#100. What Email Marketing Trend will Help Marketers Succeed in 2022? 100th Episode Special! | Podcast

Vira: 0:40

Hello. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode number 100. Number one freaking hundred. You guys, can you believe this? I’m like, I still can’t believe this. It feels like yesterday we were launching on our very first podcast on Canada Day. And now look at us, 100 freaking episodes behind our backs. And we have a very special guest joining us today. Andriy Boychuk, the CEO, the mastermind behind our company, basically behind Flowium. Andriy. Say hi.

Andriy: 1:14

Hi. And you know what? You’re probably the first one who’s pronounced my last name in English the correct way. You probably because you’re Ukrainian.

Vira: 1:24

Might be. Might as well be.

Andriy: 1:26

No, but even Ukrainians, they call me Boychuk here in America. They say Boychuk, but you said it correct. Boychuk. And actually, kids in my daughter’s high school. Sorry, not high school. School is her because of her last name. And I never thought about that.

Vira: 1:47

Really? Why?

Andriy: 1:48

Yeah, because it’s first, it’s a boy, and Chuck is like chucking boy.

Vira: 1:54

Oh, no, I would never think about it. Oh, my goodness. Poor thing. Well, my friends tease me because I’m sad luck and it sounds like sad luck or like sad sad lad. Sometimes they say it too. Of those American people with their last names.

Andriy: 2:16

I agree, I agree.

Vira: 2:18

That’s awesome. Okay, Andriy. Well, it’s not your first rodeo. Apparently you’ve been on our podcast already for like two times. I think it’s going to be your third one, right? Or four times even. Huh.

Andriy: 2:29

And we were planning to invite some Big Dog for 100 episode and because. Because we had too much work and didn’t have time to invite somebody like Klaviyo CEO. You invited me.

Vira: 2:43

That’s fine. That’s fine. You are a big dog, Andriy.

Andriy: 2:46

How they do it in like, how did they say in Klaviyo a default value back. Default value. You know, when you put like first name if.

Vira: 2:54

Yeah, I think it’s default fallback value. Yeah.

Andriy: 2:57

Yeah. So I am fallback value in case you are no guest for podcast.

Vira: 3:03

Big Dog fallback value. I like it. Andriy, let’s do a blitz Q and A just, Just to. To. To warm you up before we go to all of the juicy questions. Okay? Let’s do this. Email or sms?

Andriy: 3:17

Email.

Vira: 3:18

I kind of knew you were gonna say it, but SMS is so hot.

Andriy: 3:21

I even have don’t say this notification off. So sometimes I check every three days or every five days. It’s not my way to check.

Vira: 3:32

I hope our clients are not listening to this podcast, you guys. But we still love sms. I mean, as a marketing tool, it’s amazing. If you want to reach Andriy, don’t. Don’t use sms. Just call him. His old fashioned. You’re very like. You’re giving me a very like 80s vibe, you know Andriy, like very 80s cool. Early bird or night owl?

Andriy: 3:56

Mix, I like. I’m trying to be early bird, but sometimes like last night I. I fell in that bad trend.

Vira: 4:05

I know you’re a night bird. Okay, cool. Let’s do this. Paper planner. Yay or nay?

Andriy: 4:11

Nay.

Vira: 4:12

You’re not using paper planners anymore?

Andriy: 4:16

Not anymore. I’m like recently, in the last like six months or so. I’m like very hard to like to be concerned about the environment. So switching everything to electric, like going extra crazy with recycling, collecting batteries.

Vira: 4:35

So good for you. Did your 6 year old inspired you to do that? No, because it’s like so.

Andriy: 4:42

Not really. Like I live like right next to a beach, so my beach inspired me to do it. When you go there and it’s not clear.

Vira: 4:51

You see the stuff, right?

Andriy: 4:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Vira: 4:54

Cool. IPhone or Android?

Andriy: 4:57

IPhone, 100%.

Vira: 4:59

Yay.

Andriy: 5:00

Sorry guys, I’m goals.

Vira: 5:02

Apple crowd. Apple crowd. Cool. Your power song, Andriy, if you have one.

Andriy: 5:08

So right now it’s Kaush – Stefaniya.

Vira: 5:12

That’s the one. Yes, yes, that’s. That’s the one. That’s for sure. Who would play you in a movie if there was ever a movie about you?

