Leveraging Email Marketing to Grow your Business (E125)

• Chase Dimond
• Partner at Boundless Labs

Show Notes:

• Map out the touchpoints
  • 2 buckets
    • Post-Purchase
    • Pre-Purchase
• Campaign side
• 20% Open Rates
• 1-3 Campaigns Per Week
• Holiday’s as an anchor
  • Send 7-10 Days ahead of the sale
  • Extended Sale
• Build 2-4 Master Templates
• Drip emails
  • Great to educate
• Daily newsletters
  • The Hustle
  • Morning Brew
  • The Skimm
• Joanna From Copy Hackers
• 80/20 Rule – You need to be strict 80% of the time
• Segment List
  • Sending people who engaged
  • Predict gender based on the name
  • Geolocation
• Bonus Tips
  • Send email based on what they click in the first email
  • Popups for users on the list
  • Site abandonment

Bio:

Chase brings a unique and advantageous perspective to email marketing having experience in almost every aspect of email (from ecommerce email marketing to cold email marketing to even building and scaling email newsletters and everything in-between).

Chase is the Co-Founder of Boundless Labs — a top ecommerce email marketing agency. Since launching Boundless Labs in June of 2018, they have helped their clients send hundreds of millions of emails resulting in over $25 million in email attributable revenue. A few of our clients include: The Chive, IBEX, Original Grain, TUSHY and Vinyl Me Please.

Additionally, Chase, as briefly mentioned above, has tons of experience with cold email, having delivered millions of cold emails into users’ primary inbox. Lastly, he’s helped acquire millions of email subscribers for brands he’s built personally as well as for his client’s businesses.

Sponsors:

• Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!
• Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation

Links:

• https://www.boundlesslabs.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedimond/
• https://www.instagram.com/chasehunterdimond/

Transcript:

Charles (00:00):

In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talk with Chase Diamond. Well, how to leverage email marketing to grow your business. This is the business of eCommerce episode one 25

Charles (00:16):

Today’s episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It’s a world’s first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you’re ever in an eCommerce store, you need to have drip to try and. Here’s why. Drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There’s robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing, one of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It’s powerful, but also easy to learn. Unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation. To get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that’s drip.com/b O E now under the show. Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Charles Polaski and I’m here today with chase diamond. Chase is the cofounder of boundless labs, a top email marketing agency since launching boundless labs in June of 2018 they have helped their clients and hundreds of millions of emails resulting in over a 25 million and attributable revenue. I asked chase on the show today to chat about how you can use email to help grow your eCommerce business. So, Hey chase, how are you doing today?

Chase (01:38):

I’m doing well, thank you. How are you doing? Yeah. Awesome to have you on the show.

Charles (01:41):

So email marketing. I kinda, we were talking before the show about this and this, it’s a very wide world. We kind of talk about that. What do you usually, when you kinda start looking at initially the eCommerce business, right? What do you kind of focus on first? Are you looking at a kind of a transactional sort of thing? Marketing? Like what makes sense [inaudible] to begin with?

Chase (02:05):

Yeah. So I don’t actually focus as much on transactional. The nature of like order or shipping confirmations, those are fairly straight forward. I think a lot of people in a lot of companies can make their transactional emails look a lot better, right? Most people just set them up in Shopify or whatever platform they’re on and they kind of just set it and forget it. So where I kinda come in really is on the low hanging fruit on the automation side. So what are the core flows that you have? What are the core flows that you’re missing? So for me, kind of the three core flows, and I’m always ensuring that people have at the bare minimum is the welcome series, right? So greeting new subscribers, the abandoned checkout, basically pushing those people over the ledge to make sure that they’re buying from us. They might’ve, you know, forgot about us.

Chase (02:47):

They might have been waiting for an email to see if there was a discount. Maybe we didn’t offer free shipping. Right? So the abandoned checkout emails inherently have really strong engagement and really strong conversion. And then a post-purchase, right? Thanking customers for their order. So those are the first things that I’m looking at to make sure that people have. And if they do have that the bare minimum, then I’m looking to build upon that base to have further touch points with the customer depending on where they are as a subscriber or in their customer journey. So that’s kind of on the automation side. And then on the campaign side, I’m going in and looking at like, you know, what kind of segmentation are people using, what are their open rates? You know, our goal on the campaign side is to be at or above 20%. And I’d say most people are well below that 20 minutes

Charles (03:28):

Open rates or

Chase (03:29):

Click correct. Yeah. Sorry for the openers. Oh man, I wish it was a 21st century.

Charles (03:33):

I was going to say. Wow, that’s a good benchmark of that clip though.

Chase (03:36):

Yeah. Our clients would be printing even more money than they are. But yeah, so 20% open rates, kind of the benchmark that we’re looking for on campaigns. And typically I think the biggest reason that people are not hitting that as one of two things, either either sending to the wrong segment that could be, they’re sending it to everyone or they’re sending to a segment that’s a little bit too generous. It might be, you know, 180 day engaged, they’re sending it to where it really should be at a one 20 or they’re not leveraging any AB testing. Right. They’re not testing subject lines, they’re not testing content, they’re not doing any testing. So the long winded, those are kind of the things that I focus on both on the campaign and the automation sides when I’m first looking at an account.

