’s not as good as it was. But thing about email is it’s just that one consistent channel that’s been here for the last 20 years. It’s not going anywhere, especially not anytime soon. And without it in 2020, you’re going to leave a ton of money on the table money that you already spent to acquire your customers, right? You’re already spending $1,000 a day, $10,000 a day on Facebook ads. And you know, what’s your conversion rate? Two to 5%, maybe 10% if you’re lucky, like in you have some insane website or targeted to traffic or something, but the rest of those people, they’re gone. But what’s great about emails, you can capture those people and you can get your customers to come back for more, which of course, you know, it makes the business a lot more profitable, enables you to scale because now you can spend more on ads because the lifetime value is higher, you know, so on and so forth. And I, I can keep going on that. But that’s the gist.
Charles: 04:41 Yeah. It’s a very like, like for lack of better word, intimate form of communication where you really are talking directly to someone else and you can kind of as tools now we can kind of talk is, you know, they used to just be email blast where you just write out this like, you know, big email to thousands of people and you know, hope that it hits kind of the right people the right way. But now you can almost talk completely like one-to-one with different folks. And it’s really this thing where, you know, you know, Hey, they’re opening it and they really are reading this verse, you know, just like display advertising was, you’re just blasting out to the world. So, yeah, totally agree. Cool. Yeah. So what is, so since we last talked, has anything changed like in the past, you know, six, 12 months or like what has changed in 2019 that was working and isn’t, or, or is there anything or is it still kinda the same?
Dylan: 05:29 Yeah, so that’s a really good question. I mean like the biggest thing is like, and we see this over time, like this has been happening the whole time, but like the reality is people get used to marketing, right? Like they get fatigued, you know, you run the same ad for so long, it could where it’s like crazy in the beginning and then before, you know, and it’s like, okay, this ad’s not working like it used to be. And you know what we’re seeing, you know, running email marketing for some of the top brands and e-commerce is like, people are getting used to the good old, like, like you talked about the batch and blast, like spray and pray. Just like, right. Like so many brands like this kind of brands fall in two buckets, right? They send like no emails, which is terrible. Or they send like w equally bad.
Dylan: 06:08 They just kind of spray and pray. It’s like, Oh crap, labor day is in a week. Or like, you know, like, Oh, black Friday’s tomorrow, let’s just blast out an email real quick. But there’s no real thought behind it. It’s last minute. It’s rushed. Bo, what we see the most successful brands doing is not just doing, taking the spray and pray approach and this is something that we’ve even turned into like a system that we use for all of our clients in like a real framework, we call it the way break method, but the idea is that it’s like reverse engineered email marketing. And what I mean by that is before it used to be like, Hey, let’s set up some email sequences based on best practices. Like tell me the timing, give me this amazing template, amazing subject line, plop it into any store and it’ll be great.
Dylan: 06:47 But the reality is every store is different and every customer is different and everybody like so many of the same Shopify stores all have like the default abandoned cart and like it’s just like the same old same old and you’re leaving a lot of money on the table with that because you’re like you said like you can treat people differently now, but what does that actually look like? Well, you got to think about your list, not as just a list that you blast and make money there. People on your list and you got to think about why do these people buy and why don’t they buy. And what we find is that by taking like this reverse engineered email marketing that I’m talking about that we’ve kind of discovered and we’ve been using with our clients to great success and it’s like taking things back a step instead of just saying like, Oh, we’re going to send out a sale on black Friday.
Dylan: 07:30 It’s like wait, before we do that, why do people not buy from us? And then you think through their objections and you take them off the table. I’m a great analogy of this is this isn’t my, my analogy, I stole this from a book. I forget which book, but it’s like before a customer goes to buy, like they have all these objections in their head, right? There might be like five or six and you can take, and they don’t even know they have these objections, but you can slowly and subtly take them off the table. Like, for example, you know like, Oh like what if this breaks or whatever. Like some of them are more obvious, but it’s kind of, if you think of an airplane conveyor belt, like you’re waiting in line for your luggage and like when you check these boxes with people, when you take their objections off the table, it’s like you’re taking a piece of luggage off the conveyor belt.