Andriy: 5:23

Everybody said like I’m like very similar was Matt Damon, but I have like

Vira: 5:29

Modest Andriy, you’re so modest.

Andriy: 5:33

There’s no similarities at all. But I don’t know.

Vira: 5:37

Cool. Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, One of those guys. One of those icons, right? Would play you sitting AT computer for 15 hours a day. Yay. I wouldn’t go to that movie. Sorry, Andriy, but whatever. Maybe someone would.

Andriy: 5:55

I wouldn’t listen to this episode.

Vira: 5:58

Cool. Okay, Andriy, since you are a big dog of e commerce email marketing today, at least on this, on this podcast, let’s talk some hot email marketing trends. So this will be like a little game. I’m going to tell you the trend and you will tell me if it’s hot or not. Your honest opinion. You don’t have to agree with Me. Although I would prefer prefer it. I’m joking. But yeah, let’s start. Email in general, like email, is it still hot or not? Your your thoughts, Andriy?

Andriy: 6:35

It was hot. It is hot and it will be hot.

Vira: 6:39

Okay, good one. Why?

Andriy: 6:41

I mean this is the way how we communicate. And yes, there’s sms, there’s messengers, but up to this point nothing beat email.

Vira: 6:52

In terms of like conversion or in terms of like generally speaking, like connecting with your customers or like, I guess both. Right.

Andriy: 7:02

So in the recent years the usage of emails increases because of the COVID And also if you compare emails to personally for me, if you compare emails to messenger to sms messengers and sms, they are not like, not official. They’re like random communications. Not something you can save or track. You can easily. But even like sometimes your friends or family or co workers say, can you send me email? Because sms, like I might lose that SMS that you send me. And it’s hard to have a chain of communication per topic in email. It’s easy, you just open new email, write it down and like you’re going back and forth, back and forth. Yes, a lot of people at work sometimes hate emails because on Monday when I go to open my inbox, it’s close to what, close to 300, sometimes 500 emails. Because to keep up with the industry I subscribe to many different brands to see what they do and I’m like, I hate Monday morning when I open my inbox.

Vira: 8:14

But, but I like your 0 inbox policy. You have this like really cool habit of like yeah, search.

Andriy: 8:22

Thank you for mentioning this. Yeah, I’m practicing for since 2014 or maybe even earlier. I’m not sure where I heard about this, but when I open my email I unpause it my all emails loading. Then I click pause and until I go through all emails I do not move to anything else. Just on YouTube, just put in zero inbox and my first and last name and you should be able to find them.

Vira: 8:51

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, that’s a really, it’s a really cool thing. And I do get like on average like 200 something emails on, on Mondays. Mondays are the worst. First of all, a lot of brands are like messaging on Saturday and Sunday, which honestly I do with my clients too because for some reason Saturday and Sunday morning for like female brands is huge. Like that’s where we make most of our money for like female oriented brands for some reason. But yeah, I would say in general this pandemic has definitely changed the way we interact with email. I found this really cool graphic, it was from mailchimp, but it was very insightful and I think the numbers would be very similar with Klevi as well. So Pandemic has definitely changed the way we interact with emails and metrics for the engagement. They grew so much during the pandemic. So at the beginning of pandemic, all of the metrics went down. But by March 2025, 2020, almost all industries saw an increase in like open rates, click through rates and revenue obviously as well, because I read this number somewhere that 75% of people have changed their shopping behavior during and after Pandemic. So they’ve started shopping more online. And actually that’s where. Where we see this like big growth with the email. Right. And the global email marketing market. Like back in 2020 it was valued at 7 billion, and by 2027 it’s projected to increase by 17.9, almost$18 billion. So is email that. I don’t know. Like, look at the numbers. To us it seems very much alive. But I mean, it’s definitely a competitive market because research started sending more and more during the pandemic. So you have to be good, you have to deliver the value. It’s more about the value than ever before.

Andriy: 10:51

But still, I don’t have exact numbers and I don’t want to say it’s only 20% or 50% or 80% of brands using email marketing, but I’m subscribing to a lot of brands and even they present themselves and they might be big brands, but this is subscriber and in best case scenario, I receive welcome email. Just one welcome email and then quiet for six months and I might receive another email and I’m like, seriously?

Vira: 11:49

Yeah, yeah. People are not utilizing the power of the email. And that’s what I’ve noticed with like a lot of newer brands. They think that email marketing is like, about sending this like beautiful 4th of July campaign and like welcome email and that’s it.

