#146. The Importance of Market Segmentation | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira. And I’m very passionate about email marketing. And here at Flowium, because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. And today it’s the first episode of our Segmentation May. Yes, you heard it right. Segmentation. That’s the month where we will be talking all things segmentation. We might have invented this holiday here at Flowium. And a big shout out to our girl Lexi for coming up with this holiday. But yeah, basically the idea is that the entire month of May we will discussing all things segmentation. And I know this is like one of your favorite topics, guys. Every time we post something segmentation-related, you love it. So I hope you will enjoy this one as well. We have a very special guest with us today, and I’m thrilled to say that our episode will be the perfect introduction into the month of segmentation. And today we will be talking about big stuff, about big segmentation stuff, and discussing the different email marketing segmentation strategies for various stages of your marketing funnel with Emil Kristensen from Drip. Say hi, Emil.

Emil: 1:55

Hello. Nice to be here.

Vira: 1:57

Yeah, we are very, very excited to have you here. And for those of you who don’t know, Emil is a CMO of Drip and co-founder of Sleeknote, which, by the way, Drip recently acquired. He’s also a co-host of the biggest Scandinavian marketing podcast, Marketing Brief, and we will link his podcast in the description box to this podcast as well. Guys, it’s going to be an exciting episode. Buckle up, grab a cup of coffee or tea or whatever, and let’s dive in. Okay, Emil, I’m really excited for today’s episode. Yeah.

Emil: 2:27

Yeah, me too. Me too. I feel like segmentation, oof, it could be super nerdy or we could, yeah, we could talk about this for hours.

Vira: 2:36

We love nerdy stuff. I mean, we are the biggest email marketing nerds here, so bring it on. Before we go there though, let’s play a little this or that kind of game just to get to know you better. Okay.

Emil: 2:47

Let’s do it. Cool. Cool.

Vira: 2:49

Cool.

Emil: 2:49

Cool.

Vira: 2:49

Let’s do this. Okay. Tea or coffee?

Emil: 2:53

Coffee.

Vira: 2:53

Free shipping or 10% off discount?

Emil: 2:56

That depends, but mostly free shipping.

Vira: 2:59

I’m a discount kind of girl. Yeah. Give me a good discount and I’m there. Cool. Okay. Instagram or TikTok for influencer marketing?

Emil: 3:13

I think I’m mostly Instagram. I can’t really say I’m on TikTok yet. Uh, so I think I have to go with Instagram here.

Vira: 3:20

Okay. Rating by price or by popularity?

Emil: 3:26

Popularity, 100%.

Vira: 3:28

Yes. Okay. User-generated content or professionally shot product photography?

Emil: 3:34

Ooh, I have a big one for user-generated here. Always.

Vira: 3:38

Yeah. Yes. That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Email or SMS?

Emil: 3:44

Email, of course. I have to say email, right?

Vira: 3:47

You might be biased, right?

Emil: 3:49

Kind of biased.

Vira: 3:50

Both of us. Okay. If there was a song playing every time you entered the room, sort of like your theme song, what would it be?

Emil: 4:01

Wow. Okay. That was a new one. A part of me wants to say Dancing Queen, but I’m not sure. That’s a good one.

Vira: 4:09

Stick with it.

Emil: 4:10

That’s a popular one, right?

Vira: 4:12

It’s perfect one, I think. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And you being from Scandinavia, not exactly from Sweden, but I think it’s like still the theme.

Emil: 4:21

It’s close enough, right? You know.

Vira: 4:22

Close enough.

Emil: 4:24

You know, in some countries, like Scandinavian is one country. So I would steal them.

Vira: 4:30

No, it’s amazing. It’s amazing theme song. Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Amazing. So let’s go to all of the juicy email stuff. So before we go there, briefly, can you explain what is drip.com? And what it does in simple terms.