Dylan: 08:11 And what’s really cool about email is that you can do this in an extremely targeted way. Like if somebody is on your email list and they haven’t bought yet, there’s probably like 3 million reasons why they haven’t bought. I’m like, I’ll give you an example. Like let’s say you have an online clothing store, you know, they’re thinking like, what if this doesn’t fit? You know, maybe you charge a shipping minimum so they don’t want to pay the shipping minimum or something like that. Or they just have some other totally random objection. And the reality is most retailers, they don’t even address those. They don’t use email to talk about those. All they send out is like selfish emails where it’s like, Hey, buy something, you know, we’ll give you a discount. But like it’s just, they’re, they’re not adding any value, you know, they’re not sending anything besides the sale emails and they’re not actually using email to educate their email list on like reasons to purchase, like educate and persuade them. So that’s kind of a high level overview of where like, if you want to be successful with email marketing in 2020, that’s what you’re going to have to do. Get more personalized and really think about the people behind the emails that you’re sending.
Charles: 09:07 Yeah, I feel like back in the day, going back even, you know, years ago you were almost like excited to get an email. Like, Hey, someone’s emailed me. Fantastic. And like, Oh, Brandon, maybe like the gap really, you know, thanks to gap reached out to me. Right then it got where everyone’s doing right now. It’s at the point where, you know, you need to be more creative. And just like you said, just sending out those sale emails, you can only send that so often. You can’t get, you know, everything’s not always on sale and just sending, you know, your to, you know, your black Friday and your holiday email each year doesn’t really cut it. People kind of forgot who you are. So you need a way of staying in touch with people throughout the year. So what are some things you can do to actually start emailing folks on a more regular basis and not just, you know, like you said, those handful of selfish emails per year and it’s, you know, holiday sale, black Friday. That’s great. You should, everyone should send those, right? That’s fine.
Dylan: 09:57 Yeah, definitely don’t not send those, that’s not what I’m saying at all. You definitely, you need to be sending those emails,
Charles: 10:02 But there’s like 45 more weeks throughout the year. If you’re doing a weekly, there’s another like 40, you should also be emailing. But what is the content, cause you know, you don’t always have something, you know, you don’t always have something great to talk about. So how do you kind of ma, what do you manufacture each week to actually talk about to people? That’s, that adds value.
Dylan: 10:20 Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great, great question. So I mean, like you said, like there’s, there’s over 40 other weeks in the year that aren’t around a sale. And there’s a few ways we approach this. Like, and the reality is like if you’re just sending those emails on black Friday, like you said, people are gonna not, they’re going to be like, who the heck is this? And you’re not gonna make as much money. So by warming your list up and keeping it active and engaged throughout the year, you’re actually going to make more money on black Friday. So some examples of, I’ll give you some exact examples cause so many people just beat around the Bush with this and like nobody even really like one of the reasons why I love going on podcasts like this and you know, we’re actually doing a lot more content ourselves in 2020 with like, you know, specific, actionable, like w guides just filled with examples like given away for free.
Dylan: 11:05 Just cause I’m tired of bad email marketing. We can’t help that help everybody. But like basically what we do with clients is, is kinda like what I said first is like, you know, you just, number one, it’s like you want to be consistent. Like that’s really important and you want to make sure like your, whatever you do, like people are going to get used to it. Like, even if you’re just emailing once per week, people are going to start to expect that from you. And then if you miss one week, it’s like they already start, forget about you. But anyway, like you were saying, what the heck do I send? Well, I mean, really you can we kinda joke around like, w will you find any excuse to email people? But it’s true. Like there’s so many, like it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there’s always news happening.
Dylan: 11:42 There’s always things happening. And sometimes it’s that easy. Like, you know, you just sit down for 30 minutes a week and you turn some news into a, into an email that’s just simply like, Hey, did you, did you know this was going? It’s like, wait, you’re not asking for sale, but here’s what you gotta do. That’s really important. You got to always include a call to action. Every email. Here’s why you want to train people to open your emails. And then you want to train them to click on your emails cause then they hit your site. So when you send that sale email, they’re used to opening and clicking. So what you do is ideally you set up a blog on your site or someplace with lots of content. Like if you can create content and you know, put out one blog post a week or whatever, just like as much content as you can, you can leverage that on your email channel to keep your list engaged and active.