Andriy: 12:04

They don’t think any emails from you.

Vira: 12:07

Oh, Andriy, come on. You had to, you had to say it on episode number 100 of, of our podcast.

Andriy: 12:16

You know what, it’s a, it’s a good, it’s. Sorry for putting you on the spot, but let me interview you asking questions. So you just started your like, business. I mean your company, like your brand. Actually you. It was, you started a long time ago, but you, you went through some changes, new product. But still, why, why you’re not focusing on the email marketing at this moment or not focusing. But why, why you’re not doing this.

Vira: 12:42

Yeah, we are doing some email marketing, but mostly we launched on amaz, where all of our focus went. And honestly I wish I had put more like work into email marketing. And that’s exactly what we are doing right now. That’s like we are developing the strategy right now and everything. But we started as an Amazon first brand and Shopify was like a nice addition, you know. But right now we’re trying to get all of our customers to Shopify through this little freebie that we are offering just to. To own that contact, to own that customer, to be able to talk to them directly. So that’s definitely our number one focus right now. That’s what we’re working on.

Andriy: 13:23

Looking forward to receiving your emails.

Vira: 13:26

Oh yeah, I know you were one of the first one to subscribe when we didn’t have even the website live yet or ready. You were on the list. So you were definitely top 10 customers right now because you were one of the first ones. So thank you for that.

Andriy: 13:44

Anytime.

Vira: 13:44

Cool. Okay, so email is not dead. Trend number one was email. And we think that email is still hot. If you think differently, let us know in the comments. But if you think differently, why the heck are you listening to this podcast? We are the community of email nerds and we do believe that email is here. Email is still very much hot and alive and it’s going to be here for a while, that’s for sure. Andriy, trend number two, global privacy. Hot or not? Your thoughts?

Andriy: 14:19

It’s extremely hot. And even Apple here in New York and probably in usa, like running even ads right now, not promoting their. Not promoting their phone or whatever, they promoting their privacy.

Vira: 14:36

Really?

Andriy: 14:36

Actually, yeah. And actually the like Apple was one of the first who did this step to protect privacy of their users.

Vira: 14:50

How do you feel about it as a marketer and as an Apple user?

Andriy: 14:56

So when they released this, I was against it and I personally still don’t like it because it on one end, yes, it protects you for privacy reasons so people cannot steal your data. But on another hand, when you go to your Facebook Instagram, your ads are not very targeted. I mean, it might be beneficial as well. So you don’t spend much money, but they are not so relevant. And sometimes I’m even reporting the ads because they show me like pills for heart disease or something, unless I don’t know, something. But on the consumer side, I like it because in the past three months I was hacked twice.

Vira: 15:48

Wow.

Andriy: 15:49

So I do understand the importance and my data was sold on black market. I Used to last pass the paid version and it notifies me if there is data leak and if the data leak was affected me and if it was found on black market for sale.

Vira: 16:08

Wow, it’s amazing. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. They can notify you about that. Apparently my data leaked somewhere too. But for some reason all of the scammers, they call me and they want to talk to my husband. So they were like hey Andriy Sadlak, you were like, I don’t know, you are charged with some sort of like crime or whatever or this is cra, you didn’t pay your taxes or whatever like all this kind of stuff. But for some reason they are calling me thinking that I’m Andriy Sadlak. That’s probably happened when we were like traveling in Asia or something and he was using my phone number. But yeah, yeah, definitely. As a user I love what Apple is doing but as marketer not so much. And those random ads, they remind me of 90s TV commercials. You sit there and you’re just like like looking at the pet supplement advertisements even though you don’t have a pet or for like Huggies promotion even though you don’t have a kid and stuff like that. So I’m not a fan of that but I really like how Klaviyo approached it. They said that they’re calling this breaking up with third party data. It’s like a different thing. It’s not an Apple thing, it’s more like a Google thing where they are reviewing, removing the third party data from, from all of their services. But they said that now we need to like look at data differently and we need to approach the process of like collecting data more as a dating. So you need to talk directly to your customer. So you have to talk directly to them and ask them about their interest. You, you want to earn their trust basically before you try to like sell them on something, on some idea or something. So you have to directly talk to them which will help you to make your email marketing a bit more conversational and a bit more personal I’d say. So that’s what I actually enjoy about this change. Yeah, yeah.

