#2. Getting Started With Ecommerce Email Marketing | Podcast

Alissa: 0:16

217% higher open rate, over 500% higher click rate and 90% higher revenue per recipient than your average email campaign.

Vira: 0:25

We are email marketing nerds.

Alissa: 0:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Vira: 0:27

So that’s why we’re good at what we do.

Alissa: 0:54

Hi everyone and welcome to Email Einstein. This is Alissa and Vira here. We are email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are so passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. On today’s episode we are going to get into the juicy stuff. You’re ready, you’re excited and you just want to dive headfirst into email marketing and that’s all. And we’re so excited for you. But you need to slow your roll there bucko, because there are a lot of things to consider before you do get started. Today we’re going to give you the absolute basics the bare minimum must haves to get a solid email marketing plan and strategy in place so you can do the most for your e commerce store. We have tons and tons and tons of information to share, so throughout our future episodes we’ll cover a lot of what’s mentioned today in a lot more detail. But if there’s something that you’re really itching to know more about and you just gotta know, please feel free to reach out to us. Before we get started as promised, we have our pro tip of the week today. So our pro tip for today is as you are starting your email marketing journey, we strongly recommend getting in touch and engaging with other like minded individuals who are also starting their email marketing journey. So whether that’s joining a Facebook group, we actually have a Facebook community called Klaviyo Community which is open to the public. You can get involved. There are tons of people in there writing comments, asking questions. Everyone’s engaged and interacting with each other and it’s a really solid place for you to just get more insight and also be Engaging with other people who are kind of going through the same thing as you. So.

Vira: 2:53

Yeah, and another big one, by the way. Hi everyone, Vira’s here. We really love this resource called really Good Emails. It’s not like an ad or anything. It’s just a really, really helpful resource, especially at the beginning of your journey. And they have an awesome email newsletter that you can subscribe to to get inspired every week. And of course Pinterest. Pinterest is your go to resource when you are starting your email marketing journey. And, and also our podcast. So subscribe and stay tuned because we will be sharing a lot of good stuff here.

Alissa: 3:28

Love it. So I think we’ve split everything up today into about four steps. So we’ll take you through each step. Vira is going to kick us off and we’ll kind of expand and kind of go from there.

Vira: 3:40

Yeah. So basically here comes our four steps of getting started with e commerce email marketing. So I’ve been through this process so many times and every time our clients come to us and start working with us, they are like, let’s start sending campaigns right away. Let’s send one today. No, better send it yesterday. And we’re like always, yes, it can be so tempting to simply sign up for email marketing platform like Klaviyo and start sending your campaigns. But before jumping in headfirst, it’s worth taking a little bit of time to, to think about what you really want to achieve with your email marketing and what are your big goals. And this will define your entire email marketing journey. It will define how many campaigns per week you will be sending, what flows you will have first, how you will segment your list, what content you will be sending, et cetera, et cetera. So email marketing is marketing. That’s why it’s very important to have this like clear, clear goals or clear objectives. And to establish good email marketing goals, you need to basically align your email marketing strategy with your other marketing strategy with your KPIs. So before you jump into email marketing, ask yourself a question. What would be your ideal scenario? Do you want to engage your customers through emails? Do you want to nurture your leads? So what is your focus? Maybe you want to, maybe your one and only goal is to convert those people. So here’s a good example. We have a customer who is selling this expensive designer watches and his biggest goal was to shorten the sales cycle. So yes, it can be one of the objectives as well. So we have built a bunch of flows for him that would help him to shorten this cycle. We have built a bunch of flows that be would answer popular customers questions and concerns. So like for example, customers were usually asking about the materials or the warranty or stuff like that. So we addressed all of those questions before customers even had them. And plus we incentivize their purchase with discount to give that little extra like push to shorten the sales cycle. But your scenario can be completely different if say you are a subscription service. So we have another client who’s selling this like a gum subscription. And the main objective for them was to convert those one time buyers into loyal fans and subscribers. So of course the strategy for them was completely different. And that strategy focused more on staying at the front of your customers minds and rewarding repeat customers with incentives based on like, based on sales. And we were trying to push that subscription program. But of course if you are like organization like UNICEF or something, like the global charity organization that provides this humanitarian help, your email marketing strategy will be like completely, completely different. Because success to your digital marketing team, it can be, it’s in donations, right? So they use email marketing to reach out to their donors base to educate them, stuff like that. So understanding where are you standing right now and understanding where are you going? It’s like super, super important. And email marketing, yes, email marketing is a powerful tool, but you should know what you want to do with that tool before like jumping into that world of email marketing. Would you agree, Alissa?

