From someone who sent one billion emails
Joining us to discuss Pre and Post BFCM Email Marketing Strategies is Chase Diamond, an experienced email marketer who has sent over one billion emails resulting in $75 million in email attributable revenue.
We learn:
Our guest today is Chase is currently a Partner at Structured — a top ecommerce marketing agency, where he runs the email team. A few of our previous and current clients include: Orgain, The Chive, Original Grain, and Crossnet.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
10/19/2021
Kurt Elster: Today, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking about email marketing strategy. Yeah, we’re finally getting there. It’s that time. It’s happening. Black Friday Cyber Monday! It’s here. And to discuss it, of course you have me, your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And I’m joined by Chase Dimond, a partner at Structured, which is a big deal eCommerce marketing agency. Been around several years now. Survived the pandemic. Congratulations. And since June of 2018, they have sent a billion emails, generating $75 million in attributable revenue. I love that. That is… So, clearly a gentleman who knows what he’s talking about, and I’ve been following this guy on Twitter for several months now, and really getting a lot of value out of his content, so I’m like, “All right, I gotta get this guy on my show.” And so, I was thrilled when he said yes to letting me pick his brain with you folks.
And a few of their past clients, Orgain, The Chive, Original Grain, and CROSSNET. That’s great. I’ve heard of two of four of those. All right. So, maybe I’m still in the loop here. Chase, how you doing? Welcome.
Chase Dimond: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. I’m doing well. Thank you. How are you doing today?
Kurt Elster: Pretty good. My day was solid other than I had my first post-pandemic traffic jam. I sat in just bumper-to-bumper traffic for half an hour. And honestly, at this… Currently, kind of novel. I really was not that bothered. It was just a little bit of a waste of time, but beyond that, it’s okay. It’s so funny having not done that for so long.
Chase Dimond: Where are you based? I hear you. I mean, not having to commute’s pretty nice, so I guess having to deal with it once in a while kind of reminds you of the old times, right?
Kurt Elster: I’m sure we’ll be back to it at some point. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Work from home’s kind of an acceptable, standard, desirable thing now. Everybody should work from home so as not to mess up my commute.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. You get to work from the house, wear sweats, get to go to the kitchen whenever, it’s pretty sweet.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right, Chase, focus. Quit talking about traffic jams, all right? Nobody cares. They’ve all experienced this horror. So, today, as of when this episode goes live is October 19th, and so we’re getting close to the wire with Black Friday. We really need to start putting things together now, but I want to know. 2020 was weird, certainly, right? 2021, also different. What is different or the same about this year than in years past? What considerations should I be making?
Chase Dimond: Man, a lot. There’s everything, right? We don’t have to go too deep in terms of everything from all the shipping, and people getting products, and all the expenses, and Facebook, and Instagram, and iOS 14, iOS 14.5, and iOS 15. iOS 15 rolled out on September 20th, so there’s a lot that’s different. I think what’s the same is really A, putting the customer first, really being transparent and putting the customer first. That’s very much the same now. I think even probably more important today than it was prior.
I think also starting earlier is super important, right? So, for a lot of our clients, I think every single year starts a week or two earlier. This year, it’s obviously no different. We’re starting earlier. And I think this year we’re really being mindful on how we communicate messaging and we’re letting people know inventory is low, and these are shipping cutoff dates, and this is what you need to do, but doing it in a way that’s not like… come across as like, “This is marketing and they’re trying to mess with me psychologically.” We are being very transparent and very real, and I think that’s super important.
So, there’s a lot going on. I think starting early, being prepared, and just being open and honest with your community and your customers I think will go a long way.
Kurt Elster: I love the strategy because it’s just good advice in general, right? Like hey, be open and honest. Well, geez, open and honest communication is kind of the cornerstone of all successful relationships. You know, whether it is your marriage or your relationship with your customers. And I think customers are increasingly sophisticated and they know, they can sniff out BS. And so, I think your advice, really, saying, “Hey, you have to go to them and say look, here’s the cutoff date, so you gotta buy before then because… and Shipageddon is in our recent memory, and hey, this stuff is in stock now but in limited quantity.” And so, you don’t want it to come across as like, “Well, you’re just trying to induce scarcity, urgency, FOMO,” right? But it’s also the truth.
So, you’re right, you have to communicate it in an empathetic way. And the examples I’ve seen that I really liked are like first-person plane text emails largely from the founder, from the owner, saying like, “Here’s what’s going on. Hey, order your stuff earlier if you want to be certain you get it and we’re not just trying to get you to buy. It is what it is.” And fortunately, with national news covering supply chain shortages, the White House issuing statements about it now as of this recording, that it should be… It should feel legitimate, I think. Right?
Chase Dimond: Yep. Yeah, and a couple other things come to mind. I think the other thing that we’re really learning this year is, so, I’m an email marketer through and through. I run an agency that we do a couple other things, but one of the tools that we recently launched was SMS, right? SMS channel. And the reason that I like SMS, and again, we’ll focus mainly on email, is the fact that we could really communicate with customers or subscribers in real time when things are happening, right?
