#25. Biggest Email Marketing Lessons 2020 Has Taught Us | Podcast

Vira  0:00 

We as an email marketing agency, we found ourselves this year in a very like unique position. We learned a lot of lessons, and here are our biggest email marketing lessons that 2020 has taught us.

Alissa  0:35 

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Email Einstein, Vira and Alissa here, we are two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are super passionate about email marketing, and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium, full service e commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business, and it’s designed to help increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50% that’s five 0% we deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment, and that’s what we’re all about here at Flowium, and we are gonna just get crashing through our very final episode in 2020. Can you believe it?

Vira  1:26 

Yay, final episode. Take a deep breath, people, because we are almost there. 2020 is almost over, and everyone has so much hope for 2021. Yeah. But for most of us, this has been an incredibly challenging, transformative and life changing year, yeah, and especially for people in business, for many businesses, especially small businesses 2020, feels like someone just like pulled the rug out of from underneath them. And yeah, I mean, for all of us, it’s been a challenging year, but let’s just like briefly, talk about all the good stuff that happened this year, because let’s, let’s focus on something good. So I, I found this, this fact, I googled them, like, what really good happened this year? 2020, so here’s my personal favorite list. So SpaceX launches two astronauts into the space for the first time.

Alissa  2:24 

We watched it live as well.

Vira  2:26 

You watched it live?

Alissa  2:27 

Yeah. We went, we went and we saw the launch. It was amazing. So, yes, very cool thing what happened in 2020.

Vira  2:33 

Yeah, and Tiger King became a hit series, series. So, and you watched that too Alissa, right?

Alissa  2:41 

Yes, yes, I did. Apparently I indulge in all the nice things from 2020.

Vira  2:48 

I guess wearing sweatpants and T shirts became acceptable fashion choices all day, every day, and I’m super happy about it, like I’m wearing my sweatpants as we speak right now. So that’s a good one. Lady Gaga actually gave us her new album. So that’s one of my personal highlights. Is now, yeah, creola, how to say how to pronounce it correctly, like, Crayola, you got it right? Crayola, okay, guys, can I heard like, different versions I heard, like, even crayons and, yeah, like, all kinds of weird pronunciations. Anyways, Crayola launched a box of crayons with different skin colors for for children to accurately color themselves into the world. And I think this is so cool, yeah, because even in Slack, we have this, like, different colors of the white.

Alissa  3:43 

Yeah, it’s true. I always used to whenever I would do my skin. I mean, I’m not brown, I’m Latin, so, like, I have pretty tan skin. I always used to do, like the brown color mixed with yellow and try and get the perfect skin. So that’s cool.

Vira  4:01 

Crayola, thought of people like you so and also, in 2020 we came up with creative ways to celebrate big milestones like drive by birthdays and zoom parties and hello Facebook weddings. Am I right, Alisa?

Alissa  4:02 

Guilty, guilty.

Vira  4:07 

Yeah, that was actually the first ever Facebook wedding I attended. But, yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never done this before, but I thought it was such a cool idea. And I literally felt like we were there. We were in our like, team, Slack, crying there. So sweet. Yeah, and actually, another good thing that happened this year is the highest voter turnout in 120 years. And wow, the states. So that’s a big one for you, I guess, yeah, as well. So a lot of good things happened as well. It really a few things have impacted our world on so. Many levels, like, like covid pandemic of 2020, the key we still have so many things to be grateful for, so many things to be like, happy about, and yeah, and we, as an email marketing agency, we found ourselves this year in a very like, unique position of helping clients to make decisions regarding their businesses in a very like turbulent time. So it was a roller coaster for us as well. But hey, we learned a lot. We learned a lot of lessons. And here are our biggest email marketing lessons that 2020 has taught us. So yeah, I’m excited about this episode because, because because I feel like we have a lot a lot of things to share.

Alissa  5:45 

Yeah, for sure.