Emil: 4:47

Yeah, this doesn’t have to be an ad for Drip and it isn’t at all. So I will make it super short. Like Drip, we’ve existed for like 9 years now. We’re a marketing automation platform for e-com. We’re building mostly towards being a CRM for e-com. I’m sure that’s something we’re going to talk about today, not in a Drip context, but segmentation context. We try to help our customers kind of understand their customers. And we do truly believe that to do good marketing, you kind of have to understand your best customers. So we kind of divide that into know, think, do, and learn. And I’m sure we’re going to talk more about that later on as well. So that’s kind of the brief version of it. Drip has existed a long time, but we’re about 150 people here. We love email. We love SMS as well. We love marketing automation and kind of nerds for it. So Drip is mostly built by nerdy engineers in the beginning. And so now we are kind of trying to simplify a lot of the system for all users.

Vira: 5:51

Amazing. Amazing. And I’ve never heard this sequence, know, think, do, learn. I mean, that’s what we do a lot of times, but I never thought of this sort of form of it. That’s interesting. So let’s start with a big picture, email segmentation. It’s like no secret that personalization holds the key to like success in email marketing, but not all personalization is equally valuable. So how do you decide on segmentation on different stages of customer journey and how segmentation, actually, yeah, how segmentation is different for different customers and how you know what this customer is? I know it’s a loaded question, so feel free to start from wherever you want.

Emil: 6:39

Yeah.

Vira: 6:41

But I’m just like curious to learn about your way of thinking.

Emil: 6:46

Yeah, sure. I think, you know, this episode we probably have to kind of divide it into if you’re doing segmentation today versus if you’re not doing segmentation. So we’ll kind of start at a low level and build towards my more advanced and higher level. So first of all, segmentation, you know, the obvious one is like simple, the most simple segmentation that I don’t see a lot of e-com do is just This is going to sound dead simple, but companies don’t do it. Like, have they bought from you or they haven’t bought from you yet? Customers or non-customers? Like, that’s— start there. If you haven’t done that, start there. You kind of like, if you go into— I always kind of talk about this as if it was a physical store. If you had a physical store, you know, the corner store, if someone walks into the store and you haven’t seen them before, How would you reach out? How would you talk to them? You would talk to them in a different language. You would show them other products versus someone that’s been there 10 times over the last month, right?

Vira: 7:43

Mm-hmm.

Emil: 7:43

So that’s kind of how I look at segmentation. Kind of look at it as if you had a store, a physical store, how would you treat segmentation from someone walks into the store? That’s how you should look at segmentation in an online world as well, to some extent. There’s of course some limitations, some attribution limitations as well. But at the end of the day, you can start with customer, non-customers. From there, you could take it 10 ways. But how we like to do it in Drip is we like to see it as potentials, casuals, core, and champions. I’ll explain more.

Vira: 8:18

Interesting.

Emil: 8:19

So potentials for us are someone that haven’t bought anything yet. Casuals are someone that bought from you the first time. Core are your repeat purchasers. And champions are the loyal, high-spending, highly engaged. subscribers on your list.

Vira: 8:35

Amazing.

Emil: 8:36

And there’s 3 segmentation, there’s 3 segments here and all 3 of them, there’s 4 total segments and 3 of the segments is someone that already bought from you, right? And why is that? Well, I do truly believe that we are moving towards a more customer-first marketing approach in marketing in general. So it’s not all about chasing the next transaction. Where this is something you’ve heard over the last 5 or 6 years, you know, here’s 10 strategies to get your next customer, yada, yada, yada. At the end of the day, I do think if you don’t start to think about it in an e-com context of like keeping your customer and making them buy from you again, then we’ll lose sight of what’s really important and we’ll kind of go back to the e-com growth kind of unsustainable kind of—

Vira: 9:25

Sure.

Emil: 9:25

direction that I feel like we’re going into right now.