Andriy: 18:12

And one more thing that I like about this change from marketing perspective. It’s kind of the, I mean universe give us new challenge because our job was easier when we didn’t have, now it’s harder and we need to think more creative how to engage those customers, subscribers and how to collect data better.

Vira: 18:37

Right, right. And one thing that we all can benefit I guess to improve the data Privacy and stuff is to provide customers with an option to unsubscribe or change email preferences. And I cannot tell you how times I’ve seen those brands who are like trying to hide the unsubscribe link or don’t have the preference page. It’s. It’s bizarre.

Andriy: 18:59

It’s funny that you just mentioned this. I just received. I bought software Uber Suggest owned by Neil Patel, the huge SEO guy.

Vira: 19:09

Yeah.

Andriy: 19:10

And today I received my last email from them and they say like hey, if you don’t engage with our email by six nine, which is today I believe by end of the day we’ll unsubscribe. And they specifically said like if you don’t click on any links, we’ll unsubscribe you. And here’s like latest content we produce, blah blah, blah. By the way, they just purchased Ask Anything, Ask Public. There’s like resource. Very like very useful resource. So Neil Patel purchases that, that resource. And anyway like they list bunch of trends and they said like if you don’t engage with any of our links, we just subscribe you.

Vira: 19:58

So what, what, what do they mean by engage? Like click on the links.

Andriy: 20:02

Yes, basically.

Vira: 20:03

Right?

Andriy: 20:03

Yes. They ask by clicking. They probably don’t see if I opening the email or not. They probably. That’s why, that’s why they asked me to do it.

Vira: 20:12

I see. I see. Well that’s a, an aggressive sunset. Sunset flow. Right? Or. But I mean it’s. It’s interesting to see what, what kind of like feedback they’re getting with that. That’s awesome.

Andriy: 20:25

But they are transparent. Like yes, aggressive. But they are transparent.

Vira: 20:29

I like it.

Andriy: 20:30

Me too. And they probably want. Now they have my data, they probably cookies installed to my browser so they are able to track me better.

Vira: 20:39

I see. I see. No, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. I wonder if we should try it with our. With our own cl. I mean we are sending the sunset message anyway, right? We might as well try something like this. That’s amazing. I’m actually trying this new thing with one of my clients just like to improve the sender score and reputation and stuff. We are sending the newsletter and the last portion of the newsletter says like hey, reply to this email with your favorite summer song because we are creating our ultimate summer Spotify playlist and I just want to see how, how this like replies will help us with, with like deliverability and stuff because I heard that it gives you like brownie points.

Andriy: 21:19

A million subscribers.

Vira: 21:20

So I mean it’s a good problem to have Good problem to have. But my client was she, she really liked this idea and she was like, yeah, I’m gonna take the day off. I will be replying to those emails. I’m like, okay, nice. Sure. Yeah. And we also want to try this idea which I’m very like hesitant about, but it’s basically like reply to this email and let us know if you want us to send you an exclusive discount code which will have to be sent manually. But I kind of like this idea because A, it’s an engagement and B, it feels very personal and C, client already agreed to reply to all those emails manually.

Andriy: 21:59

There’s workaround.

Vira: 22:01

Oh yeah. Okay, spill the vince.

Andriy: 22:06

You can set the out of office notification, say hey, I’m out of office. But we’re running this promotion like if you responding.

Vira: 22:15

I love it.

Andriy: 22:16

Email while I’m away. Here’s the code.

Vira: 22:19

Oh my goodness. I love it, love it, love it. So basically everyone who will reach out to the brand will get a notification like this.

Andriy: 22:27

Yeah.

Vira: 22:28

Oh Andriy, you’re a genius. I love it.

Andriy: 22:31

Thank you. The best way to probably to do the separate email like because you don’t want to your vendor or somebody, I don’t know, like complaining and to receive this kind of notification, but maybe instead of like Andriy or andriy@flowium.com for example and everybody replying to that because you can give a reply to email, you know.

Vira: 22:57

We might actually try it. That’s awesome. Woohoo. There’s a work around it and my client will not need to take a day off to reply to all of those emails manually. Listen, that’s awesome.

Andriy: 23:09

I’m not sure how good I’m with email marketing, but I’m very good with workarounds.