Dylan: 12:25 It’s extremely effective. But what you do is you send this content email like, Hey, did you see this news? You kind of make it click baity and then people click. And then not only did they get pixeled on your site, so you can send them an ads, but also they get used to clicking on your emails. And they’re engaging with your content, right? They’re engaging with your email list. The more engaged your email list, the more money you’re gonna make. So content is a great email to send. Like I also said earlier, it’s like, you know, you know what customers are already asking, you know what their top objections are. Like if a customer calls you, like if you can close, I know like clients come to us, you know, and they’re like, listen, we can close anybody on the phone.
Dylan: 12:59 Like if we get them on the phone, it’s game over. And we’ll say, okay, great. What questions do people have when they’re on the phone with you? And they’re like, okay, well they’re not sure about this. Like a, you know, the shipping or they’re not sure if it’s going to fit or what if they don’t like it, you know, whatever the product is. And then we’ll actually take it one step further and instead of, you know, waiting for that person to give a call or to send a support email, we’ll email it leading up to the sale, like objection busting content. So it’s like, Hey listen, like just, just wanting to make sure you knew. Like, listen, we have a free exchange policy so you never have to worry about ordering the wrong size. Cause if you do, we’ll just ship you a new one of the right size so on and so forth.
Dylan: 13:34 And this can even trickle down into your automated emails to like if you have abandoned cart emails and you notice like, let’s say you have a free shipping threshold of $50 and you’re getting a lot of abandoned carts under $50. Like what is their number one objection? They don’t want to pay that shipping price. So you just slip on that shipping discount. You don’t have to give them like 20% off, 50% off. Like I’ve seen some crazy things just to get the sale. When most people would convert for free shipping because that’s their objection. So you can do that with your onetime sends as well leading up to the sale throughout the year because then what happens is it’s like the conveyor belt, you’re taking these objections off the table and before you know it, the final objection remains. It’s like, okay, it’s like price or whatever.
Dylan: 14:14 But leading up to that point, the people who are going to buy at full price they’ve already bought. And then when you pull that lever on black Friday or whatever, you just make it rain because they have no other objections. Like what if this doesn’t fit? What if this, like it just makes a ton of money. And then the third thing you can do is like if you run an apparel or like a jewelry company or whatever, like we have a lot of clients in those spaces and it’s like, okay, what do I, what do I make content about? Well, you can kind of, you know, figure out some unique ways to do content or you can just simply, you know, be like a lookbook and share different styles or even just showcase your product catalog. Cause the reality is, you know, let’s say you have a thousand skews, let’s even say you just have 50 skews.
Dylan: 14:50 Like nobody’s going to sit through your website and scroll through every page. Like people’s attention spans are shot. Like they scroll through Facebook and like what does the new on like tick talk or whatever that the kids are on now. And it’s just like these like five second videos or whatever. Like that’s how long people are spending on your site. They’re not going to click through all those pages. You can use email to show people like, Hey look, we have these other products. You can show your high margin products and so on and so forth. In a really targeted way like by this, and the best part is like, it’s pretty much free because you don’t have to spend money on ads.
Charles: 15:19 Yeah, I’ve seen the thing that I like the look book idea or actually and this only works for the brands that, you know, if you’re selling, you know, parts of go inside an engine or something, maybe not new, not so cool, but there are
Dylan: 15:29 Vitamins probably not a good idea for a lookbook.
Charles: 15:31 Well, but even, okay, so if you tell them vitamins, you know, you could the people using the vitamins, I guess, I don’t know, like these healthy people and green, you know, green shakes and that sort of thing. So you could start to, it’s almost like your own version of Instagram, Graham on email. Basically on that. You could scroll through, look at some pictures real quick and it kind of shows people, Hey, I can like open this and just kinda get some value real quick. And it’s not this like heavy handed thing. Okay, I’m going to have to go through and it’s a 10 paragraph email and it’s all about buy this, buy this. It’s more, I’m just going to look, look through real quick, see some cool photos. And at the end, like you said, there’s a little, you know, free shipping coupon or whatever it is.
Charles: 16:09 It doesn’t even need to necessarily, it sounds like tie in directly with it. Cause if you have a lookbook it kind of just giving an offer at that and then, Oh by the way, if you like this, here’s a coupon and they know to open it every, you know, every time you send it they’re going to open it. Look, throw. You’re not really asking if they have them, just kind of showing them here’s some cool things. If you want to see more, I’ll click through, go to our blog, here’s some page with some photos. It makes it really easy and it’s easy to generate that kind of content. Yeah.