Charles (04:14):

Yeah. It’s funny you talk about the touch points. It was actually just on a mastermind call with another couple of founders. And we’re kind of just discussing something. One of the businesses and someone mentioned kind of just going through it very strategically and mapping out those touch points. And I think that’s not something a lot of people do enough. Mmm. And just those. And when you say touch points, I guess kind of let’s expand upon that a little. What do you, how do you kind of describe those ways someone interacts with the business?

Chase (04:41):

Yeah. So every person on your list, they’re either in one or two buckets and sometimes they’re in both. One bucket is they’re a subscriber and they’ve never bought from you. So that’s, you know, oftentimes those emails are pre-purchased, right? And other times people have purchased from you. So the other types of emails are post-purchase. So those are the two lenses that I’m looking between. So pre-purchase, those are things like the welcome series, the site abandonment emails, the browse abandonment emails, the abandoned Carson, the abandoned checkouts. Right? So those are all the touch points that I’m looking at. Pre-Purchased. I’m on the automation side, right? Obviously on the campaign side, those people will be getting hit regularly with all different types of offers and messages. But kind of going back to the automation side on the post-purchase, right? It’s having messages from the day that someone’s bought from us all the way out to the point where like someone needs to buy from us again, whether that be in the form of like a customer win back our across our upsell all the way to the point of someone being at the point of churning.

Chase (05:35):

Right. And then we need to send them basically what we call a sunset on engage, which is a fancy way of saying a breakup series. Right? So we’re trying to hit people pre and post purchase and we typically build out content, you know, up to like 180 days out. Right. and obviously they don’t get hit every day, you know, cause some people might get hit once a week, other people might get hit every couple of weeks, once a month depending on what they aren’t taking.

Charles (05:59):

I’m curious, actually, I was on a call with the founder a couple of days ago. One question actually you raised was what is the right cadence to send emails and you see this all the time. This is like one of those things. I’m curious to get your opinion on that. Cause I’ve been on some email lists where they sending out like three a day and you’re like, really? Is that normal? And there’s other ones we don’t have from them, but like months, what do you kind of see as the right blend there?

Chase (06:22):

So I’m going to give you a range and I’m going to kind of give some more information on that. So most of our eCommerce clients are sending in the ballpark of one to three campaigns per week. And then typically if you added, you know, automations, depending on how engaged people are are they might trigger, you know, an abandoned cart or an abandoned checkout on top of that. Maybe a customer. Thank you. So I would say on average, people are probably receiving some kind of email probably in the ballpark of two to four to three to five times a week from us. And again, that content is very differentiated. What I always tell people, at least on the campaign side, it started with one campaign per week. See what the open rates are, see what the click throughs are, but also just as important, look at the marked as spam, looking at the unsubscribe, and also look at the support tickets, right?

Chase (07:04):

So you have to take both the qualitative and quantitative data that you have and say, okay, we have great open rates with great click throughs and the unsubscribes and the market has spams. We’re also really good. Great. So one email for sure per week is okay, let’s try two emails per week. What happens? Okay, great. It looks like we can send three emails for a week or we send that 30 email per week. Oh man, that’s the point. I wish a lot more people are unsubscribing marketing a spam and complain that we’re sending too many emails. Then you know, the sweet spot between maximizing revenue by minimizing churn is two times a week. Right? So that’s kind of how I explain it. Like really simply to our, to our clients is we’re gonna start with one. You know, the goal is going to be at two or three campaigns per week. And, and we’ll go from there. So that’s kinda how I think about it. What are your thoughts?

Charles (07:50):

Yeah, I mean I feel like it testing is really kind of the key here, like you said, just because depending on the segment of the market like one of the ones I know that I’ve been on like the click funnels email lists and they’ll just, but last year and Russell, the founder of click funnels expert marketer, so it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong. It’s just, I think the, that group, their appetite for receiving multiple emails is just very high. Then there’s other sides where whatever, maybe just someone that’s not on email all day every day. If I by email my plumber, you know, five times a day, he’s literally gonna think I’m like attacking him. Like just because he’s probably not sending email for 10 hours a day. Like a lot of marketers are. So it really comes down to testing, like you said, just because you don’t know the answer is there is no like, yeah, there is no standard answer. One day could be too much. Like, you know, one a week might even be a little aggressive or in other markets you could do three, four day. So it’s, it seems to vary wildly depending on the market is what I’ve kind of found.

Chase (08:50):

Yeah. And one other thing to add too, it depends on the season. Like is it black Friday and cyber Monday, then you have permission, you know, permission to write in quotes to email people more frequently. Right. so I also think that part’s really important to that. I don’t think that people talk enough about,

Charles (09:05):

Yeah, you can go this any holiday. You can always just make up a reason. You know, you’re like Valentine’s day, you’ll get an email from my LLB and saying like by the matured and you’re like, I don’t think so, but okay. Maybe that’s a stretch. Yeah. So yeah, any of those almost any holiday you could, like you said you have this like free get out of jail free card just to keep blasting them a little extra that week it seems like.