Vira: 23:14

You’re good with like hacking stuff, that’s for sure. Chief hacker. No, it sounds bad. It sounds really bad. But I like that about you a lot. So I like how you build your own systems out of box system basically. So Andriy, since we started talking about global privacy and apparently it’s still hot, what do you think of tracking open rates? Open rates were a bit bread and butter of email marketers, but do you think they’re still hot or not so much?

Andriy: 23:46

No, not anymore. But honestly I never believed in open rate Even before the iOS privacy, all those updates. So my answer is not.

Vira: 23:56

Why you didn’t believe in them. This is like was one of the main metrics that we were all living off.

Andriy: 24:03

Yeah, I mean it was one of the biggest KPIs in email marketing industry. And this Is what the top like standard but giving you my example. So as we spoke before about my Monday when I come to office, opening my emails, loading all emails, sometimes I spend maybe two seconds per email. I just like archive, archive, archive, archive, archive. And out of hundred of marketing emails I may be engaged with one or two. So for them it showed that I opened the email but how good it is, I didn’t engage, I didn’t even scroll. So it means nothing. And in my case I opened that email not because they have catch a subject line but it was in a sequence of not open emails.

Vira: 24:57

I see.

Andriy: 24:58

Yeah, so it doesn’t mean however sometimes I spend two seconds or maybe sometimes less on email and it might catch my attention. So I stop, I scroll and I engage.

Vira: 25:14

Yeah, I see, I see what you’re saying. Well I do think that it’s still, I think this metric is still valuable though. I mean not as much now with the new Apple iOS 15 updates but you can basically see especially when person is like constantly opening your emails you can still see that they want to hear from you at least that you’re doing a good job with like subject lines. Right. It still tells you something about your email marketing. But for those of you who don’t know what Apple Update was about, there are basically, although I think most of you will know it but there are basically three main components that affect email marketing. First of all it’s the ability to turn off open tracking, the ability to block your IP address and the third one is the ability to hide your email address. It doesn’t affect like all users, it only affects users who use Apple Mail. So say if they are reading, if they’re like using different services like Gmail but reading it from Apple Mail, yes they will be affected but if they’re using like a different, different app, like Gmail app they should not be affected. So that’s, that’s one thing to understand.

Andriy: 26:25

So yes, I think that’s why Neil Patel’s Uber suggest send me those emails because I recently signed it up and they start sending me emails and for the last two weeks I checking all my emails from my iPhone and I use Google sorry Apple Mail app to check my work emails and I’m kind of like opening all the emails but they Since I use iOS they’re not sure if it’s like by default opening like goes to proxy, you know.

Vira: 26:58

So do you think they like segment based on like what sort of like devices or services you’re using?

Andriy: 27:05

I would like if I would them and they probably did the same thing. So I opt in and they see that I either use iOS or not opening emails or they not able to track that there’s a branch, there’s like split in their automation and say send this kind of emails to those who did not engage with our. Who. Who never click any of our links and they start to sunset flow to engage every engagement and the rest they probably unsubscribe automatically.

Vira: 27:39

So they have like a separate branch for Apple users. That’s what you’re saying. Or like I still haven’t.

Andriy: 27:48

A separate brand, a separate branch for people who never clicked in any of their emails.

Vira: 27:54

I see, I see. Well anyways, yeah, I was pretty bummed when I first heard about the Apple iOS updates because I did rely heavily on open rates. We were creating our engaged segments based on open rates. We were checking how our soldier clients are performing based on the open rates. But now I see it more as a good thing. I just tried to reframe our mindset around the email marketing and now we try to see it more not as a one way form of communication, but we try to encourage replies to collect some data directly from a customer. And by all means our clients are trying to write back to those emails. So we treat it more not as a one way form of communication, but just as a communication as interactive as possible. That’s like our goal with all of the emails that we’re doing. But it’s not just informational. You want to make it conversational and personal as well. So I’m kind of happy that this happened. It’s like a blessing in disguise. There’s like Apple Update and the open rates. But yeah, I agree, tracking open rates is not as hot as it used to be back in the days. Oh, Good old early 2000s. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. I love that movie. I love that movie a lot. Yeah. And I think we should watch it as a. You were talking about with Meg Ryan, right? You get mail.

Andriy: 29:35

Yeah.

Vira: 29:37

Yeah. You’ve only been living in the States for how long? For like 20 years.

Andriy: 29:43

It’s not about states, it’s about like your interest.

Vira: 29:46

I mean this is like the most one of the top 10 most iconic movies from like 90s or like early 2000s ever. Not a big deal. We should watch it together.