Dylan: 16:36 People hate being sold but they love buying and what you do is you take their guard down. Like it’s really, you know, it’s like funny because by adding value you end up making more money from people because they have their guard down. They think, Oh I’m not going to open this email cause I’m going to be sold. They don’t think that at all. But they do. When you’re just blasting out discounts, they think, Oh, they just want my credit card. They just want my money. They don’t actually care about me. But if you actually care and they’re like, Oh, what is this? And it’s like, Oh, like it actually they’re excited to get an email from you. Like that’s when you know you’re doing things right.
Charles: 17:03 Yeah, I like that because if you think about most, most of us fall burns on Instagram. And all the brands, they’re not on Instagram. You kinda you, you know, visits like thing where it, you know, put photos, put cool photos. You’re not going to sell to everyone. Maybe one out of every 20 there’s a sale photo, but you’re not really trying to sell on Instagram. You’re showing cool photos, part of that brand. Right. You could do that same thing with email and it really, like you said, lowers the, I’m just going to dread it. I have to open this every day. Kind of click through Marcus, right. And go to my next one. You actually going to open it and scroll through it and look at though. And on Instagram I follow burns STO and just to, Hey, look at the, you know, maybe a watch brand, right? Where let’s look, look at these cool photos. And when they come up with a new product, it’s like, Ooh, let’s actually on that jump through and see more details about that product. And we do this with Instagram and brands. Email really is a smart idea.
Dylan: 17:56 Yeah. And what’s crazy too is like a lot of brands will think, Oh, we’re not gonna make any money from that. Why should we send it like a lot, like even our clients will be like, Hey, can we send more? Like, we were making a ton of money. Can we send more? It’s like, well, you know, you don’t want to fatigue your list, but what’s crazy is like, we see like even when we’re sending content, like we’ll send people to a content piece on the website and that email will generate thousands of dollars in sales. Because like what will happen is like number one, like if you can even insert the piece into the content that works really well too. Like if it’s just kind of like a subtle thing, it’s like, Oh Hey, here’s a great article. And then at the end of the article it’s like, Hey, by the way, this or they’ll just hit the site and then before you know it they’re like, Oh yeah, by the way, I’ve been meaning to, you know, get another pair of pants from these guys or whatever.
Dylan: 18:39 And once again, it’s like they don’t feel like they’re being sold so they convert. And what’s also crazy too is like, we’ve seen open rates go up with clients like dramatically just by doing this. Like we didn’t use any fancy subject line. I mean our subject lines are good, but like we’re not using some hack, we’re not using some like, you know, manipulative thing. Like we’re not throwing in like, Oh, let’s throw in an emoji and see if that makes people open more. It’s like, no, we’re just like starting to add value. And just like you said, like it trains people to like lower their guard down and just like, Oh this is going to be good. Like what, what is, what am I getting this time? Which is really cool.
Charles: 19:08 Yeah. I’ve got a couple of years ago it was all about hacks where you know, you, you had to send you emails Thursdays at 4:34 PM and that was the best day. And like everyone had like this time that like you have to do it at this day, at this time. And then like you said, the subjects became a thing and then emojis on the subjects for a different thing. And then people thought, well you definitely don’t want to put it. And then it turned to no emojis. Definitely don’t do that.
Dylan: 19:29 Yeah. Cause everyone’s doing emojis now. It’s like all emojis in the inbox and yeah. It’s just back and forth.
Charles: 19:34 Yeah. I can only get somebody those little clapping and rocket chips every, every day.
Dylan: 19:38 Right. Or like fire, fire, fire.
Charles: 19:40 Yeah. What sort of content? So let’s say you’re a brand where you actually want to do some written content. I’ve had a guest on here the other day talking about he sells vitamins and you know, different things of that on how you can use them, different things. There’s a lot of content you can generate on a bash. But how about things with let’s say clothing you know, you’re a clothing retailer. How do you actually generate content for some of these other brands where maybe it’s not so much about how to use a product but it’s more just about a visual is, is there a content you can generate other than photos or would you go right to photos if it’s a visual type product?