Chase (09:28):

Yeah. And because that’s been kind of the impression that we’ve been given by customers and that’s what brands want to do. We’ve actually been using holidays as an anchor. And what do they mean by that? Is like for example, you just mentioned Valentine’s day I know that obviously every single e-commerce brand in the country in the world is gonna send an email. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get ahead of it, right? We’re trying to send an email seven to 10 business days ahead of that introducing the sale, right? And then on Valentine’s day we’re then sending the sale like everyone else. But hopefully by that point we’ve already made enough revenue that that sale doesn’t perform as well because it’s so crowded and it’s okay. And then what we might also do on the backend is like, if we want to squeeze even more revenue, you know, Valentine’s day sale extended, right?

Chase (10:09):

Or, or this year, actually what we had done too is we had sent an email a day or two later on single’s awareness day, right? It’s like, Hey, you know, you weren’t this Valentine’s day thing and it’s just a, it’s just kind of like a friendly, funny way to keep the promotion going. Or most people are just very linear and laser focused on just Valentine’s day. Right? I think most of our clients and most accounts we audit, that’s like the only campaign bucket they know about is like Valentine’s day and special offers for us. There’s seven others, right? Like there’s nine different campaign contents that we’re constantly rotating between to ensure that customers are not just receiving offers. And on the other end they’re not just receiving content. Right. We’re really making it a nice hybrid of a nice mix.

Charles (10:46):

Gotcha. So when you’re saying seven to 10 days ahead of the sale, you’re emailing folks and saying, in 10 days we’re going to have a sale. So just like you’re getting them ready for it, you don’t even send an email telling them you’re having a sale, you got an email saying get ready, cause I’m gonna send you another email soon telling you that we’re having a sale.

Chase (11:02):

So both so sometimes we’re rolling in the sale early. Like, Hey, this, this sale as a heads up is only good for 24 hours. The main sales coming in a week, be on the lookout for that one. Or we might say to someone like three days in advance, Hey, you know, Hey Charles, is this sales going out in three days? Make sure to add this to your calendar, right. And there’s ways to add like a calendar link within an email so that way if people opt into the calendar invite, they’re also getting like a push notification or a counter message as well. So there’s a lot of really cool things you can do both with letting people just know in advance that a sales coming or actually just pushing the sale early and just saying, Hey, Valentine’s day came early. Make sure you shop this offer. By the time Valentine’s day actually comes around, we might be out of stock. You might be too late.

Charles (11:44):

Yeah, I liked that answer. The nice part about doing this is a lot of kind of like you said, sending someone to a little calendar invite sort of thing. You can keep using that kind of that module as like a building block in your business and you can just keep, okay, we’re going to do that every those, like you said, I don’t know, seven, 10 holidays, we can singles day, you could just keep making up different holidays, right? And you could just keep using that same block and just insert a different offer in the different holiday. She uses a copy just a bit, but it’s kind of the same fundamental concept and just keep repurposing.

Chase (12:16):

Yeah, exactly. Like the templates we built are absolutely stunning and beautiful. But that being said, like they’re all modular. So to your point, you just pretty much drag and drop elements in and out. And one of, one of the things that we do do is we do recycle content, right? So from this plat pass black Friday, cyber Monday, the concept that perform well, you better believe this next cyber Monday and black Friday that we’re going to reuse a lot of those elements. Right. You know, some of the copies, some of the logos, some of the assets might change, but we’re going to use a lot of the core and the base that worked previously. So we do that both on campaigns. But one other thing that we do kind of in the same vein is we’ll sound like education content as a campaign, let’s say. And every month we’ll pick like the one or two best campaigns and we’ll drop those into a specific educational flow that happens either pre or post purchase that we already know it’s going to work. We already tested it on our audience and we know it’s going to work and then we’ll just exclude anyone that’s already received it as a campaign. So we’re always recycling, we’re using content.

Charles (13:09):

Yeah, I think that that’s one of those things when you first starting off with email, any sort of email marketing, it just seems so daunting, right? I have to build templates and you basically have like this, like, you know, you find a little template and then you’re like, just as a blimey Carissa and you’re like, Ooh, I have to type something. You know, I’ve typed it, I’m really engaging here and it just seems so just such a high mountain to climb. But then as you do it on email three, four, and five, you’re like, Oh, we already have that template. We already have kind of the, the header, the footer, we have all this stuff. And now you just popping in a couple of paragraphs and you’re like, Ooh, that was actually, you know, went from like ours in the first one to like minutes to get it ready. And that’s kind of impressive how that works.

Chase (13:47):

Yeah. And we typically build, let’s call it two to four kind of master templates, right? So we’ll build kind of like one or two master templates for campaigns which are pretty specific to those. And then we’ll build one or two master templates for automations, right? So the welcome series will kind of have maybe its own template, whereas like all the abandoned emails, so the browse abandonment, the site abandonment, the abandoned cart, they’ve been in checkout, they all have the same structure and format. So it’s really just switching in different dynamic blocks and pieces. So it’s very much plug and play. So email and using it the way that we do, it’s become very efficient and therefore very effective.