Vira  6:10 

So the first and big one for me, anyways, was that in email marketing, you have to provide value first, and it is estimated that in 2019 there were 293.6 billion emails sent and received every day, every freaking day, which means that an average person receives more than 120 emails per day. And again, that was back in 2019 I’m sure that this numbers are much higher in 2020 I bet in this year the numbers will be, oh, my goodness, through the roof. And it’s way too easy to just like, get lost in all that email marketing noise, right? And if you really want to stand out in your customers inboxes, and that’s something that we learned in 2020 and sometimes we learned it the hard way. If you want to stand out, you need to stand out through high quality content. You need to be providing value first, rather than always hitting your subscribers with an ask. And I just like listened lately to this great podcast, and they were talking about what makes a good content, good content, and they said that your content should either educate, entertain or inspire. If your content doesn’t do any of this, three things, don’t don’t send it, don’t exhaust your customers with with those emails, you should either educate, entertain or inspire. So start by asking yourself, Hey, who is my customer, and how am I going to meet my customers needs? How can I educate my customer? How can I entertain my customer? How can I make them smile, and how can I like inspire them to be better versions of themselves. So here are some examples of educational content that you can be sending. So when your customers understand the value of your product and they know how to use it properly, in that case, they will get the most after out of your products, right. So education can be something as simple as, hey, here is how to properly use our product to get like, the most out of it. If you are selling the supplements, you can send an email about, like, what is the best time to take the supplements? When they need to be taking supplements? How often do they need to be taken it? Is there a good idea to combine the supplement with some other supplements, or something like that. Educational content comes in a variety of forms. Honestly, it could be like a step by step videos how to put on your socks. I don’t know this this rent probably don’t need a step by step video, but it can be a product guide or even an FAQ. You wouldn’t believe how often people like message. Well, you probably would believe if you, if you work in E commerce, but try to address all of the customers frequently asked questions before they even ask them. So be one, one step ahead of them. Create some content around your frequently asked questions. Create some campaigns, or even make it a part of your flows. Provide information that needs, that your customer needs to achieve something specific in order to see the results. And actually, one really cool thing that we did, actually, we will do it soon with one of my clients. They are, they are selling the herbal teas and herbal shots. So basically, like detox products. So and early 2021 we’ll send the campaign that we’ll be talking about the best detox tips to like to cleanse or to clean your body after after the holidays. And yeah, so we just like Google them and put together really nice, informative email. And we are not asking them to purchase anything from us. We want to provide the value first. Before asking them to do something that’s cool. Yeah. And another big one as inspire, as we already talked and case studies can be really powerful. Inspire kind of content, right? You can show your customers so, like other clients, success stories, just like to inspire your customers to take an action and Neil Patel, he’s like a big marketing guy, the co founder of Crazy Egg, he actually managed to increase his sales by 70% by including case studies in his email flows. So yeah, the case studies, they are powerful. They are inspirational. They’re educational in a way as well. And I guess you can make them entertaining as well. So get get creative with them. Okay, so you we’ve kind of covered inspire, we cover, educate, entertain. If you are blessed with Jerry Seinfeld kind of humor, definitely use it in your emails. Go for it. But if you are more like me, and the only person laughing at your jokes is your grandma, and Thank you grandma, maybe you better focus on something you are good at. You don’t have to entertain if, if that’s not in line with your branding, yeah, you don’t have to entertain if you don’t have to be funny if you are selling. I don’t know. What can What? What not funny? Can you be selling if you’re providing, like, the funeral services or something?

Alissa  13:30 

Yeah.