Dylan: 20:16 I mean I think photo is huge and email like don’t get me wrong, like we send out photos and pretty much every email, I mean I’m all photos or just, Oh this is an email with any text content or is it literally just no like, no, no, no, no. It’ll have, it’ll have texts like always store copy on an email. But like photos are a big part of what we do because email is like one of those things where it’s like the whole email is basically a headline. Like you open the email, you’ve got to catch people’s attention. And if it’s too small, if it’s not eye-catching, you know, people are just gonna be an add on to the next email cause they have a million emails in their inbox. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get him to open your email. So you do want it to look good and get their attention.
Dylan: 20:50 But like, yeah, what kind of content can you send? If you, let’s say you’re, you’re a fashion brand, it’s like, Oh, I can’t send any content. Like, I mean, the look book is a great idea, but I mean like, okay, Dylan, you already said that. All right, cool. Well I have some more ideas. So here’s what you can do. Like one thing we’ve seen brands you really successfully as like, okay, what is your brand about? Because a lot of brands are about something. So, you know, maybe your brand is a lot more outdoors-y. So you create content on the outdoors. Maybe, you know, let’s say your brands like let’s take like movement watches for example, right? Like they’re all about adventure and things like that. So like, notice how like, they’re not just selling watches, it’s like they’re selling this lifestyle of adventure and like travel and all these things.
Dylan: 21:29 So if you look at their content, like what are they doing? They’re doing travel videos, they’re doing travel blog posts, they’re doing like, you know, best destination and things like this. Like, you don’t have to necessarily make it like about the product. And I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up. You can actually, you know, just simply take a step back and be like, okay, you know, what is our brand about? What are our customers about? And you know, just kinda think like, Oh, you know, my customers, my friend. Usually your customer is a person like you. It’s like, what kind of content do they want to see? Like, what, what article would I share with them? Or like what would, what would they find interesting? So I think movement’s a great example for that.
Charles: 22:02 Those movies do a lot of brilliant content or is it more because I actually follow a couple of watch brands. They all give to all people like using the watch and some, you know, it’s like a diver’s watch and it’s someone you know, on the art deck doing some cool thing, you know, like I’ll never do that. But I liked the watch. Oh, someone like in the woods, you know, doing something. Or actually it’s always like a pilot with a watch on, you’re like, well I don’t know how to fly a plane but I like to watch. Right. What would you actually put though as it, could you just do all photos or is there actually some content on the watch brand, the aviation watch? Would you actually kind of include some sort of text in there? Like what would that hook be?
Dylan: 22:37 Yeah, I mean like it depends on your customer, right? Like, I mean, if it’s a high end watch, like people are gonna care about the story behind it, they’re going to care about like the components that make it up. And that’s really like one of our clients is a watch brand actually. And so like, we’ll dive into kind of the specifics of like how it’s made because like a lot of brands have these really interesting products that have like a lot of care and consideration that go into them. But then it’s like, it just gets like one little line on the product page. Like, Oh, we have this strap or we have this movement. It’s like nobody knows what that is. Like, I’m like, even like, like if you think of a brand that’s like movement watches, where it’s like most people buying their watches you know, if you know watches, like you know, there’s different types of movements, right?
Dylan: 23:16 There’s like an automatic movement and things like that. But like the average person buying a movement watch doesn’t know what that is. So you can create content around that. Like, Hey, listen, this movement watch is really cool. Like, it doesn’t require a battery, this and that. Stuff like that. So like that’s kinda like our, I mean you think about your customers, right? And then test it. Like that’s what’s great about marketing and that’s what’s great about email. I was like, what are people engaging with? Are they engaging with video, do more video content? Are they reading written content? Like maybe you sell a high ticket product. That people have a lot of objections so they’re going to want to read a lot of content. Maybe it’s helpful for them to watch a review. Video reviews are another great form of content to send.
Dylan: 23:51 You know, customer generated content like our people, you know, real people wearing the watch, real people wearing the clothes, real people who are reviewing the product. Like especially if it’s a high ticket item. You know, if you have any affiliates who have reviewed your products, sending out content based on, you know, just even saying like, Hey, check out this affiliate review. It doesn’t even have to be your own content that you’re sending people do cause you’re still training people to click. And buy from emails and you’re still taking their objections off the table because they read that review and then they changed their opinion and you know, they open up their mind to your product a lot more than when before they, you know, maybe weren’t interested in buying yet.