Charles (14:21):

I like that. Yeah. I feel like that’s, that’s an a gift. People write that, they start doing it. Everyone has like these big hopes and dreams. And then like, you know, the first couple of weeks you’re like, I got this, I got this. And something comes up and you just get kind of, you know, you kind of fall off the horse and then it’s hard for people to kind of keep it, get it going again. What do you kind of, do you do much with drip emails that kind of like these evergreen content funnels that you kind of put folks in and you know, Hey, we have a sequence with 10 emails and everyone that does X is going to drop into this.

Chase (14:52):

Yes and no. Like we, we do have what we call like an educational flow. And these are for mainly for products and companies that sell things like CBD supplements or products that need a lot of like education and handholding and kind of further Steli after someone’s purchased. Basically teach them how to use it, how they should feel. So for example, like let’s say with the supplements company post-purchase, we kind of have an educational flow that says like, Hey, Charles, while your orders out, we wanted to let you know more information about this product. Make sure you consume it every single morning with your breakfast or I make sure you drink enough water. You know, here are some of the things that you should probably feel. You know, you probably should go through our products every couple of weeks. So all of these things like subconsciously are training people how to use it, which then set up like replenishment flows, right?

Chase (15:37):

We’re then able to teach people how to use the product. So then we know we could remarket to them four weeks later and they’re gonna buy again. So we’ll, we’ll build out flows like that and then kind of fall apart on, we’ll have education, right? So we have a company that sells like hydration packets, right? So we’re teaching people about the importance of being hydrated, right? And how it’s important for your, for your memory, how it’s important for your workouts, how it’s important for your sleep. So we’ll have all these contents that like, you know, the research and the studies have proven this, so it’s not going to change on a monthly or even a yearly basis. We might want to go in and updated maybe every six months or every 12 months, but more or less, it’s kind of evergreen in that sense where it’s not going to change too often. And those performance great, right? When you’re not trying to sell and you’re just trying to educate, you really can build that bond with your customer and therefore build that trust.

Charles (16:23):

Yeah, I’m a superhuman user. I don’t know if you’re familiar. It’s a, okay. Yeah. And their email if you, I think it’s costs, it’s $35 a month or something. But people should stand up just to see the onboarding email sequence. It is so good. And I believe the founder’s name is rat hole. All the emails come directly from him and every day you get one and you’re like, I actually kind of like, you get it and you like look forward to it and you read through it and like this is great and you can reply back. And he like replies to you. It’s like, it’s, it’s like this weird onboarding sequence. Probably one of the better ones I’ve seen. I’m not even an eCommerce, but just just to see, and it’s all, like you said, educational, right, so be human. It’s, there’s a learning curve and they kind of, each one is basically to educate you has a new feature for today. A couple of days later, here’s another new feature and that’s, and it goes for weeks and you kind of look forward to each one, which is amazing. Yeah.

Chase (17:13):

Piggyback on the unrelated T commerce. But like that’s the reason like the hustle morning brew, the scam, right? Those editorial emails are so popular. No, no, the conference, not necessarily evergreen, but like the fact that like they’re written in such a strong editorial voice.

Charles (17:25):

It’s one of those

Chase (17:26):

The hustle and mourning group, those three are all seven, eight figure newsletter brands, right? Like their business literally is a newsletter where they send daily content educating their subscribers about current events and happenings and, and teaching them. So unrelated to kind of what you talked about in terms of evergreen, but to the point of like superhuman, like I look forward to receiving those emails every single day because I truly do learn something every single day. You know, as a person. And then I also learned something every single day. Like as a brand owner. Right. I’m a great, I love the way they did this copy. Oh, I love this design. Oh, it’s so simple. I love how they made this analogy, right? So, so to your point, like email is such a powerful channel if you harness it correctly to get people really excited and to get them looking forward to what’s next. And you know, as you train people to open your emails, you know, inherently you’re going to have more chances to convert them.

Charles (18:18):

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, definitely. What were the three actually I want to make sure I get those for the show notes.

Chase (18:22):

The hustle is one. Morning brew is the other and then the Skimm,

Charles (18:28):

The Skimm, I never heard of that one.

Chase (18:30):

Yeah. Will female focus, they probably have an audience of like five to 10 million females. Very millennial focus and it’s really kind of teaching women about current events and talking to them like it’s girls kind of at the office talking around like the water cooler. It’s very casual. It’s very fun. And it’s just really cool to see what they’ve done.

Charles (18:49):

Yeah, that’s one of those little tricks. If you’re going to send email, sign up for other folks, email that, just have a, like for example, click funnels you sign up for the email and I guarantee the click funnels format and the skim format, probably polar opposites, but just to get an idea of what things might work or working. For some folks it just kind of gives you, and neither both or neither might work in your business, but at least the nice thing is you just have things to try and that’s kind of the whole thing kind of with marketing is you’d have to try something and see if that kind of resonates and then try something else and see does it resonate more or less. And that’s basically the rinse and repeat at that point.