Alissa: 7:27

Yeah, totally. And I think that’s huge. And that’s something that a lot of, I mean a lot of clients kind of forget. They think that now that they’ve signed up with us or now that they’ve signed on to a platform, it’s like just send emails and go and blast it. And more often than not they forget that email marketing is just another branch of their entire marketing strategy. So it’s a, I mean it’s a huge thing and a lot of people oversee that. So it’s definitely, it’s definitely a good thing to encourage people to really focus on and make sure that you’re aware of your goals and what you need to achieve as a brand before you just dive headfirst into again another branch of marketing and then start making these crazy decisions based on zero data at all or based on the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve for your company. So I love that. Really good point.

Vira: 8:12

It can be really hard for like a small business owner to like step out and like kind of look at your business from outside. But I think it’s, I think it’s crucial.

Alissa: 8:23

Yeah, yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. So following up on that with step number two, now we get to the picking your email marketing platform. Okay, so in our last episode, we really hammered hard how important it is to implement email marketing for your E commerce store. And we don’t want to beat a dead horse because you all know how important it is. So you get it. You’re an email marketer, you believe in email marketing, and it works. So what’s next? Okay, so your next step is to consider a few things before you decide which email marketing platform you want to use for your brand. So, aside from what Vira had talked about in the first step, which is really understanding what your marketing goals are and how you’re going to achieve that through the email marketing strategy that you’re going to create, there are three things that we strongly recommend that you decide for your brand and your store. So the first thing is integration. That’s the big focus as a business. Your CRM or whatever backend platforms that you use are your best friends. You don’t have time to manually update lists, update your subscribers, figure out their behaviors, put in your own custom integrated APIs every other day, figure out what their actions are or any other extremely valuable customer data that applies to how you’re going to activate and how you’re going to really execute your email marketing strategy. So you have to pick a platform that will seamlessly integrate with your current CRM or backend platform. And that’s crucial because if you don’t do that and you don’t base your decision on the integration and how seamless it’s going to be, you’re going to create a whole host of issues for yourself before you even get started. So, for example, we have a client who uses Magento as their E commerce platform and they use Klaviyo. Luckily, Magento integrates with Klaviyo fairly easily, but there are a few hiccups and a few things that don’t necessarily integrate as seamlessly. So, for example, creating discount codes, you have to create the discount codes on the back end of Magento and then apply them to Klaviyo. Whereas if you’re using Shopify, for example, for example, with Klaviyo, you can create those discount codes in Klaviyo and they automatically update in Shopify. So there are little things that you really want to consider when it comes to the integration, because again, if you choose a platform that’s not going to integrate easily with what you currently have, oh my gosh, you are going to hate email marketing before you even get started. It’s a total mess. And we’ve experienced that before with clients who don’t really understand what the integration process is like. And they just assume that everything kind of factors into all platforms and everything kind of molds together smoothly. But it doesn’t. So that’s a huge thing to consider. Next thing you want to consider is reading and viewing the options. So according to stats that are provided by email Monday, 26 to 78% of email opens will happen on mobile. That’s nuts. And most of you are actually probably listening to this podcast on your phone. So it’s very clear that in this day and age, we can’t do anything without our phones, and that includes opening most of our emails. So it’s really no surprise that in today’s world, fewer people are opening emails on a traditional computer. Which means that the platform that you choose needs to be optimized as best as possible for providing mobile functionality. If you deliver an email and it’s not set for a mobile display, your email will bounce and your efforts to reach that subscriber will go down the drain. And really your email, there’s just no point to it. So mobile functionality is huge. It’s so, so huge. And other issues that are kind of coming up now in today’s email marketing world is how people are making adjustments with dark mode. So many mobile users are starting to use dark mode on their smartphones and a lot of emails are not created design wise for users who use dark mode. And so you’re getting, you’re getting these emails sent out and people can’t even read them because it’s on a light background with dark text. And if you’re in dark mode, all you see is the dark text, but you can’t actually read it because your background is dark. So the mobile, the mobile situation is huge. And if you’re working with