Charles: 24:26 I like that. So what, what would the, are there any surprises you kind of see coming up in the next 12 months on, Hey, you know, this was working really great and last year, the last 12 years, but it’s going to start dying off or any kind of things like that where it just, it people should stop doing or it’s just been a big kind of guts or something you see coming that was a little unexpected.
Dylan: 24:49 Yeah, I mean, I think like as fast as the industry moves, it’s still is like really slow where like things aren’t going to like rapidly change overnight unless, you know, something big happens with like, for example, Facebook or you know, like there’s like the tricky part about something like SMS is like, there’s still a lot of litigation around it because it’s such a new and intimate form of communication that’s not saying, you know, don’t do it, but just be careful, you know, with stuff like that. But on the email side, like it’s just you know, people are getting the same old emails every single day from your competition. Like a lot of brands, we’ve been copied their competitions emails, like, you’re not, you’re not gonna make any more money. You’re not going to beat your competition by copying them. And you’re definitely not going to be your competition by not emailing.
Dylan: 25:29 Like, if you’re, like, so many brands come to me and they’re like, Hey, Dylan, like, listen, like, you know, I just feel like we could be doing better. And I’m like, okay, well tell me about your email marketing. And they’re like, well, we have this amazing list. It has like 300,000 people on it, or like, you know, an insane amount of people on it. And I’m like, okay, great. Well, how many of those people are actually opening your emails? They’re like, well, like 40,000. It’s like, okay, 40,000 of 200,000 so, or 250,000, 3000, whatever it was. That’s like nobody on your list. Like you have a 40,000 per person email. It’s not 300,000. How does the list get to that point? You’re not emailing, you’re just spraying and praying these discounts every few months and people forget about you. And the reality is like, you know, people used to say like, Oh, you should send a win back email to get the customer to come back at like 180 days and a year.
Dylan: 26:11 Well, that’s way too long. Like we find with our clients, like most people, if they don’t come back after 50 days, they’re never coming back again. And it’s just like that number drops off. Like after you know, day 14, that number just keeps getting smaller and smaller until day 50. It’s like they’re not coming back. So you really gotta strike fast. Like that’s one thing that’s changing. And number two, it’s like, just send an email like it’s 29 or 2020, well it’s 2019 now, but like it’s in 2020. Like if you’re still not emailing your list, like I mean it’s just, it’s stupid because it’s free money sitting inside of your business. Like not like you don’t have to spend more on ads, you don’t have to, you know, do some crazy thing and your conversion rate, like one of the highest ROI things you can do is just start emailing your list, being consistent about it.
Dylan: 26:54 And you’ll make a ton more money and that’s going to enable more scale on the front end. Because like I was saying in the beginning, like you get a higher lifetime value, like one of our client’s businesses literally tripled because, and I was like, what happened? And he told me like, listen, now that we’re getting a higher lifetime value out of our customers because we have email on the backend that’s consistent. I can spend more on the front end on ads and just enable the whole next level of scale in the business. Like if you want to grow your business in 2020, stop looking for the next marketing hack. If your email marketing isn’t on point, like get that sucker locked in first thing. Like it’ll only take you the first quarter to get it set up and going. And then from there on you can just ride it to profits down. And then Q four comes, your list is nice, warmed up, engaged people are loving your emails. Like you look at a brand like Chubbies, like everybody loves their emails. Like how can you be the Chubbies of your industry and hopefully you’re not competing with them.
Charles: 27:44 Yeah, we don’t want to visit a profit town. There you go. So yeah, profit town when you see, so will grown these big email lists. But I guess actually that’s a good, good question right there. How do you get, how do you actually entice people to get on your email list? I know this year what you’ve seen a lot of folks who is that little popup on, you want a you know, want a 20% discount, I want a discount, give us your email, we’ll send you a coupon. And that’s kinda the, you know, the hook onto the list. Is that something you still see working right now or is that gonna start? Cause I feel like those tactics start to burn out eventually. Where does a little property go to the side and Hey do you want 5% off, give a shit. You know, we’ll email you a coupon. And that’s, I think that’s like the 2019 thing right now. Where is that gonna go? Is that keep going to keep working or people kind of getting a little burnt out from that one?