Chase (19:25):

Yeah. So kind of random but interesting. Like I’m actually in terms of getting clients, like people actually sign up for like our clients websites, right? They want to see their emails, whether there are competitors that, I just look to these brands as aspiration and you don’t even know how many times it’s somewhere on that list. We’ll actually email the brands and I’m like, Oh my God, I love your emails. I love your content. Like how do you do these? You do them in house, you use an agency. And like you’d be surprised at how many leads we’ve gotten just from other companies, whatever, whatever reason, not even knowing us signing up for these brands emails cause they heard about them. And then we ended up getting like an intro from a client like saying, Hey, this brand X, Y and Z loved the emails. Like are you open to working with them? It’s like, Oh my gosh. Like these are all these many billboards in the world for us just because we love what we do and we’ve done such a great job. And people like, like to your point are coming to these emails as their examples of kind of their North star. Like, Oh, this is what our welcome series should look like. This is what our abandoned cart should look like. So it’s kind of interesting.

Charles (20:20):

Yeah. So here’s my little, this is my little secret thing I do with this. I sign up for a bunch of them. Yeah. Everything goes to Gmail. I set automatic labels, so these get labeled and archives automatically. And then when I’m writing some sort of campaign somewhere in the future, now I can just go through this list and I just have banks have hundreds of emails. So when I’m in that, like I’m going to generic meals mode, I can just, I have my research sitting right there in my Gmail. I can just go through these 10 different labels and they’re all just waiting me and that’s been so I don’t even, a lot of them, they’re not even things that I, like you said, it might be a brand for mothers or someone, you know, it might not resonate with me, but I just kind of then go, okay, let’s just pick out some elements and see what’s working for these different, and then just the nice part is I don’t need to do it when I’m ready to write the email. It’s already sitting there kind of collecting the data and then I just, yeah, poke into all of them and look at the different things later on and using them as my assets. That’s my, that’s my secret tip.

Chase (21:14):

Yeah. And what I do, I do that too. And what I tell people, like people hate cluttering their personal inbox. I would make even a separate email that’s literally just for signing up for newsletters. Right? That way they’re organized, it’s very searchable. And there’s also other tools, right? Like there’s a cycle, like really good emails. There’s a site called mail charts that actually do like sign up for all these lists and they post them on a website and it’s searchable by category. Right? So you could go on and look, I know we’re recording this in March, right? But things coming up, it’s like st Patrick’s day, you know, April fools, right? So I can literally go into one of these tools and search March, March 17th st Patrick’s day, and see other brands, examples. So that’s also another cool thing that we do.

Charles (21:52):

Yeah. I like that. It’s funny. That’s something I’ve done too. So I thought it was my secret. But apparently all of us do that. I guess. Not everyone, we have people who don’t, you should do that. As far as sending campaigns, I had Joanna from copy hackers on here a while back and she talked a lot about kind of that segmentation. And I, I know even with me, I was taking notes on how powerful that is. And I think even the more of that I’ve realized I’ve none. Mmm. It just drastically increases open rates, click through rates, everything. Can you talk a little bit about that? Cause I, and I know I’ve talked to other folks about that interview and they’ve talked about how powerful that has been on, cause you open rates can literally go from like single, even like lower like sub 1% [inaudible] the high double digit percentages just by that, like super segmentation.

Chase (22:48):

Yeah. So I think it’s important to start this with back, back in the day, you know, five plus years ago you know, ISP is like Google, Yahoo, Hotmail. They used to reward actually people that sent in bulk, right? So everyone kind of got trained at like quantity is the best thing, right? I’m going to send more emails to people, I’m gonna make more money. That script has completely flipped. Or now it’s all about quality and consistency. So now we will Hotmail, Yahoo, you know, whoever all the ice is, they’re rewarding people that are sending the people that want to open their emails and enter doing it consistently. Right? So I kind of talk about like the 80 20 rule where like 80% of the time you have to be very strict in your segmentation and the 20% of the time for things like black Friday or cyber Monday, then you maybe it can kind of loosen it up and be a little bit less strict and kind of send it more people to get the message out there.

Chase (23:35):

But, but list segmentation is everything. So kind of the rules of thumbs that we have is if people are sending every single day or multiple times per week, their segments that they’re looking at should tighter, they should be looking at day 30 day, 45 days, 60 engaged. Basically saying that someone’s either opened or clicked an email in the past 30 days, past 45 days or the past 60 days. The reason that that’s typically shorter and tighter than something else is because you’ve given these people so many chances to open and they have an open. So say you send every single day, right? Monday through Friday, you’re sending 20 campaigns a month. If people have an open 2040 60 of your emails in a row, the likelihood of them actually ever opening is very low and you’re actually hurting yourself more than you’re helping yourself by sending to those people.

Chase (24:19):

So if you’re someone that’s more normal and sentence, probably two times a week, you know, a couple times a month you could then potentially get away with like a day 75 a day, 90 120 to engage just because people have had blessed chances actually engage with your emails. So that’s kind of how I think about it. And again, the way that you test this is you have a benchmark of 20% open rates on campaigns. If you send a day 30 people and you have like a 40% open rate, like you crushed it, then you can extend that to like a day 45 or day 60 and kind of find that sweet spot between maximizing number of people you’re sending to without risking your account health and therefore your deliverability. So that’s kinda how I think about it. Is that helpful? Charles, do you want me to kinda dive into anything else there?