Vira: 9:29

True, true. And I’ve read the stats and I was really shocked by this number. 60, 70, sorry, 76% of customers who receive some sort of email communication from the brand, they feel frustrated when they don’t receive personalized interaction. So it’s just like you said, you don’t want to be talking the same way to different people. It’s like, imagine walking into the room full of people. They’re like some of your best friends, some of people you’ve never met, some of the people who you met maybe once. And it would be really awkward if you talked to the best friend of yours the same way that you would talk to the person that you just met. And the customers are being frustrated with this one-size-fits-all communication. And I didn’t even realize it was a big thing. But apparently, the customers, they do kind of expect more personalized approach from you as a brand. So that was like interesting that you pointed it out. So like, how do you treat the customers who are just the potentials, I guess, who are just getting into your, um, into your list? The, think of it as a top of the funnel subscribers. Like, how do you segment those people? Are they all the same or do you have some like recommendations to segment them as well?

Emil: 11:22

I think potentials again, and this is where we could go super deep. So each of these 4 segments here, you kind of have the classic marketing flywheel of attract, convert, delight, right? So you want to attract more of them. You want to convert those potentials that’s there to being a first-time purchaser. You want also to delight them to kind of create a positive experience from that entire journey that you’re building for potentials. So how I look at potentials in general is like Like you can kind of see it as high intent, low intent. That’s the classic way of doing it in an e-com case as well. So high intent could be someone, they had something in the cart, they didn’t buy from you, but they signed up to the newsletter. That’s a classic example. Like high, super high intent. It’s kind of like you walked into the store, you had everything and you were actually ready to buy, but it’s like, oh shoot, I’m out of time. I’m going to come back another day. I’m sorry. done. Like that’s kind of high intent, right?

Vira: 12:29

Mm-hmm.

Emil: 12:30

Versus someone you kind of just, you know who the brand is, but you don’t really know what they stand for. You don’t really know, you know, maybe just comparing prices. You signed up to a 10% discount code, but you don’t really know why. Or you signed up to a competition somewhere on Facebook or TikTok through a lead ad. That’s very low intent. You probably want to fruit them. You want to probably have them through a different automation and a different journey than high-intent potentials.

Vira: 13:02

Right. That’s actually what we do internally as well. We kind of call it like a welcome flow for people with low purchase intention and like a separate variation of the welcome flow, like an exit intent. So basically the main difference is that if person is going to say like a product page or like has this product in their cart, or if they express some sort of interest towards the product, and haven’t purchased, then we can serve the discount. If they don’t express any interest toward the product directly, but they just more hang out on your homepage or about us page or something, we try to serve them more with about the brand information, something to get to know the brand better, just because we kind of don’t want to train our customers to expect the discount codes from us all the time, right? So that’s the strategy that I’m using for a lot of my clients. And that’s interesting that you mentioned that you guys are like recommending something similar as well in a way.

Emil: 14:02

Yeah. And a little bit like we can, we can dive super deep on it, but I do also think, of course, we can move on here. But one final thing to the potentials, which, you know, is all of the segments is like, you can ask questions the other way around, right? It’s a, I think most people, most companies these days see emails as a monologue communication and dialogue. It’s like, it’s not, it should be a dialogue, right? Email is created for people to reply to it. So invite them to reply to your emails and maybe get away from all of the HTML classic emails that everyone is sending out. You know, a classic thing that our sales team are doing these days are if a potential lead signs up to Drip and it’s like high-end typical, I’ll kind of take typical one fashion. You kind of take your logo, you remove the logo and you remove the colors. And they can’t recognize their own email versus the 5 competitors that we found. So how do you differentiate and how do you make it a dialogue instead of a monologue? And it’s okay to ask questions in an email where it’s based on survey or they can click on something in an email and they help you understand them better. Like that’s a part of the potential part here and casual and core and champions, all of them. It’s like you can ask questions in the emails and let people either click on something or reply to something or Go to a form where they fill out more information about themselves. That’s not easy to get people to do, but click on something is fairly easy. We’ve done this in a B2B context as well. I remember back in the days with Sleeknote, we had, we had, of course we had a blog. You sign up to a blog post and a constant upgrade where we say, you know, it’s probably talking about email marketing and do you want to download 99 email examples? Yes, I want to download that. Okay. Our next problem is, was it an agency? Was it a B2B? Was it e-com? Our ICP is e-commerce, but we also like agencies, right? Because we have a partner program, but we need to know who they are. We can’t really know that from a low-intent signup, but we can ask them in one of the first emails, hey, we do want to send you emails that’s personalized to you. So can you help us kind of know who you are? And we saw that about over 30% was clicking on an email because kind of spent a lot of time formulating the email. It’s all about them and not about us. It’s not about us wanting to do better segmentation, but them getting better content from us. And then we knew who they are. And you can do the same in an e-com case.