a platform that is not going to make the mobile functionality easy for you, again, you’re going to lose most of your subscribers because everyone’s opening their emails on, on their phones. So that’s the second thing. Third thing, third and final thing is the dynamic content that’s available to you when you use your email marketing platform. So because we’re focusing on sending relevant emails, and again, that, that word relevant is coming up constantly when we do these podcasts, we’re not only looking for solid open rates, click through rates and roi, but we want our subscribers to actually engage with us in order to get this kind of response. You want the ability to send emails that are not only automated, but personalized to each subscriber. You want to make them think and feel like your brand is personally reaching out to them and interested in their wants and needs, even though the email is automated and you’re not doing anything personally to send that email. This is huge. And again, this stems back to the relevance. If you are sending personalized, customized emails to your customers and subscribers, the engagement levels are going to be through the roof because they feel like you’re targeting them specifically. You know, like it feels like Bob in Kentucky is receiving that email specifically from the brand versus just receiving a generic hey, thanks for coming to the brand, thanks for buying with us, see you later kind of thing. You want to get personal. So now that we’ve reviewed those kind of three things that are so crucial to making the decision about what email platform you’re going to use, the next thing you have to decide is, okay, I’ve considered integration, I’ve considered the reading and viewing options, and I’ve considered the dynamic content that’s available. And I know that all three of these things are important to me. So which platform do I go through? So we have three platforms here that we’re going to kind of discuss. All of them have their pros, all of them have their cons. There’s one that we specifically work with a little more, but we do want to kind of lay them out there for you just so that you can get a good idea of what’s available. So the first one is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is one of the most accessible email marketing platforms in the world today with around 7 million users worldwide, which is nuts. The other thing to note is Mailchimp does have a feature where you can use their platform and send a certain amount of emails to a very limited amount of subscribers monthly for free. So to get started on Mailchimp, if you have a very tiny subscriber list, you don’t even have to pay for it. Which if you are just getting started in the email marketing industry or in the email marketing journey of your brand, Mailchimp might be a good one to just start off with so that you can kind of dabble and play a little bit with it. But as you get more advanced, you’ll probably want to move into the next thing. Mailchimp is great for small to medium sized businesses who manage weekly or monthly newsletters alongside regular campaigns with a strong social media focus. It’s a, it’s a great tool, it really is. However, your ability to create automations is extremely limited. The interface is very difficult to use, your designs will be limited, your content blocks are limited, and your ability to actually customize each automation is super limited. So again, if you’re just getting started and you really don’t know what you’re doing, mailchimp is a good place to start to kind of play around with. But as you get more advanced, it’s definitely something that you want to kind of graduate out of. So the next platform that we’ll discuss is active campaign. ActiveCampaign is phenomenal for bloggers, informational businesses, that kind of thing. So UNICEF for example, like the example that Vira gave UNICEF would be great for using ActiveCampaign, but it’s not ideal for e commerce businesses. So the activecampaign drag and drop interface is really great. It makes building the content of your email extremely easy, very speedy and very accurate. The platform boasts a range of sophisticated market and sales automation features as well as a huge library of free stock images. Image hosting and real time analytics are also available so you can monitor your campaign performances as they’re happening, which is awesome. Another one of the main selling points for larger and more active businesses is that ActiveCampaign does offer the AB testing tool which is huge. The functionality is really easy to set up and, and again it has those real time analytics which can be very effective for optimization of campaigns and it’ll just help you maximize your roi. Again, activecampaign is phenomenal for bloggers, informational businesses, that kind of thing. But we don’t typically recommend it for E commerce. The analytics, the metrics, the triggers, they make the E commerce kind of integration a little more difficult. So again, great platform, not ideal for E commerce.

Vira: 17:38

Sorry, it works actually the other way around as well. The other platform that you will be talking about, Klaviyo, it’s great for like physical businesses and for e commerce businesses, but it’s not good for like, for people selling online courses or bloggers or influencers or stuff like that. So that’s just like interesting to know this like little, little benefits of each and other platforms.