Charles (25:01):

One question is they Derrick segmentation. I feel like some people get tripped up on like what to segment and how to segment. And drip is a sponsor of this week’s episode. They have, I know they have like some awesome things you can, people that have looked at this product, people have done that. And some people then go, then they get a tool like drip or these different email tools and they go a little too far cause then you’re like, I guess I’m on the list down to like just send an email to Joe. Like I’m just basically emailing someone at that point. So you can go, you can go really far with them. Email a hundred percent or I’m just gonna email this one guy. Where do you kind of see how, what are some ideas on how to actually slice the different segments?

Chase (25:43):

Yeah, so let me, let me give you a kind of a tangible example. We’ve got a client that sells like Merino wool. They sell like apparel, so and socks and accessories. So socks, jackets, shirts, tank tops, shorts, pants, like you name it, right? Everything is very high quality, premium, Merino wool. And with them, you know, a couple of things that we do that are really cool is one, they have product both for men and women. So we’ll segment by women. And we’ll just send women on the list items like, Hey, here are our most popular product for women, right on the bottom of the email. Just in case for whatever reason we had the person wrong on their gender because we found the gender. And one of two ways. We either ask for it or B, some of the tools that we use can predict someone with gender based off their, their name, which is really cool.

Chase (26:24):

We also kind of have like a fallback at the bottom. It’s like 75% of the email to women, it’s going to be about women, but the last 25% is going to just be our fail safe in case we are sending it to a man. So yeah, we target women and men with different campaigns. Speaking to them specifically and having that segmentation has been for a couple of things. It’s been huge for a longest to get away sending more emails because it’s highly personalized and very relevant and, and to the conversion and the engagement attendance in through the roof, right? Because we’re actually speaking to people about the things they want to be spoken to. So that’s one. The other thing that we do with this client is we send based off of geolocation. So people on the West coast, I’m in California, it’s, it’s nice here, 365 days, right?

Chase (27:07):

Every day of the year. It’s great here. I’m not really wearing a jacket too often. I’m wearing flip flops somewhere and tank tops. I’m wearing shorts, I’m wearing t-shirts. I’m not really buying these bulky pants or jackets. So we’ll send specific content to people on the West coast. So we’re able to say like, you know what of my, one of my zip codes is like nine, two, eight, six, nine, right? So all of a sudden the people within a hundred miles or 500 miles of that radius and just send them different content than I would on the East coast. Right? On the East coast, we’re pushing jackets and hoodies and beanies. So again, kind of going from the beginning, it’s sending the people engaged, you know, send them whatever. I’m getting more granular, more refined at sending to people based off their gender, based off their location.

Chase (27:50):

And as you learn more about people items that they viewed, items that they’ve purchased from things that they’ve added to their cart but didn’t buy. Right. There’s all these other segments. Yeah. So to answer your question, like I think it’s worrisome to build a second that’s too small. Like it doesn’t make sense for you to spend the time building an email to send it to a hundred people, right? Like that’s too much work for such a little recurrent. If you’ve got a 20% open rate, you know, in a 2% click through, now you’re only getting two people to actually click through. It’s not worth the heavy lifting. So I would try it again. Obviously everyone’s list sizes are different, but I would try to at least hit, you know, a couple of hundred plus people at minimum, right? Like ideally a couple of thousand people in a segment. If you have that many people on your list is worth the work of building the email. But obviously the more the better without sacrificing engagement.

Charles (28:39):

Hold on. The nice part is what you’re talking about. Having those different building blocks as you’re going to have those, even if you are only emailing, you know, a few hundred people at a time, if you can just do it faster if you already have, okay. I know this is the email within, basically I’m just going to pop a product photo in hair, little description here, hit send, go. If it’s taking you, you know, 25 minutes to build the email and you’re only sending it to 200 people, that might actually be worth it. And some, like if you, it’s just kind of part of this process, right? If you can make the process easy, whip these up quite quick and you know, okay, Tuesday morning, East coast people send them the hoodies. Same thing. West coast people are going to send it three hours later, some of the sandals and you can just, if you can do that in 20 minutes and there’s only a few hundred people and it’s still, it might be worth it, which is a new part.

Chase (29:22):

Yeah. Yeah. Add to that, I mean that’s a great thing about automation, right, is like you’re building these segments not knowing or these automations, these flows, this content not knowing how many people are going to engage with it, right? Like it could be 200 people a month, it could be 200,000 right. That’s also the great thing about building content on the automation side. I think people are kind of scared and intimidated by automation. It’s kind of this whole daunting thing, but it’s, it’s fairly simple. One or two other things I wanted to mention on the segmentation side is, for example, we have a client in New York and they had a pop up recently. So like an in person pop-up, they rented some space, they wanna you know, customers in the New York area to kind of meet them in person and check out their products. So we actually done as we segment it to the list and we hit people within 50 miles of the New York radius and I think they ended up doing like $5,000 in like physical store revenue within like a weekend just based off the email. Like almost every single person that they asked said that they came from the email, like no one came in random. So truly cool how you can harness the power of your online email channel to drive offline traffic and therefore revenue.