Vira  11:28 

I don’t know, but we, literally, we had the client before in the past. That’s why that’s an example that that I got, if you struggle coming up with hilarious posts and memes that go viral, focus on educational, focus on inspirational stuff. But if you are actually good with making people laugh, just like, just go for it. It’s actually powerful. I really liked there’s this brand. It’s called Chinese tea, and they are selling the like the T shirts and shirts and basically apparel company, and at the beginning of 20 of the pandemic, they started selling their masks as well. So they had this like hilarious campaign where they said, masks are like pens these days. You can go in public without them, but you killed straight, but you’ll get strange stares, and people will likely cross this street to steer card clear of you. So if humor is in your toolbox, don’t, don’t be, don’t be afraid of using it. And listen, you don’t have to be like you don’t have to be a steinfold, or you don’t Seinfeld. You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to create a good quality content. When people think of quality content, most of the time, they are not looking for like perfect grammar. They are not looking for like Hollywood style video effects or like super high quality like jokes or something. The content just needs to be like useful to them. To be either educational, informative, it has to be inspirational or entertaining. The important part is always focusing on your customer, knowing how you can serve that particular kind of customer. And you need to understand what is valuable and worthwhile to your audience. So lesson number one that we learned this year is provide value first, and only after that, you can hit your customers with then ask. You can ask them to do something, but before provide the value first.

Alissa  13:31 

Yeah, I love that. And that’s something that we drive home with clients all the time where they’re like, oh, sell, sell. And it’s like, hold on a second. Yeah, you’re not adding value. You have to add the value, and you have to make people trust that you will add value before you can actually push them to make a purchase with you, you know. So I love that one. That’s a really great one in the educate, inspire and entertain. That’s huge and definitely, definitely something that I personally let slide from my mind from time to time, and then I see an email and I’m like, What am I getting out of this? Not a lot. Let’s rethink this. So I love that really good. So for lesson number two, we called it connecting with empathy. So I’m sure you can all agree, if this year has taught us anything, it’s that empathy it really matters when you get down to the nitty gritty, this year was obviously filled with unprecedented events that made us all kind of reconsider and reevaluate our priorities in life. And I think the biggest priority for a lot of us, actually, and what we’ve realized a lot of this year is that people really matter the most, especially in a pandemic and in times of struggle. They matter to us personally, our loved ones, the people that we see, our friends, our family. But they also matter in general. A big reason why a lot of people wear masks is not necessarily because it protects because it protects themselves, but it helps protect others. People are avoiding seeing their family members who are high risk because they want to protect them. So I think, all in all, as a society, we can all agree that people matter. People are important, and sometimes in situations that require higher than normal levels of empathy, business practice or. Businesses kind of get kicked out of the door. And so what I mean by that is your empathy sometimes has to trump your ability to sell and get a sale from a customer. So one thing that we actually noticed many brands doing, and we also started to encourage our own clients to do, was to consider showing their more empathetic or vulnerable side to their customers. So with email marketing, obviously, we want to sell and we want to grow e commerce businesses. I mean, duh. That’s why marketing exists as a whole. But this year, email marketers and business owners alike really got a chance to show their customer base that they actually care from there for them through all of this. So how did we actually do this? How did we achieve this? Well, for starters, instead of sending another email pushing the sale of a product, we had our clients check in with their customers. We were able to send plain text emails on behalf of CEOs requesting a pulse check. Hey, thanks for being a loyal customer. Third, like a customer with us. How are you doing? How are you feeling? What can we do to support you? That kind of thing, just being like a good neighbor. You know, we helped our clients create initiatives that would support and uplift those on the front lines of the healthcare industry. We saw a lot of brands that were doing like, buy one, donate one. So there was one brand that we worked with that was selling energy bars, and for every box that was purchased when you made that purchase, you had the opportunity to donate to a