Vira: 16:39

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And there’s like a ton of different really cool apps for collecting that like zero-party data that, I mean, in Klaviyo, we can like integrate a bunch of them. Those like quizzes to collect that first or zero-party data as well, but I really like the aspect of email being like a two-way communication tool. So with Drip, how do you actually like collect the data on the top of the funnel stages and how do you organize it and how can it be used for the segmentation purposes in the future? Do you like record it somewhere on the background of their profile? Like what’s the process there?

Emil: 17:21

Yeah, I think it’s similar to a lot of the other email marketing tools out there, right? Like we have something called Onsite. It is more or less a pop-up and slide-in solution, but you can also embed it on the site. But a part of this is where you can have your gamification, as you talked about a second ago, that’s a part of the platform. So you can kind of do your segmentation. You can do segmentation based on checkmarks. You can do segmentation based on what they did on the site. So transactional or— Behavioral data, that’s all recorded in the platform. And from there you can do the segmentation. The platform is built on top of a segmentation with kind of the vision at the time, 8 years ago, was closer to being a CDP than it was to being an ESP. So it’s very data heavy, which we actually try to get away from a little bit. But from a segmentation standpoint, I do think, and I’m very biased, but I do think we’re We’re behind in other areas, but we’re definitely one of the leading ones on a segmentation area. And that’s where our customers thrive as well. It’s like from a segmentation, if they’re heavy into segmentation, we do have one of the best engines and one of the best data layers on top of it as well.

Vira: 18:36

That’s awesome.

Emil: 18:36

And that’s kind of how we look at it is just, okay, can we simplify segmentation and make it super advanced if you want to? So simplify it into those 4 buckets of potential casual and core and champions. And from there, you can split those into 20 segments. And you can divide that into the marketing funnel of the classic attract, convert, delight. So you want to expand your— and that’s what it’s all about, right? You want to expand your core and your champions. You want to expand that as much as possible to get as many people to buy from you again and again and again. And I think that’s one of our I wouldn’t say a vision, but that’s kind of what I, especially when I go on podcasts like this, I think marketers these days over-rely on kind of focusing on the next sale. And I think that that just leads us to kind of this transactional tactics that where you focus on the channels and not the journeys. So each channel has its own kind of set of rules. I think you mentioned an example earlier where the classic one is you, You send a discount code out on an email and someone buys from you an email. And the next day you get a Facebook ad with a discount code that’s 5% higher, right? That’s a shitty experience. And that’s channels over journeys.

Vira: 19:55

True, true. Yeah, no, I see that more and more brands are kind of doing that omnichannel marketing approach where it’s all like, no matter where the customer is like coming from or where they meet you as a brand, they would still be served like a proper portion of the experience. So meaning that this like channels, they do not compete with each other, but you like marry them together and they help each other. That’s definitely the approach that we’re using with like a lot of our brands that we work with. But yeah, the omnichannel experience is huge. And the more data you have, obviously the better. So Emil, just like to summarize everything that we talked about briefly here, discussing that like the top of this funnel subscribers or like subscribers who are just becoming new to your channel. Like what we do here at Flowium is like a lot of segments are based on obviously the demographic, signup source, engagement. And like on your blog at Drip, I learned that you guys have this like segments, maybe like let me know if you know what I’m referring to. But you guys have the segments that you can basically set up a lead scoring system almost that will help you to determine where in the funnel each of your subscribers are and like how you should approach them based on that like score number. Do you know what I’m talking about? Or is it like something that like some of your brands using and not like everyone?