Charles (30:23):

Yeah, I liked that. The other neat thing that’s kind of seen and realized over time is the, that tagging and kind of segmentation, how have you kind of segment them. It can be usable. You are transactional and your marketing emails, right? So, you know, every time a woman in California buy something, you know, send out email acts, but then you also know this is a woman in California and now every time you I have something for women or for folks who are resident in California, you still now you’re building these other lists. So every time you add someone you’re not only hitting them with the automated email, we are also adding them and kind of growing those lists. Which is a really powerful part. Very cool. Any other kind of last tips you’d say? Anything kind of yeah, anything I like to that someone wouldn’t think of? Yeah, I got some. Yeah. Okay. I like those.

Chase (31:16):

Okay. I’ve got, I’ve got two that come to mind initially now that you asked that one is, so again, this is particular to the tool that we’re using. All we do is email marketing for e-commerce. So we use Clavio, Clavio can’t pronounce it. I think everyone says it differently. But within that platform they have the ability to create custom tracking links that no matter what people click will automatically add a property to their profile. So for example, Charles, a lot of our clients sell like men’s, women’s, kid’s clothing. And sometimes they have like a sale category. So if you envision like the product kind of navigation header that says like men’s, women’s kids and children and sale or whatever it says we tag each of those links with this property. So now Charles, you came to my Chase’s store on my story.

Chase (31:59):

You clicked men’s, so it’s going to say Charles was interested in men’s based off the category. He clicked in a header and then depending on the actions you do or don’t take, I might drop you into a flow or an automation that says like Charles, like saw that you express an interest in our men’s category. Here are top six best-selling men’s items that are all under $20. And it actually even sorted them from least to most expensive. So here’s a $5 t-shirt, you get a $10 t-shirt, here’s a $15 t-shirt, and then here’s three teachers that are 20 bucks. And the engagement on that is through the roof. Like we’re seeing 30, 40% open rates and like 15, 20% click-throughs. Like it’s, it’s crazy.

Charles (32:35):

Why is that so much higher engagement on that you feel?

Chase (32:38):

Because someone will express interest in a category or a collection and then we’ll follow up with them like two hours later or four hours later. Yeah, almost like an abandoned cart sorts. Right? Like it has that same kind of fueled reaction if people didn’t make it to that step in the journey.

Charles (32:53):

Oh, I liked it. Yeah. So if you get the email right, and there’s 10 different apparel categories, but I happened to click on gloves, then you know, I’m in like glove buying mode that day. And then you sit two hours later you’re like, Hey, here’s some, here’s the 10 best gloves and then all of a sudden you know this, okay, I liked it. So you basically find people that are pretty much ready to buy, ready to at least it’s top of mind. They’re doing their the right to buy, doing their research and then drop them in that flow like right then.

Chase (33:19):

Yes. And another thing that we do actually in a lot of onboarding or welcome series is we’ll actually ask people, you know, we’ll show them, here are the nine. For example, we work with a big apparel company, like an eight figure apparel company and they’ve got dozens of dozens of categories and collections. So we’ll take like their nine most popular and we’ll say like, Hey, you know, which of these most sounds like you? And they don’t actually know on the back end that we’re, we’re taking that information and dropping them into the content that’s most relevant. But you might click, Oh, I’m interested in comic t-shirts, I’m interested in sports t-shirts and then we’ll just drop you in. So we’re always kind of surveying users without them actually knowing through these tracking links,

Charles (33:55):

Why they clicked. So you’re saying what’s the, which one describes you the best? Right? Con comic t-shirts. Sports. That’s why they w what do they get out of? Click on the link. They just think they’re going to,

Chase (34:07):

It’s positioned as like here are most popular categories, like pick the, pick the one or the ones that you want to check out. Like we’ve sorted it. So you’d see like nine categories and you’d see like a sample from each one. And so they don’t even know we’re doing this. It’s basically just showing you and positioning as like tier our most popular category. It’s like knock yourself out.

Charles (34:24):

Oh, I see. Okay, got it. So then depending on, so you’re just sending, so you’re just sending a list of here’s things people found popular, they click on that and they like, Ooh, you, you, you’re interested in that. Let’s send you some more.

Chase (34:36):

Yeah. So they didn’t even know on the front end, we’re basically organizing it. Like everyone else organizes their emails. We’ve just been smart enough to tag it and track it in a way that we could use it and leverage it. So, so that’s, that’s one. Does that make sense?

Charles (34:47):

That’s very cool. I like that.

Chase (34:48):

The other thing that we’re doing, and again I haven’t heard anyone doing this you, you might have is we’re basically, so everyone uses popups and sign up forms for people that are new to their lists that aren’t already on their list, right? So new their website, not already on your list, they’re trying to get your email, here’s free shipping, here’s 10% off, right? What we’re actually doing is we’re also sending people forms based off of the segment that they’re in. So within Klayvio they have predictive analytics. I could say, Charles, you’re likely to purchase in the next two weeks. So we’ll actually build a popup. So the next time you come back to the website, during those two weeks, you’re actually going to see a very specific popup that says like Charles, again, I won’t say your first name, but I’ll be like Charles here, here’s 15% off on your purchase.