Dylan: 28:34 Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean like what we’re seeing is like people aren’t necessarily getting burnt out yet, but I mean it’s kinda like everything. Like people are now expecting it, but there’s people real random people like you know, like your aunt or your uncle or whoever who are abandoning cards because they figured out it’s a thing. But I mean that just means you just got to keep testing and keep looking at your numbers. But no, I think, you know, email capture tools like, you know, adjust, you know, or an optin monster privy, something like that. It’s still a great way to grow your email list. And I don’t see it going anywhere yet, but I mean it’s just like email. Like it’s so like occasionally you’ll come across one and you’re like, wow, this one is great. I’m like, try your best to, to, you know, make it like that.
Dylan: 29:11 And same with your emails. Like everybody, it’s like, Oh, like here’s it. Are people going to open your emails and say, Oh, this is a typical email. Are people gonna land on your site and be like, Oh, here’s another one of these crappy popups in snipe and mobile optimized. You’re like, it’s not like some people don’t even have them connected to your email list. Like big brands. Like I’ll go and I’ll just, you know, cause I’m an email guy, I like going on unsubscribed email lists for fun. So that’s like a weird thing in itself. But like some brands that really have a connected or they, they’ll send out like one email. You know, I mean that’s still a great way to your list. And then also to like I’m just like, people send so much traffic to their website. So like there’s different ways you can do it where it’s like if somebody leaves your site, you know, with exit intent you can target them.
Dylan: 29:51 One thing we’ve seen that works really well with clients is if you position your offer around like your sales. So like if it’s, you know, for example, black Friday or whatever the sale is, you’re running new year sale what you can do is like, say like, instead of just like, Oh, it’s a discount for no reason. I’m like, Hey, you can just be like and you’re like, we’re running our black Friday promotion right now for 20% off. Unlock the discount code. You still get the email as the lead and you end up converting a lot more people because then you can follow up with emails, Buster objections like we talked about in the beginning and go from there.
Charles: 30:23 I like that cause I feel like you would always have some sale and it always kind of gives us like time horizon, right? Where give us your email for the black Friday sale. Give us for the Christmas sale, new ESL. I dunno, the Valentine’s day sale after that, there’s just, you can always keep, you know, this father’s day, mother’s day, whatever.
Dylan: 30:40 Oh my goodness. Yeah. You’d be surprised. Like we have a whole list like by industry that we use for our clients. Like for example, we’ve a client in the you know, like the pet industry, there’s like puppy day and after puppy day there’s Chihuahua day and after Chihuahua day it’s like cat pod day. Like it’s so funny. There’s so many different, you know, excuses in the holidays. Anyway, just a quick side note.
Charles: 30:58 No, I liked that because that gives that kind of, you know, time pressure onto it, right? Where yes, you’re not just saying, yes, give us your email, 5% discount. It’s just this very, and because that person knows I’m not ready to buy, I’ll just come back next week and they don’t come back next week and it’s over. But if you say the black Friday sale and black Friday is a hope by Sunday, they know, okay I have to do it right now. I have to get the coupon I have to buy. So it puts us time pressure on that you don’t otherwise get by the generic, just email for our coupon, sort of a sort of trade right there. So that gives you this like this very, it drastically increases a time, an increase, decrease the time, increases the pressure right there. And you could put, you could do that forever so you could always just keep manufacturing your own sail forever. That’s always two weeks away. So the person can’t say, Hey, I’ll be back or I’ll, I’ll remember. They know they have to do it now,
Dylan: 31:49 Right? Yeah, yeah. I mean you can even alternate it month to month. Like, you know, January, it’s your new year sale. February, it’s your Valentine’s day sale. And that’s one thing too. It’s like, just like little next level things like that. Like everyone’s looking for the next hack or the next, you know, live what’s the app like get out of my Shopify store. But it’s like really, it’s like you can just do something as simple as, you know, switch the wording from you know, new year’s sale to Valentine’s day and you’ll get more conversions just because you know, like it’s like you said, if it feels more urgent, all of these things and you know, it’s still honest. Like the one thing that’s really bad is like false scarcity because people really get used to that and then they really get annoyed. You know, they’ll unsubscribe like crazy. The market is spam and you know, they’ll take it out on your customer service team really bad.