Emil: 21:24

Yeah, I think, you know, lead scoring is a thing, but I do think lead scoring for the most part is something we left a little bit behind us a few years ago to some extent. I think it’s very much a thing in B2B, but In e-com, I think it’s so behavioral and transactional focused that putting a score based on it, I don’t believe in it that much. That’s why we simplified it to, okay, at the end of the day, to have a sustainable business in e-com, it is someone that, if someone is buying from you, that’s kind of what you want to get to. It’s like someone buys from you and they want to buy from you again, not just the first purchase, but the second purchase. So I think It’s kind of not to sidetrack this part, but I do think that’s more what you should look at. So flip the funnel a little bit. Don’t chase new subscribers, but chase customers who buy from you more than twice. And that’s your lead scoring. That’s your scoring system. Can you expand that call? Because I do think the lead scoring system in itself, there’s so much that’s broken in today’s attribution world that I won’t even get started talking about it. But from a segmentation standpoint, I think you could simplify segmentation a whole lot.

Vira: 22:37

Yeah.

Emil: 22:38

And you could have it super advanced and multiple segments in each of these 4 groups. But at the end of the day, if they’re buying from you more than once, you’re doing something right. And that’s what you should look at.

Vira: 22:50

Interesting. Interesting. So let’s talk a bit more about those customers, those people who just like subscribe to your list, but right now they are in between Like those stages. So they are basically, they are ready to purchase, but they haven’t purchased yet. How do you segment those people based on what do you segment those, those customers?

Emil: 23:16

Here’s the classic one is of course behavioral here. So what did they look at? Did they look at X amount of products? Which products did they look at? Do you want to show them products or do you want to introduce them more to why they should buy from you? Again, it depends on the products. Are you selling socks? Are you selling a product that’s you know, a couple of thousands of bucks, you know, it’s kind of a low-intent, high-intent product as well, to some extent. If it’s a low-intent product, if you’re selling socks, well, you should probably just throw a discount code at them right in the beginning. But if you’re selling a product that’s above$1,000 or $200 even, like you should educate them about the challenge or the problem you’re solving with your products or your brand is solving. And then you can show them products based on what they looked at already. But at the end of the day, I don’t think we are doing ourselves a favor by just sending a discount code right away, which I see most people are doing, trying to convert them right out of the gate. I don’t think that’s the right approach anymore. I think it was the right approach a couple of years ago, but now everyone is sending a discount code out of the gate and it’s not converting as well as it did a couple of years ago. So I would change that approach a little bit and I would have it earlier in the process if I had a low-intent product as selling socks or I don’t know,$10 product or whatever. Of course you can have it earlier there.

Vira: 24:43

Right, right. No, the classic example is like socks versus mattress. Obviously, like the customer journey for these 2 groups of customers will be very different. And we normally see that this like purchasing cycle for people who spend more money are obviously like longer. You need to take some time like convincing them that this is the product that they need. They need to spend some time educating them on this product, like maybe using more user-generated content just to convince them that this is the product they need. And people tend to be less spontaneous with this kind of purchases, right? So yeah, definitely, I agree. I agree with you there. What do you think of like segmenting different cart abandonment journeys? Like what’s take on that?