hospital that was affiliated with the brand, or whatever it was, which was which was really cool. You know, it just goes to show like the community support that gets or community support in the community outreach that kind of transpires from a really horrific virus, we crafted strategies for our clients that enabled them to provide discounts and extensions on refunds or help, even with any payments on subscription services. You know, one of the things that like Loom, for example, is a service that we use a lot internally. It’s basically just like a screen recording platform, so you can record your screen, and then also you can turn on your camera so that your face is also there as part of the recording and make videos and things like that. They were actually offering 50% off their subscription for like, six months out of the year as soon as the pandemic hit, to help people with their payments and things like that, because people were struggling so in times of struggle, despite being a business owner and wanting to make money, yes, that’s super important. That’s why you have a business. You got to pay the bills. You have a family, you have a house, whatever it is important to show others that you care, because your business will be remembered in the long run, and it may not pay the bills right now, but I can promise you that it will pay dividends beyond comprehension in the future. So people will always go back to a company that showed that they cared about them, versus a company that kind of slapped them in the face when they needed help. A personal example for me. I mean, this is it’s not an E commerce business, but so I’m sure a lot of you who have listened with with us from the start? No, I actually got married this year, very crazy year, but my husband and I got married back in April a local wedding venue here in Boca Raton. We had a contract set up with them and everything, and we had to cancel our wedding. They were horrific to work with, like they really, really made the whole process 10 times worse than what it was, they were not willing to provide any form of any partial refund, or willing to pay it forward for us. We had six months to reschedule our entire event, which was ridiculous, because there were no promises that we would be able to have our wedding in six months, which if you look back six months from April to October, we still haven’t been able to have our wedding, so we had to throw this huge fit. I had to make all these posts on social media. This is where digital marketing comes in handy, because, you know, you know the right buttons to press. And then we finally got through to them, and then they agreed, oh, yeah, you can have your wedding in a year’s time. Well, if you think about it, a lot of people still can’t even have their wedding at the start of 2021, because it doesn’t look like this thing is really like this thing is really blowing over very much anytime soon or not, that the virus isn’t stopping the spread, but it’s just people are still very, very anxious about what they can and can’t do. So it’s been miserable, and so we lost quite a large amount of money because we just ended up having to cancel. I’m pregnant now. We’re buying a house. I mean, there’s so many other things going on, and to look in the next six months to think, Oh, can we, can we host a reception, or whatever it is with this venue? It’s just, it’s foolish. And I know that I wasn’t the only we weren’t the only couple that went through that. There were a lot of local couples here that were actually reaching out to me via Facebook Messenger and things like, oh my gosh, this venue totally screwed us over. What do we do? Like, what did you do? And I was like, it’s bad business. It’s really bad business. So that’s one place that I know for sure that I will never, ever, ever go back to, whether it’s for an event, my own event, going to someone else’s wedding, I refuse to support that entity, because they were awful to work with in the middle of a pandemic, whereas other couples who worked with other venues, the venues provided them a full and total refund. Hey, you can reschedule in the next five years if you want to whatever you need. We’re going above and beyond to help. So make sure that you’re on the good side of that versus the bad side. It’s tough in in kind of like in that, in the middle of that situation, because you don’t necessarily know how things will transpire, but just know that people will be loyal to you, and people will come back and appreciate what you did for them in their time of struggle, and they will be more than happy to come forth and play ball for you. You know now everyone is talking about shopping small people are really diverting their focuses from like the big boys, like Target, Walmart and Amazon, and focusing on the local businesses because they want to support the small business. Small business owners who are a lot of you e commerce owners. So make sure you kind of hang tight and go the empathetic route, because it’s important. It’s really important for people to know that you care, and it will go such a long way for you as a business owner.