Alissa: 18:04

Yeah, no, for sure. And I know for us at Flowium, when it comes to our marketing for potential clients, when it comes to providing like freebies and information for, and it’s more for like outreach purposes. We actually do use ActiveCampaign because it’s just so much easier for us to get information out to potential clients because we’re not actually selling a physical product, we’re just sending freebies, information and so activecampaign is one that we use regularly, but the third platform that we use commonly for our clients because they have E commerce stores is Klaviyo. So again, as Vira pointed out, and this is a great point is Klaviyo is phenomenal for E commerce stores, but definitely not what you want to use if you have an informational oriented business. If you are a blogger, um, if you’re unicef, you’re definitely not going to be using Klaviyo. So again, it is, it’s a nuance, but it’s something that you definitely want to consider. So with Klaviyo, it has so many perks and benefits. It’s the platform that we are the most familiar with for our clients and we really do love it. So few A few quick things about why we love it so much. So because segmentation plays such a pivotal role in any email marketing campaign, Klaviyo helps marketers target their promotions more precisely using transactional as well as behavioral data. So Klaviyo tracks all of that, which enables you to create these segments that result in sending more relevant marketing campaigns and the segments actually update in real time as you’re using the platform, which is extremely powerful. It also enables marketers like us to specify multiple different criteria for our segments, which is awesome. So a great example of this is marketers can target female customers who bought a purse during the holiday season. That’s huge. And there aren’t many platforms out there that offer that precise of segmentation. So it’s amazing. And the segmentation again plays a huge role when it comes to relevance. And we’re going to drive that word home until it’s stuck in your brain. Relevance, Relevance. Relevance is so key with your email marketing. The other cool thing is there’s a custom web tracking search system that uses browsing behavior and helps target people who meet specific criteria. For example, male customers who looked at T shirts five times during the week, which is really cool because you virtually have unlimited targeting opportunities, which again is huge. And it just goes right back to that point of being able to send relevant emails. The other thing is the software is extremely easily integrated with so many other popular softwares like Magento, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Zendex or Zendesk, which is awesome. And there’s also an open API, which is a big plus for users who want custom integration. So if you have a whole development team and you’re really into that kind of thing, there is open API available for you to do your own custom integration, which I actually have a client personally who we’re working on creating a custom integration with Klaviyo. So a few other benefits that class has is Facebook advertising, ROI based reporting, real time tracking, website tracking, built in autoresponders. I mean, dynamic data blocks. Yeah, that’s beyond every variety that you can think of. I mean you can literally include any kind of information that you want that’s dynamic and specific to the subscriber who’s receiving the email. Tons of custom activity fields triggered emails you can use. You can create email newsletters. There are automated list imports, signup forms and pop ups are available, AB testing, I mean out the wazoo. It’s nuts. There are so many cool features that are included with Klaviyo and Klaviyo is constantly adding new stuff. So it’s a really great platform again, specifically for e commerce brands. So as an email marketer, it’s so important for you to understand what is absolutely essential for your e commerce store or your business before you decide which platform to go with. The platform you choose can make or break your email marketing plan. So definitely. Yeah. And Vira, I know you have experience in this too. This is something that we just really want to drive home that you pay attention to before you make such a huge decision.

Vira: 22:20

I agree with you, Alissa. And we might be biased because we work so much with e commerce businesses and most of them are using Klaviyo because it integrates so well with like Shopify and other stores. So we might be a bit biased but, but oh my God, I love what can be done here. And it’s so customizable and you get so much data from there. And like literally two days ago we were talking with our clients about pop up forms, about AB testing of pop up forms. And he was like, that’d be cool to have this feature in Klaviyo. I was like, yeah, but they don’t have it yet. And they literally released it on the day when we were talking about it. So you can now AB test not only the flows and the subject lines and stuff like that, but you can also AB test different offers in your exit intent pop ups, which is like, which is huge because it can give you so much data to analyze. Okay, so we basically covered, we covered the objectives. That’s huge. One, step one, to have good objectives, to have good email marketing goals. Step two, to pick the right platform basically to pick the right tool you were working with. And step two, three is setting up essential flows. Alissa, you can take it from here.