Chase (35:29):

You have to use this code in 24 hours. So we’re basically like almost using it as like a push notification as like a retargeting pixel on the website that’s showing you a message and showing you a code. And it’s telling you it’s only good for 24 hours. So you also, another example is like you might’ve purchased from us today, you might be in a segment for the next week, it says recent purchaser. So the next time you come to our website it’s going to say, literally just call up and say thank you so much for your recent purchase. It made our day. That’s going to be it. I’m not gonna have anything else. So we’re using popups to communicate and think and try to convert customers that are already on our list. So again, everyone’s doing this for people that want to get on their list. I haven’t seen anyone or heard of anyone doing it the way that we are as like billboard speaking to specific customers already on their list.

Charles (36:12):

I like that. So it’s basically like almost like a retardy campaign. But people that are already on your site though. Yes. Which would probably actually when you kind of thinking of it work very well with an actual retargeting campaign. Cause you know you’re retargeting people and you can retarget people on your list, drive them there, and then you’re pretty much customizing the content on your site for that exact, so you know, Joe came, he’s interested in gloves. Let’s pop up the glove pop up right here. There we go. But he has to use it the next 24 hours. So you know, because he was an abandoned cart user, right, that he’s kind of prime to buy. So you just kind of get the site ready for when he comes back.

Chase (36:48):

Exactly. Yeah. So those are two that like I’d say almost no one or very few people or probably even know about it or are doing. And I mentioned this briefly earlier, the last thing I’ll leave you with, and I know it’s been a lot, is so no one’s really doing site abandonment emails. Everyone’s doing abandoned cart, everyone’s doing abandoned checkout. Some people are doing browse abandonment, no one’s doing site abandonment. And the reason that we’re seeing that work, I know it’s pretty creepy. But we’re, we’re positioning the contents that way. It’s not creepy.

Charles (37:19):

Explain side that abandon because some people don’t even, yeah, it happens to you and you’re like, how did they just know that it’s amazing. But yeah,

Chase (37:25):

So, well I guess, let me take a step back. Someone’s already on our list, whether they’ve entered their email into a welcome series, whether they, you know, abandoned checkout, whether they’ve bought, they’re on our list. When they come to our website, right? There’s multiple actions they could take I think to our website. And they don’t do anything. They don’t view a product. They don’t add to their car. They don’t start checkout. That will trigger a site abandonment. Someone came to our website, they didn’t do anything. They just bailed. The next one, right, that’s a little bit further down the funnel is a browse abandonment. Someone came to our website, they viewed a product but they didn’t add to cart. So they’re going to receive a browse abandonment. And in that we could dynamically show people the item or the items that they were viewing.

Chase (38:03):

From there, the next one on the funnel is the abandoned car. Right? So Kim to your website, you know, beauty product added to cart, but they didn’t start check out. That will then fire the abandoned cart. And then lastly, which is the best one because it’s furthest down the funnel, people are most likely to buy as called the abandoned checkout. People did all those further actions but yet they didn’t actually check out. So they started checkout but they didn’t convert. So each email as the next step happens, you, you paused it, the step before it and you prioritize the one that’s furthest down the funnel. So someone that had those actions would not receive the first three. It only received the abandoned checkout, otherwise people would get really annoyed. So it’s really important to have that filter on your automation that prevents people from receiving all of those.

Charles (38:46):

Yeah, it’s definitely, I’ve been on the other receiving end of that before and it’s, you get like three emails and you’re like come back and like why don’t you try it? And like I just bought like something from you and you’re getting all these, like you’re getting like a band of Heidi mills after you checked out and you’re like, that doesn’t feel right. Yeah. It makes no sense. And you know that just no one’s run through the flour. And if they did, it’s very obvious. You just do it as user and you’re like, this doesn’t make any sense. Like someone just try this. Yeah, I think that right there just someone knowing to pause them, I think a, but then just knowing that you’ll probably get something wrong like every month or whatever. So we should just run through some of these flows just manually just to see does this still feel right?

Charles (39:27):

Because anytime you make any of these marketing platforms get relatively complicated. You kind of go through the roles and you’re like, wow, we can do a lot of complex things now. But in that power you could put yourself into this weird state of, you get nine different abandoned cart emails in like one hour and like bad things can happen too. So you do need to kind of run through it. And then also, I think most of them have this now too. You can kind of check out an individual user and just see what emails do they receive. When did they receive them? Is it like saying, does it make any sense or did I send like, you know, the checkout email then an abandoned cart later on, like so you can actually just pick users and randomly sample them. And I would definitely recommend people do that as well. So they don’t reach that exact Stace sound. That’s a good one. Awesome. Awesome. So if people want to find you kind of learn more about you, see what you’re working on, what can they do? So

Chase (40:17):

My, my Instagram is great. It’s chase, Hunter diamond no. And diamonds. It’s chase, Hunter diamond, the IMO and D. People can feel free to email me if you have any questions. My email is chase at boundless labs, diet.io. So chase at balance labs at IO. Happy to answer any questions. Those are probably the best two.

Charles (40:35):

Awesome. I’ll link to all that in the show notes. It was a super helpful thing. Chase, thanks for coming on today.

Chase (40:39):

I think so. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (40:42):

Yeah.

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