Vira 19:35 

And it doesn’t even have to be anything huge. You can even do as little as change the tone or the copy of your emails just to make it sound more empathetic. You can maybe offer some kind of exchange and return policy, like an extended or, I don’t know, do the higher discount. Obviously, you are still in business to make money, right? But maybe just change the way you are talking to your customers. Just like, understand that on on the other side of the screen is is an actual person who is going through this anxious times as well. So those times are hard for, like, all of us on the both sides of the like, marketing, marketing models, but just like, remember about it.

Alissa 21:18 

Yeah, don’t. Don’t make it harder for the other person. And that extension of the refund or return policy, I mean, one of my clients did that, and he got tremendous feedback, and I think he extended it from, like, 30 days to 60 days or something. It’s really not the end of the world, but he got such positive feedback from his customer base because they could see like, Hey, listen, we understand you’re a business owner, and we appreciate the effort that you’re making to make this better for us. So it’s very small gestures go such a long way, and they don’t break the bank. And there are creative ways to do it. So do it.

Vira 21:18 

Yeah, and honestly, I don’t even think a lot of people would take you up on that offer, on that like extended policy, return policy, it’s just more to show your customers that you are there for them in case they need you.

Alissa  22:16 

Exactly, exactly.

Vira  22:12 

And the third lesson that we learned this year, it kind of goes hand in hand with being empathetic in your emails. The third lesson is being more personal, and during this covid 19 craziness, arguably the biggest thing that people crave is actually like interaction with each other, and email is the form of interactions. So the more you can make your email marketing feel like it’s coming from a real person to the real person, the more engaging and effective it will be. We talked a lot about emails being relevant, about the segmentation in our previous episodes, but here are the few, like basic tactics. So the first big one is segmentation. I mean, we probably mentioned it in each and every in each and every episode, but segmentation is what this entire marketing thing is about. Segment everyone wants to feel like they are being spoken to like from a real person and with a real person. So slice your list into smaller like sub list or segments if you wish, using specific criteria so you can craft personalized, targeted emails that better speak to like a certain client, to different types of contacts you have in your email database. Do not bombard your entire list. Do not send it to send each and every campaign to your master list, to like your entire list of the clients, because people want to feel that they are not just one of many people on your list. They want to feel like you as a business care about them specifically and about their specific needs. So if you are selling the pet products, do not bombard parrot owners with the food for cats. That’s That’s what I’m saying. Just like, try to segment as much as you can. And believe me, even though it sounds counterintuitive, but segmented lists, they convert better and they bring more money, they bring more revenue. So don’t exhaust your list with each and every email. So that’s the first big one. The second little trick that you can do is to use a real reply to email address. So the person you’re sending prospect email to as they want to engage with you and you want to hear back from them as why as well. So why use then noreply@company.com as the reply to address in your emails. You both want to talk to each other. You want to talk to your customer just as much as they want to talk to you, believe it or not, and using a real person’s name, like john@company.com will not only help you make your emails more like recognizable and credible, but it will also increase your open rate and it will also make your. Email feel more personal, I guess, and that’s something that we all are craving these days. So something as little as changing from or like using a real reply to email is actually customized the sender name. For the same reason, you’ll want to make sure that you customize the name of the sender in your email. And the best case scenario, you would probably use the name of, like a real person from, like a real customer support department, or, I don’t know, even like the name of your CEO, if, if it’s a small brand and and people want to connect with with your CEO directly, try to use a name that the lead might actually recognize, and that’s super easy to do, but it will make your emails feel more personal as well. And a little thing that people know about but often forget to do that is including the recipient’s name, and it’s super easy to do, and platforms like Klaviyo, like you literally just insert the tag that pulls customer name dynamically from their profile. So instead of hi customer or Hi, there, you can be doing like hey Alissa or hey Vira or whatever. And they also have this cool feature that if the system does not recognize the name of the customer. If there is no name of the customer, you can set up like a generic field, just like you can do like a high there for like hey or Hey pal or whatever, whatever your like tone of the brand as in case the system cannot pull their name from the system. So yeah. So try doing that. It’s a little little tweak, but it can help you a lot with the overall feel of the email and the tone. The tone of the copy is huge as well, and we had like an entire episode about it. But try taking a conversational tone as much as possible. Of course, if it’s like in line with your branding, knowing what to say and what and when to say it’s important, don’t get us wrong, but the tone of your messaging is, is just as important, just for your customers to to feel like, like they are dealing, not with just like a marketing with a template or something, but we want to feel, make them feel like they are working with real people, and that they are talking to a friend, actually. So try to try to make your tone as conversational as possible, if possible, of course. So that’s like, being more personal is the third big lesson that this pandemic taught us, and I’m sure it will be applicable even after this. All this crazy craziness ends, because being more personal is huge, actually.