Emil: 26:02

Oh, yeah, I think, you know, abandoned browse flow, cart abandon, price drop, and product recommendations in general. If we take cart abandon first, I would definitely do it based on, like, again, it kind of goes back to the first principle. Did they buy from you before? Should you even send the email? That’s number one. Should you even send the email? Like, ask yourself that question, please, because you don’t always have to send a discount email. 10% discount code if someone had something in the cart and they didn’t buy from you 2 days later. Maybe they’re buying from you in 7 days. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s worth it for you that 2% doesn’t buy from you, but you don’t give 10% discount code to everyone else. So kind of ask yourself those business critical questions. And I would say, yes, there’s a lot of segmentation that needs to be done. on cart abandonment. And one of them is definitely, did they already buy something from you?

Vira: 27:02

Yeah.

Emil: 27:03

Or what are the products that they have in the cart right now? So what is the order value in the cart? I think that’s a classic one to do segmentation based on. So is it above$5,000 or is it under$500 or whatever your kind of average order value is? And there’s different approaches there. So some are sending a discount code to those that’s a high value. And sending kind of just a reminder to everyone that’s a low value. That’s a classic one. But my opinion is, to be straight here, it’s like, it’s fairly simple. Ask yourself the business critical questions first. Do you need to do it? And then go from first principle. Like, okay, did they buy from you? Yes, no. Okay, maybe you don’t have to do it. Maybe it’s different. And from there you can make automations based on it.

Vira: 27:52

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree with you there. Definitely ask yourself whether or not you want to be aggressive with your abandonment cart emails. But I do think, personally with brands that I work, I do think that you still need to deliver something if they haven’t purchased from you within the few days. It doesn’t have to be the discount, but we sometimes customize their journey based on the product that they have in their cart. So say if they have a specific model of the I don’t know, like a device in their cart and we know that this is the product they have in the cart, then we sort of like create an educational content around that and we deliver like reviews of that product to the customer. We customize the email with like reviews or like recommendations on how to use that or stuff like that. But I mean, so many, so many cart abandonment can actually be recovered that like not addressing them, like to me it sounds like leaving the money on the table, you know, but I do agree that you don’t always want to like serve the discount codes, especially to those who are your return buyers, right? You don’t want to train them to expect the discount code every time they are putting something into their cart because that’s what I do, honestly, like working in the e-commerce industry, I never purchase anything without the discount, like unless it’s like something that don’t get on discount at all.

Emil: 29:23

Yeah.

Vira: 29:24

Like I normally put it on the cart, wait for like 24 hours or whatever. And then like I get the discount code and then I purchase because I know that I will receive the discount code, but you don’t want to train your customer to expect the discount code from you. That’s for sure.

Emil: 29:40

Yeah. Let me be clear. I do think cart abandonment, like that’s a no-brainer and something, probably one of the first things you have to do after a welcome flow, you kind of have to card abandonment, but there’s just different versions of it. There’s a reminder versus a discount code versus help versus questions. There’s so many versions of a card abandonment that you don’t— what my opinion is, just please ask yourself the question of the discount code because most people don’t think it. They just think about top line, but not bottom line. And you take away 10% of your bottom line by offering a discount code. And you don’t always have to do that. You can just send a reminder and ask if there’s any questions. As you said, ratings and reviews and why you really should buy this product.

Vira: 30:26

Exactly.

Emil: 30:27

So I don’t think that 10% discount code, hopefully that is not what’s going to make it or break it in most cases, but the email is a reminder and then you can test your different messages in those emails, but it is a no-brainer and one of the first things you have to do. And segmentation-wise, please do segment it and please make sure you have the trigger when someone bought something. It’s removed from the cut. It’s removed from the automation. I’ve seen that too often. And the companies don’t have that.

Vira: 30:58

Definitely. Definitely. Okay, awesome. So we kind of discussed those customers who are getting into your, into lifecycle emails, getting into the customer journey. We kind of covered people who have purchased from you. But what about those people who are like inactive customers? So they came into your list, they never purchased anything from you and they’re just like sitting them. They’re still engaging with your emails though, but they are not purchasing. Would you segment that group of people or would you just segment them based on engagement? What’s your take there?