Andriy: 29:59

Okay.

Vira: 29:59

We should watch together with our entire team, you know, with our entire team. Flowium movie night. You’ve got mail. Yeah, that’s. I know what I need to talk to Marjana about. Cool. Okay. Andriy, next trend. It’s I think number four now Unifying your email, SMS and CDP stack. Hot or not? Or let’s say let’s call it omnichannel marketing. Hot or not. Well first of all explain what it means to those who don’t know and then why you think it’s hot.

Andriy: 30:34

So it’s when all of your tools interact with each other and knows when you let’s say send email so you don’t send them the same communication message through different media like Facebook Messenger. Like something happened to me recently, I believe I purchased something and they sent me oh we have like just, just buy it. Or like here’s a discount to finish your purchase. And I’m like come on, I just purchased this thing. Like thank you for your discount. And it happens a lot, especially if you use different tools. I mean there’s like now more tools available. And I believe you had an episode with Derek recently and he said, he mentioned how many tools are on the market.

Vira: 31:21

It’s like a shiny object syndrome, right? You see that fun, fun new feature. You want to get it right away. Yeah, yeah.

Andriy: 31:28

But probably the first criteria you should look at like how they interact with each other and if you are able to see if when you send one message in one then other tool can reconcile and send it or send a follow up or do not send it the message.

Vira: 31:45

That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Yeah. And we were talking about it in one of our episodes but basically before your customer will start recognizing you they will probably have five to send five to seven different brand interactions or on like different platforms. So they might see you on like Instagram, they might see you CSMs from you or like email and ideally you want to be talking to them in the same way with the same words. You need to understand from like whatever they are using. You want to understand where they are in their journey and you want to pursue that like big holistic approach where the customer can use whatever channel they want to connect with your brand but still be able to receive like a good quality communication and like sort of like not be bombarded with the same message from like a different platforms. And that’s I think where Klaviyo is doing an amazing job where you can like marry SMS and email together and not like bombard with abandonment card email and then abandonment card SMS at the same time. I think this is powerful. Honestly that’s why I prefer this combo.

Andriy: 32:50

CDP customer data platform is also like in the recent years becoming more and more popular because you want to understand the value of that subscriber from the source from the uptown they came from let’s say direct mail. You spend $50 to acquire that client customer, how much does it cost you? How much profit you made on that client? Because sometimes people spend a lot of money on something and they don’t understand the return on investment. So that’s the power or a CDP where you are able to make that analysis. And yesterday one of our clients asked me, listen, we are spending a lot of money on Facebook driving to this landing page and people opting in but I want to understand what’s our return. So we did simple export, evaluate how much those customers brought in so far and provide them the number and then they just need to do simple math how much they invested and how much they made it back.

Vira: 34:02

Right, right. It all comes down to like data and customer personalization. Honestly too because customers want personalization and we as a businesses we want to deliver it. So if you somehow can unify all this within one customer platform and constantly be delivering like good quality communication to them personalized based on their purchasing behavior, based on where they are in their customer journey, that’s amazing. So I’m thinking this trend is hot. Honestly I’m thinking it’s hot. I’m thinking it’s here, it’s here to stay. And also with those like there’s like this big trend in the industry where like bigger companies started buying like smaller, smaller apps. Even with like Yotpo. Right. They have swell. I think they were thinking about purchasing Smile. I might be wrong but they are trying to purchase a lot of different smaller solutions to.

Andriy: 34:59

SMS bump.

Vira: 35:00

Oh yeah, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize that. But yeah, I heard a lot of talking that they are purchasing all these different smaller solution just to be able to deliver this one big omnichannel experience. And I think it’s, it’s beautiful. I think this trend is here to stay cool. Kandry, last trend or maybe not the last one, we’ll see but this one is. I personally think it’s hot but I want to hear your opinion. Plain text emails hot or not. So like text on the emails. Like no image, no gifts, no nothing. Just like text, good old text. What do you think?