Alissa  27:44 

Yeah, and we’ve talked a lot about this in the past as well, definitely on other podcasts where a big focus for us is like, okay, hat and that comes with like, the segmentation. How do we personalize like, the actual content in the emails as well, not only based on like, including their name and stuff, but like, making sure that like, people are receiving the right kind of message, like, Hey, you have a cat. Let’s talk about cats, that kind of thing. So, yeah, yeah. The personalization thing is that’s one that 100% will stick. I think these will all stick. But the personalization is a big one, definitely a big Yeah. And our very last email marketing lesson of 2020, is being flexible. And this one makes me laugh, because whether you liked it or not, you had to be flexible this year to make it through. Yeah, so sorry. Like, if you couldn’t be flexible, then you are still stuck in February 2020, and we’ll see you into the new year as a human, as a parent, as a kid, as an employee, as a business owner and as a marketer, you just had to internally here at Flowium, we usually work on our campaign calendars on a quarterly basis for our clients. It usually just helps with like organization planning and ultimately, just getting an effective strategy in place for our clients. But you can imagine all of our surprise when we got to march and we had to do a complete 180 with the kind of content and we are sending out to our clients customers. We like to be organized, and we like things to go according to plan. But definitely not the case this year, and it required a huge amount of flexibility from all of us as account managers here at the agency, along with everybody else in the world who had to be flexible with their new situations. Yeah, that’s something that as a person, it’s important to be but in the email marketing world, you just have to be able to move with the tide. Because not only did this year create a lot of changes and a lot of unexpected kind of twists and turns, but this industry is ever changing, and new things get rolled out. Klaviyo is constantly rolling out new upgrades, new updates. We have to just keep moving, and we have to keep educating ourselves and knowing what to do next, because we want to try and be ahead of whatever is coming next. So just to give you kind of a couple of examples of what we went through firsthand here, and also just kind of how we had to be flexible around it. So at the very beginning of the pandemic, we’re kind of thinking back to March. March, April timeframe, we had a mix of clients that had a mix of emotions. So for example, one of our clients Wine Awesomeness, who you guys all know well, Logan and Dale. They’re an awesome duo who co own and co founded the company. They saw the biggest spike in revenue that they had ever seen as a company, because people were desperately buying alcohol to get delivered to their homes to withstand their new life from home situation, which is totally understandable, and that’s not a bad problem to have, but they had to manage production shipment and a new huge inbound of customer service requests. So they had to get flexible whatever they had planned for or strategized for that year, they had to basically start from scratch, because now they’re dealing with this mass quantity of not expectation. Oh my gosh. I’m completely losing the word demand. Huge, huge demand on their product and on their brand, which was cool for us to see firsthand, because, you know, we help with their email marketing, but they went through a lot of growing pains in a very short amount of time. But then other clients that are kind of, I guess, in the non essential category, which, honestly, I don’t like that term, because I really believe every business is essential. Everyone has bills to pay. Everyone, whoever owns your business, your business is essential. Let’s just, let’s just put that out there. But other clients, they had to adapt with the increase in job loss, the general panic that people were having, people holding on to their money for their dear lives, not wanting to spend on a single thing other than like food and water. So rather than sending out campaigns that focused on selling or promoting the purchase of their products that we had initially pitched and strategized for the year, we started sending out campaigns that encouraged, inspired and showed care. So going back to that empathy thing, we had to kind of completely switch the mode of what our strategy looked like, what our campaigns looked like. And rather than going down the selling route, we had to go down the empathetic route. So we had to be very flexible. So, and I had mentioned this earlier in the podcast, just now, but one of my clients extended their return exchange policy to make up for the shift in focus. You know, hey, we understand there’s pandemic going on. It’s really crazy. Instead of 30 days, we’re extending it to 60 days. And again, he had such a positive response. So you just got to be flexible. You got to be able to kind of switch over and get creative and just just move along. Because if you don’t, you’re going to miss opportunities. Yeah, and now we fast forward to today, we’re hopefully reaching the end of this horrific thing, but now our clients are struggling with angry customer emails because of USPS delays, and I mean serious delays, like most of my clients, their customers still have not received their purchases from Black Friday, and we’re like, almost a month past.

Vira  32:39 

Still, I’m Still waiting for my packages too.

Alissa  32:41 

Are you really?

Vira  32:42 

Yeah.