Emil: 31:34

I think first of all, there’s a segmentation based on if you bought something and your kind of engagement in the email as well. So if they’re highly engaged in your email, well, it might be a high-intent product you’re selling and you’re okay with it. So it really is depending on the case. But yes, I would do a little bit of segmentation, but I don’t want to overwhelm people that’s listening to the podcast and think that I need to do 30 segments because at the end of the day, they really don’t. Simplify your segmentation and do better with your emails and your messaging in your email. I think that’s one of the key takeaways that hopefully people will get from this podcast here. You can get far with just having those 4 segments, potential, casuals, and core, and champions. And if we take the potentials who never bought something from you, because that’s all of them, like they haven’t bought anything yet, but those that’s not really reacting to anything, you can segment them and really see if they want to be on the list. Or you can just see it as a, this is going to take a while to convince them and segment them in a different way and send them different messages based on this is going to take a while. So maybe I shouldn’t pitch my product right out of the gate. Like maybe we should go down a different route here. And for the casual segment, I do think there’s a lot to talk about there because I think that’s kind of the someone that bought from you one time but didn’t buy again. Like that’s where, when you can get, that’s where the real magic happens for me in e-com. If you can take a casual, someone that bought from you once into the core of someone that’s buying from you again and again. That is where the sustainable kind of business comes into the picture, in my opinion. And I think that’s where a lot of the value, of course, the entire funnel has to follow, but that’s where the value of SMB e-com is, in my opinion, because you oftentimes, if you’re a kind of mid-market SMB, whatever e-com, you found a way to attract customers, but it’s very difficult for you to get them to buy again. And of course, that’s what we see from our data with our customers. That is the biggest challenge right now in today’s markets. And I think that’s where we could spend a lot of time. I’m sure you have a lot of experience as well with what are the kind of the automations and flows you activate and how do you segment them based on that as well?

Vira: 34:05

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a definitely interesting topic and I wouldn’t want to go like too, too deep into it, but like just briefly, Emil, how this like customer journeys are different, say the post-purchase journey, how is it different for one-time buyer versus like repeat purchases versus that like champion or like VIP? How is their post-purchase email sequence or post-purchase segmentations are different from each other?

Emil: 34:32

I think for me, it’s much more about if you’re casual, It’s okay to be promotion. It’s okay to be a little bit more promotional, if that makes sense. They bought from you once, but they didn’t buy from you again. So it’s okay here. It’s okay to talk about discount codes and kind of just getting them to convert one more time, and maybe talk about some of the other products that’s relevant to what they already bought. But if you look at the call and from a segmentation standpoint, for me, it’s much more about upselling, cross-selling. and the post-purchase flow that’s different in a way from what they bought. So here’s all of the transactional data that comes into picture. You have to make sure that you know what they bought and what they didn’t buy and how it’s all combined and which products should they buy now. And that’s a little bit different from the casuals where you can be a little bit more promotional. I think the core, you don’t need to be as promotional but more educational. And talk about some of their other products or related products, upselling, cross-sell, whatever you’re going to call it, back in stock notifications, price drop. You have all of those segmentation triggers, which you should definitely use to that segment.

Vira: 35:48

Yeah. And I think one of the big mistakes that I’ve seen anyways across the industry, correct me if I’m wrong, is that brands work really hard on conversion of that first customer, right? They put a lot of thoughts and a lot of work into turning that like no buyer into a first-time buyer. They spend some time into converting first-time buyer into return customer, but then they almost like a lot of brands, they almost like stop communicating. I mean, they reach out with some campaigns still, but as far as automation goes, like a lot of brands, they neglect that post-purchase journey for those champions. And I think it’s a big issue with a lot of brands because these are your most loyal customers, right? These are the people, the 80/20 rule. These are the 20% of people who will bring you like 80% of your business. Have you noticed anything like this with the brands that you’ve worked with or with the brands that you’ve seen across the industry?