Alissa: 23:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these Flows that we’re going to go over again are kind of like the bare minimum, what we recommend people kind of start off with as they’re starting to create their flows or automations for their brand. Over the course of time and over the course of the next episodes that we start to launch, we will be discussing each of these flows in a lot more detail and also going through a variety of different flows that are that are available to you. These, again, just the bare minimum. We’re going to give some brief information on each one, but these are definitely ones to focus on as you’re starting your email marketing strategy. So the first is the welcome flow, or what we like to call here at Flowium, the pre purchase AKA welcome flow. So a welcome series is a sequence of emails that are sent directly after someone signs up to hear from your brand. This is a critical, critical, critical moment in the customer lifecycle because it’s your opportunity to introduce new interested prospects. So these are people who have not bought yet to your business and product offering. With a welcome series, it’s so important that you get it while it’s hot because people are excited and there’s momentum that’s going for them and you want to capitalize on this display of interest. A welcome series is crucial to email automation because this is largely where your new customers come from. The welcome flows we create for our clients are anywhere between six to 12 emails long. But seriously, this depends on your brand. So all the information that we give here is based on our experience and what we would typically recommend for clients. But again, this goes back to that step one that Vira was talking about. You really need to look at your brand as a whole, what your marketing goals are, and then find a way to scope that into what your email marketing goals are. So the guidelines that we give, again, just a recommendation. So we usually create welcome flows that are between 6 to 12 emails long. If you have tons of content, tons of freebies and a ton of extras that will help engage your new potential customer even more, this welcome flow is the perfect time to use it. We typically use the last email of this flow to also engage the customer even further and get their feedback feedback if they still haven’t purchased. And the reason why we do this is it just helps you to understand where you’re missing the mark with your subscribers and how to provide them with the resources they need to become a customer. So it’s usually in the form of a survey. We ask something along the lines of, hey, you know, we gave you all this information, we gave you all this content, you were so excited about us and so why didn’t you buy what was missing for you to make a purchase? Obviously not in those words. The survey is written in a little more of a strategic way. But that’s a cool element to incorporate into that welcome flow. So then you get a little more insight as the business owner or as the brand as a whole to know like what are we missing and what do we need to give our subscribers in order for them to become customers.

Vira: 26:29

And we’ll go into depth of this welcome flow in our next podcast and we’ll be talking like separately about abandoned cart welcome flow. So this is just like to give you an idea of what flows we consider essential. And welcome flow is definitely important flow because this is your chance to welcome your customer to the brand, to introduce them to the brand and to start building those relationship between the business and the customer. And another crucial flow, I think it’s the abandonment card one. I know we’ve been talking a lot about it and believe us, we will be talking even more about it because we believe that not having abandonment card flow is just like leaving, leaving the money on the table. So according to some researchers, as many as like 80% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Can you imagine like 80% of the carts are abandoned. And the good news is you can actually recover like most of them, you can recover something like 70 something, 73% of that using abandonment cart automation. So to maximize the effectiveness of that flow, we recommend sending not one email, but we recommend like taking it one step further and building like a sequence. The simplest that you can do is to be sending like email every 24 hours. But again it depends on your business cycle, it depends on the product. But within the 24 hours send the first email, then in second email you can be reminding them about your about their cart. And this email can be sent in 48 hours. Then in 72 hours you can even push it harder and give them some kind of incentive. Over time you can adjust the sequence and delays. But the bottom line is if people keep buying from you from those emails in your abandonment card sequence, you should keep sending them. So you can do as little as three emails to as long as like 6, 7, 9 and just keep sending relevant information or something that customer would benefit from. We strongly recommend having abandoned card flow. And actually this is the one of the high performing flow because it’s very relevant to the customer. It’s basically triggered by the action. They place something into the cart and it triggers the flow. So that’s why the open rates for this flow are very, very high. That’s why we recommend starting with those like high performing flows, which is like welcome series abandonment cart. And the next flow that Alissa will, will cover.