Charles: 32:27 Yeah. Well I think what the sale is, you really can have a sale and you really can have specific items that maybe fit better with Christmas, might fit better with father’s day, mother’s day. Like you click 100% like those they actually make sense because you really could have certain items that really do work and you can really send any, it’s really tailored to that holiday. So it’s not just like fake thing that you’re manufacturing. Like you said, it really is. You know, if you sell, you know if you sell tires you might not want to have a mother’s day sale. Might not make so much sense, but you want to have things do fit and they make sense and you can see where certain holidays fit in for your particular brand.
Dylan: 33:02 100% yeah. That’s the biggest thing is like don’t just take advice as one size fits all. Like tailor it to your brand, tailor it to your market.
Charles: 33:09 What other things would you do to kinda, what other things would you trade for an email address? So I get kind of the coupon, the 5% off. Are there any of the kind of clever little trades you found on, Hey, give us your email and we’ll give you X?
Dylan: 33:21 Yeah. Like a giveaway is a really good one that, that we’ve seen work really well. You know, and then you just pull someone from a hat basically. I mean, you don’t actually, like you do all virtually, but like he essentially pulled the person from the hat once a month. You know, and then you can do some cool things like, Hey, you didn’t win, but like, then you still, you can pull a lever on a discount or you know, something. One other thing that’s cool is like free gift with purchase, like limited time only orders over X dollars. Get this. Like a lot of brands will even be doing offers like this already. Or like, you know, free shipping. Even like, I mean test everything. That works really well depending on your brand. Like I know Tortuga backpacks, like they’ve always done Mike a, you know, get a packing list because they sell like a travel bag and you know, that does really well. So like if you can squeeze, you know, something that’s not sale related for an email address, like that’s awesome.
Charles: 34:10 The free gift. That’s a good one too. There’s definitely little things like that that if you can just, it could be small, it doesn’t need to be high in monetary value, but you are giving away something for free. And like you said, even the list that’s, it’s even something virtual basically that you can just give a free, there is no, there’s no scarcity to that. But people, if people really do appreciate that, then it’s something you’re really trading, it’s something of value but it doesn’t really cost you anything. So that’s really just things like that and a real kind of things to try at least for your brand to see if it works.
Dylan: 34:38 Yeah, for sure. I mean test it and I mean, chances are you have something lying around that you could even use already. Like you know, like look book or you know, something like that and test it. What’s great is like, you know, we have this data so you can run it against a diff discount and see, and then you can look at the back and it’s like, okay, we’re getting lower conversions but because we’re not giving 20% off, we’re actually making more money or, or whatever. So like that’s a number advice. The number one advice I have for people is like, you know, just tests. Like that’s what’s great about email or that’s what’s great about eCommerce is we have the data. So instead of just, you know, assuming like, Oh, this is the best subject line cause I got it from my friend or I read an article about it or you know, whatever, you know, you don’t take it implemented in your store, AB tested and then you can actually find out and you might find out that, you know, there’s no difference at all or it could be big enough that, you know, you end up making a lot more money.
Charles: 35:23 Awesome. All right, super helpful. I think I think a lot of people should at least start looking at this if they haven’t looked at email 2020. So yes, that guys, so they go if people want to find you, learn more about you have the podcast
Dylan: 35:39 Where can people listen to the podcast and what can they also learn more about what you’re doing? Yeah. So you listen to my podcast at wave break, podcast.com. Or you just look up wave podcast in iTunes. You can find our website@wavebreak.co where you just Google wave break, w a V E B R. E. a. K. and I just remembered like if you want, everything I talked about is something that like, I mean, I know I talked about a lot and you’re like, okay, well like what do I even do first? So I actually have a checklist. It’s called, I call it the email success checklist. It’s basically a list of everything I talked about. Like, here’s everything you need to be successful with email marketing less than five minutes. What you can do is, you know, literally set it next to your email software, go through it and unless if five minutes to know exactly what you’re missing and then what you need to do to take your email marketing to the next level. Like it’s that simple. You can pick that up@emailsuccesschecklist.com. Yeah, email success checklist.com. Awesome. I will link to that show notes. Thank you very much for coming on today, Dylan. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s always, it’s always good to be on the business of eCommerce podcast and always going to be talking about email. Yeah. Maybe we’ll do another episode next year. We’ll do this. We’ll make it an annual thing. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Have a good one. Thanks for having me again.
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