Emil: 36:48

This is our entire pitch for why Drip is becoming a CRM. Instead of an ESP. Like we want to be a platform that just helps you identify and multiply your best customers because you have to understand your best customers and then multiply them. Like just find a way to multiply them. And you do that by knowing your best customers first. So that comes back to the know, think, do, learn. It’s like, okay, you got to know your best customers. You got to think about the strategies. That’s where you come into the picture of agencies that’s helping think for you because the biggest biggest challenge out there is resources and time, right? But if a platform like ours or any platform, and not promotional, but you gotta know your best customers, then think about strategies and journeys for them, then do, which is what most companies start with when they enter a platform.

Vira: 37:40

Mm-hmm.

Emil: 37:41

Any ESP is like, okay, well, I’m gonna start sending emails. Like, that’s what I’m gonna start doing. Well, you should actually, you should start by knowing your best customers and figure out a way multiply them. And then you should have strategies. So that’s the think part that deploys all of your knowledge from the know part. And then the learn is in the end, it’s like you gotta learn from what you’re doing. And which most companies are actually at this point, I feel like most companies are getting better at it, but they’re starting with doing things without understanding their best customers. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen these days. And what I see with segmentation as well is like you start by just sending emails to different segments instead of Okay, just let’s take the basics of marketing. It’s like, understand your best customers, know them, segment them, think about journeys based on where they are, and don’t build automations, build journeys.

Vira: 38:32

Yeah, yeah. I like how you guys summarize it. Know, think, do, learn. And it’s like a circle. Like, know first, think, then do, then learn about these customers based on what you’ve just done, and then go all over again. I love it. I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Emil. It was very insightful. I know there are like so many topics that we could go like deep into. Unfortunately, we don’t have like enough time to discuss each and every one of them. But if people want to learn more about your approach or about what you guys do, where should they go?

Emil: 39:10

Of course, they have to go to Drip. I think that drip.com, see what we do. It’s not a promotion for Drip, but we are trying to do something different. We’re not trying to be an ESP. We are trying to be a CRM. And we will have the capabilities and have the capabilities to understand your best customers. The latest one is you can do an RFM, which just basically means that you can connect with Shopify and see who your best customers are. And fun facts there is like we see that the 2% If we look at a basic kind of e-com company, 2% of your customers stands for over 20% of your revenue. That’s kind of some benchmarking there from basic RFM. Like, look it up on Google if you don’t know what RFM is. That could be an hour episode, but an RFM is just a way to look at your customers and what kind of percentage of your customers are buying from you and which aren’t, and who is in the call and who is the champions and kind of look at where and how you can expand that call. And that’s kind of an approach that we are taking right now. So go to drip.com, check it out. And yeah, you can always write to me as well. We have a book that I want to offer to people for free as well if they want to. Like, we have a book about pop-up and slide-ins. It’s called Subscribe. And that’s about lead generation more. But yeah, it is actually a book, not, not, not an ebook or anything. It’s a real book that I’ll send to you. And don’t worry, there’s no No kind of sleazy sales trick or anything. I’ll just send you the book. So just send me an email at ek@drip.com and I’ll send you kind of a copy of the book.

Vira: 40:48

Amazing. Thank you so much. You guys, we’ll mention all of the links. We’ll put all of the links that were mentioned in this episode in the description box to this episode. So definitely go and check out their website. Definitely check out all of the exciting segmentation strategies that Drip offers. And as always, If you guys like what we do, please leave us a review. We really appreciate your interest. We appreciate your help. And if you leave us a review, then send us a screenshot of your review. We will send you some surprise gift from Flowium. It might be socks. We do have this amazing Flowium socks, or it might be something else. So we’ll see. Emil, it was amazing. And thank you so much for coming to today’s episode. There’s like so much we can learn from you. Thank you for making it happen today.

Emil: 41:37

Thank you so much for having me.

Vira: 41:39

Thank you. We’ll talk to you guys next Tuesday. Bye. Take care.