Alissa: 29:09

Yeah. And the I, I have to admit, I’m a total sucker for an abandonment cart flow. As a, as a consumer, it gets me literally every single time for whatever reason, I put something in my cart, I put in my email, I’m like either about to buy it or I get distracted, or I’m like, I really shouldn’t spend the money, whatever it is. And then a few hours later I get that email and I always bite on that. It’s just. And I know that it’s coming. It’s not even something that is takes me by surprise. I know it’s coming, but it gets me every time because it just narrows your focus back and because you’re so close to purchasing. It’s literally just the step of putting in your card information and hitting submit. It just simplifies it because the information that was in the cart, the products that were in your cart originally are still there waiting for you magically, through the magic of Klaviyo. So it kills me because it gets me every single time. That’s my favorite. I think that’s one of my favorite flows. So the next flow is the post purchase flow. A post purchase flow is in existence essentially to show appreciation for customers and let them know about related products that they might be interested in. So the post purchases after. And you can create so many different variations of this. Usually what we do is we create a post purchase for first time customers only. But again, depends on the brand, depends on what the strategy requires. And so once you make your first purchase, you get triggered into this flow as the customer. So sending post purchase emails are essential for growing your brand, obviously because they turn your shopper into a loyal and potentially a repeat customer. So according to some research that Klaviyo actually did, post purchase Messaging sees a 217% higher open rate, which is bonkers. Over 500% higher click rate and 90% higher revenue per recipient than your average email campaign. These numbers literally blow my mind. When I read that, I was like, okay, I think I added a zero at the end and I added some extra numbers. But it’s not. These are the numbers. 217% higher open rate, over 500% higher click rate, and 90% higher revenue per recipient than your average email campaign. So with numbers like that, honestly, you can’t go wrong. I mean it’s impossible. You know, a post purchase flow is so, so important. So the one that we usually set up for our clients at Flowium is we typically incorporate a variety of emails from thanking the customer, providing a method to engage and interact with the brand, to additional content that will eventually lead to cross selling opportunities which will allow you to turn your one time customers into second time customers, thus creating brand loyalty, which is what every brand wants. And it’s really all from the work of a few emails. So again, there are so many different things that you can add into a post purchase flow. So more often than not we’ll create a post purchase survey where we ask customers about their shopping experience or their first time shopping experience with the brand. We’ll also create opportunities for subscribers to send in a video testimonial and they’ll get some some kind of freebie or a gift card or something like that. We love the post purchase flow because you can get so creative with it along with the pre purchase flow. It’s definitely an exciting one to incorporate and this is definitely one that we’ll be talking about in the future because there are other flows that you can create that kind of spiral out of the post purchase, like a bounce back flow, which is a really cool way of solidifying that second time purchase. So it’s very obvious that we are total nerds when it comes to email automations and they really are incredible because they do so much work for you automatically without you having to do anything. You just turn it live and it just goes. Obviously you have to optimize every now and again. But they are incredible because they do so much work for you without you actually having to do any work. And although there are tons and tons and tons of flows that you can choose from when you’re creating your email marketing strategy. The ones that we just mentioned, these four, the welcome series, the Abandonment cart, the post purchase, it’s actually 3, 3, 3 flows. I’m getting ahead of myself here with just these three. We definitely recommend that beginners start off with just these three and then as you become more advanced, you can expand your marketing strategy even more. And again, we’ll be going through these in a lot greater detail over coming episodes. So yeah, we love all of that.

Vira: 33:33

Yeah, there’s actually like gazillion, gazillion different flows that can be introduced and believe us, we can be talking about them for like hours and hours and hours. We are email marketing nerds.

Alissa: 33:43

Yeah. Yeah.

Vira: 33:44

So that’s why we’re good at what we do well, yeah. So we kind of covered three first steps and the next one is to send your first campaign. I feel like people often don’t understand that email marketing is not just email campaigns, that it’s the flows that generate like majority of your sales. Right. And when you first begin with email marketing it’s like very tempting to start sending those like campaigns right away because they are shiny, they are exciting and you just want to start sending them right away. However, it’s very important to actually send your first campaign correctly. In a way it’s your chance to convince like Google, Yahoo and all that other inbox providers that you are a reputable sender, that you are not a spammer, you are an actual business and this is your make or break moment. So that’s why we recommend starting with flows first and only after that you can start sending campaigns and I’ll explain why. So flows, also known as automations, they are great way to hit the inbox. When you first start doing email marketing it is important for you to activate them first because they have this really, really good open rates, click through rates and conversions. The flows emails are triggered by customer behavior. So say they have placed something in the cart and left. They will get this email that is highly relevant to them. They will get this abandoned cart email or say they will subscribe through your opt in form on your homepage to get something from you. What are the chances that they will open that email that they requested for you? The chances are super high. That’s why open rates for the flows are much, much higher than for the campaigns. That’s why we recommend starting with high converting flows and only after that going into the sending campaigns. And you can actually hurt your reputation a lot if you do it the other way around. We had this one client who have never done email marketing before but who was very eager to start sending something right away because they were releasing a new website launch and he wanted to send his list this campaign inviting them to go to the new website. What we’ve done to avoid this being placed into this Pam, we actually divided his 7,000 people list into I think something like 200 segments or something like 200 little emails. And we were like sending every hour so it does not raise any red flags. So this is the science in a way. But the easiest thing that you can do is to start sending the post first and only after that start sending campaigns. Believe me, it will help you with your open rates, with your unsubscribe rates and click through rates tremendously. That’s a little pro tip for you as well.