Andriy: 35:35

If I like, if I. This is very political question. We might lose like a lot of revenue in our agency. If I answer it’s not, it’s not hot. So sorry, if I answer it, it’s a hot. No, honestly I think it’s hot. And why? Because it does work. The best example so far I saw is A Sticker Mule company. They even have an article either on Forbes or Inc. Magazine about email marketing and about like plain text. If you subscribe to their emails they typically have three lines and in those three lines it’s probably maximum of 10 words. It’s like high sticker, blah blah blah for $9 and buy or something like that. It’s extremely short. But I don’t go to Sticker Mule to learn how stick your mule affects the environment in South Africa. You know like and it’s like short and sweet. Another good brand which I follow and like their design is a Magic Spoon.

Vira: 36:43

Oh I love them.

Andriy: 36:44

Yes. But I’m not sure if they sending only to customers or to subscribers and customers. So there’s like branded, branded, branded email and then there’s like from Megan, I believe Megan from Magic Spoon. And it’s like written email, text only and with one link. And I think it’s powerful. I think combination of text emails plus like design emails both are.

Vira: 37:15

Yeah, that’s, that’s what I was about to say because Magic Spoon, I’m subscribed to their email too. I think they’re very like visually appealing, they’re beautiful and they’re very like rich and interactive. And I think this trend is still here especially when you have like a strong branding but like marrying the two image based emails and like text only emails. I think it’s powerful. I made it as a part of a post purchase flow for almost all of my clients. As an email number three I think it’s like a email from, from the owner and we constantly seeing very like high open rates, click through rates, higher engagement and it always feels very like personable or real and, and, and and when you want to deliver the message. It’s also powerful because, because it’s like eliminates all of the distractions and lets subscribers to focus on the sender’s message, not necessarily on the image. And I, I think that people spend more time on those like text only emails which is good for you. And they click, they click on links, they engage more with those type of emails. But obviously it’s not for, it’s not for every brand. I don’t think this emails would be very beneficial for say like fashion brands or like brand brands who rely heavily on product imaging. But try experimenting, just throw it as email number three of your post purchase sequence or as a cute campaign. Few years ago we’ve sent or few months ago we’ve sent this campaign saying a campaign from the owner saying hey please don’t buy anything Today we have a big promotion coming tomorrow. So don’t buy anything today, wait until tomorrow and we will send you the discount code. Personally and I do it for a lot of my clients and every time this campaign generates a lot of revenue which I don’t understand the logic behind it. I don’t understand why this campaign is so successful every time in terms of revenue. But it does work. It does work. And I think that plain text emails are here to stay. But definitely try it out because different brands, yeah, it might work differently for different brands.

Andriy: 39:23

And I like what you just said. And, and honestly I think the text email can be implemented even for visual brands. Especially let’s say if they reach certain revenue milestone or become vip, they can receive message from, let’s say from the owner or from customer support, say hey, we are here. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We will help you with selections or, or back in stock or whatever you need. We are here to help. It’s just better customer experience. And also like plain text email might get to their inbox. Yeah. And they might engage higher engagement.

Vira: 40:08

Actually since we were started talking about this like personal emails and like including them into your, into your flows, there is like this one brand that I work with, I will not name them but basically as a part of their VIP flow, as email number two, we will do this thing, the text only, plain text email, text only email where it will say like thank you for being our VIP. Let’s schedule a call together with our CEO and like here’s the 15 minutes window, like we’re going to include the calendar link and they will be able to talk directly to CEO. So these are the people who are like loving your brand apparently. Right. And like imagine how many good sort of like insights you can get from them. And that’s again coming back to that like collecting the data directly from your customer. But also if they agree on, if they give us the permission to use that, that content, we can actually create a lot of user generated content as well. So again, simple plain text email with a calendar link where they can peg the time to talk to the CEO if they want to. Only like a quick 15 minutes interview. But it will give them that special feeling that they are valued that the CEO of the company wants to talk to them, wants to get to know them. Just like imagine what it can do to your brand loyalty in a long term. We haven’t launched it yet, we just started building this flow but I’m really excited about it and I think this will be A very successful one. So plain text emails all the way. I love them, I love them. But yeah, do combine the two combine like image heavy and plain text emails. But what we do internally at Flowium, we never, I would say almost never use the image only. Image only emails. We try to include, include the plain text as well just for the sake of readability and also accessibility. Because it’s like one of the trends as well, accessibility. We’re not going to talk about it in depth. If you want to listen about the accessibility in depth, go to the podcast with Megan and we’ll link it in our description box and you can read or listen more to that in that podcast. Okay, cool. So Andriy, these are the five trends. Any other trends you had in mind that you wanted to mention or like to watch out for?