Alissa  32:43 

It’s like, it’s crazy. It really is crazy. So rather than So, for example, we’ve kind of had to shift on both sides of things, on the automation front, and then also on the campaigns, automations. We have a post purchase flow that I think we’ve talked about in the past, where towards the end of the flow, by that point, we’ve made kind of the estimation that with with shipping included, or the shipping timeframe, the person would have received their package already, or their product, and they would have tried it already. So at that point, we asked for, hey, we’d love a survey. We’d love you to fill out a survey. We’d love your feedback. Would you write us a review? And customers are still getting those emails and they’re like, How dare you rub this in my face. I still haven’t, and we’re like, you know what? We didn’t mean to do this. This is an automated email, but we have to account for that. So we’ve had to extend delay now by like, two to three weeks to make sure, which is, it’s crazy. So on the automation side of things, like, you have to be ready to make changes at the you know, at the snap of a finger, because the second you get that one customer email, you can feel the enragement from your customers. You don’t want to go through that again. But then on the other side of it, we’re having to create these last minute apology campaigns, because they’re receiving so many angry customer emails asking customers to please be patient with the current state of most fulfillment and shipping centers, because it’s out of the company’s control. They sent out the product, but it’s UPS that’s not scanning it and shipping it quickly enough because of all the delays, we’ve had the biggest e commerce year ever this year. So it only makes sense, and it puts a strain on these external factors. So you as a business owner, you as an email marketer, you have to be in tune with that kind of stuff so that you can, you can make amends with your customers and reassure them and comfort them, even though they’re super angry, and really, there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to show that you’re trying, you know. So it’s, yeah, been, been very interesting. So with every client, meeting is so crucial now ever on a monthly basis or on a weekly basis, because we have to check in. Hey, is there anything coming in from customers? Is there anything we need to be aware of? That’s one of the major questions we ask at close to the end of every meeting. Are there any updates or anything that we need to be aware of? And that’s a really good opportunity for our clients to let us know, like, Hey, we’re getting a ton of angry emails from customers, but. Because of shipping. What can we do? And that’s when we, as email marketers, we kind of have to on the fly like, hey, let’s, let’s send out another campaign, or let’s target these people who specifically made purchases during Black Friday and send them an email, or send them a send them a coupon, or a bounce back coupon for a future purchase, or something like that. You know. So yeah, the flexibility side of things is huge, and this year, it was more necessary than most. But just always be prepared for that kind of stuff, because these things come up, these changes come up, and if you’re not ready to move with the change, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna take some people off, that is for sure. So yeah, that is a wrap 2020 for email marketing lessons that you have taught us, and it’s been nice knowing you. We appreciate the education we appreciate but it’ll be nice to see you leave Adios.

Vira  35:52 

See you never.

Alissa  35:54 

Yeah, see you never again.

Vira  35:58 

Yeah, yeah. I feel like this year has taught us a lot, but I’m so ready to go into 2021 we have high hopes for 2021 new year, new new me kind of thing.

Alissa  36:10 

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Vira  36:12 

No more sweats in 2021 No, no, I’m probably stick to this one when I like Well guys, thank you so much for being with us in this 2020 we started this podcast in 2020 so that was a fruitful year for us. Yeah, we love doing this podcast for you. If you have any questions comments, please let us know we love connecting with people, and don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, and if you want to get involved in a community, and that’s something that I really do about, that I really do like about our company, that we do have a big community of entrepreneurs, email marketers. If you want to join that community, please join us at flowium.com/community, and we hope to see you there.

Alissa  36:59 

Yeah, it’s and it’s, it’s worthwhile. It’s definitely worthwhile. Guys, make sure that you stay tuned for next week’s episode as we talk about what to expect when it comes to marketing your E commerce business in 2021. Doesn’t that sound good? Say it’s 2021 next week, and it’ll be our first episode of 2021 so please don’t miss it. We’re going to start the new year off with a bang. We’re really excited, and yeah, wishing you all a happy, happy New Year. Stay safe, keep it real. Make sure you stay positive. This year was crazy, but just remember all the good things, and let’s take that into the new year.

Vira  37:34 

Thank you so much.

Alissa  37:35  

Thanks, guys.