Alissa: 36:53

Love it. I love it. So, yeah. And oh my gosh, I couldn’t agree more, honestly. We have some clients who show up, Vira, like you had mentioned and they’re like, hi, I want to send a campaign, my first campaign as of yesterday. And it’s like, okay, hold on a second. Like, have you given any thought to what’s going on? Like, do you understand the work that goes into it? We need to think about what about getting these flows going before we actually get our first campaign out. So it’s, yeah, it’s definitely something that people, people really need to consider before they just again, dive, dive in headfirst with their email marketing. So I’m with you on that. So again, just to kind of recap, those four steps are what we strongly advise you do as you’re getting started with your e commerce email email marketing. So making sure that you’re auditing and establishing your email marketing goals, picking the best email marketing platform for you and your brand, setting up those bare minimum essential flows before you get going and then working on sending your first campaign and making sure that it’s a relevant campaign as well is always something so important. So before we kind of officially sign off, we do have a question for from our community. We actually got this question from May and the question is what is the best conversion rate for opt in forms? I love this question so much because it’s definitely something that we have clients kind of ask us about and people are always curious like, okay, we have opt in forms and we think they’re working but how do we know what’s the benchmark? So just for context, for those who don’t understand quite what an opt in form is, so it’s a method in which you as the brand or store can collect subscriber emails. So these are typically found in the footer of your website on a homepage pop up that you may have set up or any kind of pop up really that appears during a customer’s journey on your website or it can even be on a landing page. Typically what this opt in form does is it offers some kind of exchange or freebie for your for the subscriber’s email. So you’re either providing a subscriber an exclusive access to insider information or a discount once they submit their email. And it’s something that we’ll definitely talk about later on down the line, especially now because Klaviyo is providing the opportunity to do AB testing with these OP forms. But some benchmarks to consider when you’re determining the success of the opt in forms that you have in place. 6.5% percent and up for conversion is excellent. This is a really, really, really great percentage that you’re hitting. Anything between like 4.7% and 6.5. 6.5% for your conversion rate is really good. Anything between 1.8% and 4.7% is pretty average. And anything under 1.8%, we would say you definitely have some room for, for improvement. So whether that’s trying a new design, trying some different copy, trying a different offer, even trying different placement of that opt in form, that’s, that’s some stuff that you can definitely look at testing if you’re looking at the conversion rate being anything under 1.8%. So, yeah, this is a great, great question. Thank you, May, for bringing this up. And again, this is something that we’ll definitely focus on in future episodes. So just as a note, if you have a question that you’d like us to address on future episodes, best way to get in touch and send your questions is to send myself or Vira an email. My email is Alissa a l i s s a flowium.com and Vira’s is v I r a flowium.com. the other thing that you can do, which we mentioned during our pro tip, is you can join our Facebook community. It’s called the Klaviyo. Community is very active, very engaging. People are constantly questioning and answering for other people. So feel free to pop your questions in there and you might even get an answer before we get to we get a chance to answer it on our podcast. So yeah.

Vira: 41:00

Yeah, 100% and thank you for tuning in, you guys. This is just the beginning. We do have a lot of cool stuff coming your way, so go ahead, start with email. Email marketing, it’s not as scary as it might seem at the beginning, but believe me, the results are incredible. And not not utilizing the power of email marketing is basically leaving the money on the table.

Alissa: 41:26

So for sure. Okay, thank you guys so much and we’ll see you next time.

Vira: 41:30

Thank you so much. We’ll see you next time. Bye.