Andriy: 42:29

Yeah, I think we mentioned before we started recording the segmentation part.

Vira: 42:34

Yeah, segmentation. I mean it’s, it’s a trend that was always there, that didn’t go anywhere. And I feel like it’s here, it’s here to stay.

Andriy: 42:42

Here’s, here’s my, here, here’s my few cents about this. So in the past it was online buying, there was a trend and you show people ad, they go to your store and they almost buy immediately. I mean it’s like they’re very high chance if they went from the ad to your store, they purchased. So the next trend was no, you have to collect their email as email and send them follow up email and after that they all buy. And now I believe, believe even if people opt in, you collect their email, they still don’t buy with you because that personalization, that segmentation is very important.

Vira: 43:31

It’s powerful.

Andriy: 43:33

Yeah, we did, I mean we always like testing, split testing. But one of the very powerful split tests that we did, we send the same campaign, the same exact everything copy, open rate everything to the same, I mean for the same brand. But one segment was generic and there were a hundred thousand email subscribers and we generated close to$1,000 from that 100,000 subscribers. The second segment was people who expressed some interest in that product category and we send it only to. I don’t want to lie, But I believe one the close to 1000. Close to 1000 subscribers. So 1000 or it was 10,000, I mean anyway. But that segment brought close to$18,000. So it shows you the power of segmentation and like in email marketing you might lose a lot of yes, you can send one message to everybody but slowly your deliverability will suffer and over time you will Lose a lot.

Vira: 44:52

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we did. And I was like telling you that just before the podcast, we have a personal win of our own. I’m not gonna like name the brand, but the idea is very similar. Usually we were sending the campaigns, the content heavy campaigns, to like a smaller engaged segment. But this time we decided in this case it was spending the segment because we send it not just to like a smaller engaged people, like a segment, but also to people who have visited the collection, who have purchased this product in the past, or who have visited like certain, certain product pages or who had this like products in their carts and the results that we got. So originally like, on average we were generated like between like$5,000 and$6,000. Well, this campaign, the, that we’ve sent a few days ago, it generated already$28,000. That’s like the power of segmentation. And the dollar generated per customer was like four times higher than what we usually do usually. So not only did we send to like a bigger segment, because that’s something that people don’t understand that segmentation does not necessarily mean sending it to like a smaller segment of people. Sometimes it just means to sending it to the right segment of people. And that’s excellent example. I thought it was an accident when I first got like 18,000 or$16,000, but we already sent like three campaigns like that, same time, same sort of like strategy, same brand. And like three times in a row it did generate like a lot more revenue than it usually does. So segmentation is like your bonus trend, trend number six. And we talk about it a lot, but that’s what we believe in. We believe that email marketing is about segmentation and automation and obviously to deliver the right message to the right person. That’s your biggest goal as an email marketer. So definitely a trend that will stay here for as long as email marketing will be alive.

Andriy: 46:49

And as we said in this episode, if you don’t have resources to develop those, to produce those well designed, polished emails, just send a simple.

Vira: 47:03

Yeah, they feel, they feel real. That’s what I like about it. So they feel real. Email marketing don’t have to be like polished and perfect. It has to be real. As long as you’re delivering the value honestly. That’s what we believe in. Right?

Andriy: 47:15

Yep.

Vira: 47:16

Cool. Well, Andriy, that was a good one. Thank you so much for coming and joining us on episode 100. Yay. We’ll need to insert some sort of music here or something to make it more.

Andriy: 47:27

Almost two year. Two years.

Vira: 47:30

Two years, pretty much yeah, we are like two episodes shy of two years. Yeah. Or four more. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Yes. Because it’s June 9th and we launched our podcast on July 1st, I think. Right. So July 1st, Canada Day.

Andriy: 47:47

52 in the year. So it’s like, okay, 104.

Vira: 47:51

Okay.

Andriy: 47:51

Yeah, I went that route.

Vira: 47:54

Yeah, your route is more reliable. But yeah, on Canada Day, we will be celebrating another milestone, two years of the podcast. But anyways, a lot of celebrations over the next few months, so thank you so much, Andriy. It was nice having you on this podcast and I’m sure we will see you back again because you’re one of those guests we can’t get rid of you. I’m joking. We love having you here, so come back anytime. Awesome.

Andriy: 48:22

And thank you, everybody for listening.

Vira: 48:24

Thank you so much. Take care, Andriy. Bye bye.