Email’s a great channel but people don’t open your email for 15 minutes, an hour, a couple hours typically after you’ve sent it, and most people are gonna open within 24 hours that are ever gonna open that email. With text messages, people are opening that instantly. A few seconds, a few minutes. So, I think being able to expand the channels that we’re able to communicate with customers, obviously with SMS and text message, you have to be a lot shorter form, right? I think it’s 160 characters. But just kind of trying to meet customers where they are and being able to hit them up saying… Even if you send an email out and the stock runs out, being able to send a text saying, “Hey, so sorry. We ran out of stock.” Or being able to introduce things, I think SMS is a really interesting new channel, and then in addition to that, and I think we can talk about this maybe a little bit down the road on this podcast, but in let’s say like the abandoned cart, or the abandoned checkout, in some of these series where people are looking at specific products or specific items, being able to communicate ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday that while we don’t have the best discount right now, the item is in stock, right?
So, there’s gonna be this tradeoff between do you want the product for yourself, or for a loved one, or for someone now? If so, make sure you buy it today. It’s not gonna be as great of a discount than it will be in a few weeks or a few months, but at least you can get your hands on it, right? So, we’re kind of updating some of the messaging now and we’re starting to see some early success with that, because again, it’s true, it’s valid. To your point, it’s kind of in the mainstream media that all these things are legitimate.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea, because this is one of the things I’ve been wrestling with, is like what is the key message this year in 2021, and because of these issues, and because of them being at the forefront, top of mind for people, is this year’s hottest subject line, “In stock, ready to ship?” Or is this year’s hottest subject line like, “50% off storewide?” And the answer is… It sounds like the answer is maybe both, like depending on the person, I think early on it’s, “Hey, if you want to guarantee you get this stuff, buy now. If you want a discount but risk not getting it, try waiting.” Is that what we’re doing now?
Chase Dimond: Yeah. I think it depends on… I mean, again, depends on who’s listening to this, right? Because I think the answer is all of the above and probably none of the above or some of the above.
Kurt Elster: Good point.
Chase Dimond: I think that the larger retailers are gonna be the ones that probably have enough inventory because they have the deep pockets, right? I even saw an article the other day that I think Costco, and Walmart, or Target, or someone, they’re now chartering their own ships and their own basically logistics and inventory, and they’re spending I think $100,000 a day to charter and go get their inventory, whereas before they were paying $25,000, right? So, I think some of these big brands are gonna do whatever it takes to make sure that they are the ones that have the 50% off subject line, whereas unfortunately, the small brands and the medium-sized brands, the ones that we want to be supporting, the ones that we work with, the ones that we want to see win, the smaller guys, I think unfortunately they’re probably gonna have a bit of both.
Yeah. It just depends. So, I’m hoping that the small guys, the medium guys are gonna pull through, but it’s a scary time. I mean, top of funnel is not easy with Facebook and Instagram and iOS and all that. Email now with iOS 15 is still a great channel but there’s a little bit of stuff going on in the grey. It’s an interesting time coming up for the biggest time of the year, right? The Super Bowl of eCommerce, as the experts are calling it.
Kurt Elster: The Super Bowl of eCommerce. I do love calling it that. What… Well, now that we’re dealing with iOS 15, and what it does is when you first open mail app, mail.app, great name, it tells you, “Hey, did you want to opt into privacy?” And it like… Who’s gonna say no to that, right? And so, most people, I just was like, “Hell yeah.” Click it. I think most people do. And what it does is it breaks open tracking. So, in… Your open rates aren’t gonna get reflected on people who run these devices. And same with like in Gmail, it doesn’t open images by default, but it also… You really don’t see anything. And so, your open rates are now gonna skew down.
That’s gotta spook people. What can I do? I know I can’t control open rates, but I probably can improve deliverability so that I can worry less about my open rate that I can no longer track right. You have to know. What do I do now to improve my deliverability later?
Chase Dimond: Yeah. I mean, again, these are things that we’re trying. Whether we’re right or wrong, we’ll find out probably in a couple weeks, couple months, because it’s so early. At the time of this going live, iOS 15 has only been around for give or take about a month, so there’s still a lot of learnings that are happening. We’re kind of going back and forth on this, so in pre-iOS 15 times, we never, ever leveraged double opt-in. Double opt-in is something that ESPs, email service providers, they love. They always recommend it. They have it on by default. But marketers and brands hate it, right? Because you pay to acquire these subscribers. You don’t want to make them double confirm that they wanted to get your offers and be on your list.
And that’s kind of something that we’re tossing around now, is like we don’t love it, just because the amount of people that actually end up double opting in is a lot smaller than the people that enter their email into your popup or whatever. That’s one thing that we’re thinking about and looking at is like if someone actually has to confirm and click a link within that email, that means they’re probably gonna be ones that could be over time a good subscriber or good customer, right? So, that’s one thing that we’re looking at is how many people that opt-in actually confirm and is that making sense for the business, and with those things it takes time, right?
It’s gonna take time for us to understand is this a good move, is this a bad move? So, we’re testing it with a small sliver of our clients. That’s one. Two is really nailing down kind of the content, right? And there’s obviously not as much that you can do because you’re kind of a little bit limited by seeing how many people open it, because it’s kind of nice to know of the people that open it, how many people actually engage and click through? That’s a really important metric. The click to open. But we’re still running A-B tests on everything from offers, to plain text versus HTML, call to actions, and really trying to figure out like what does this particular client’s audience, or what does this particular brand’s audience resonate with, right?
Are they only buying if there’s flash sales because they’ve kind of become a discount brand? Or are they actually buying because they want to support the brand? And what is the language, right? So, we’re definitely testing a lot. We’ve been doing a lot more plain text emails, like to your point from the founder or community manager from a spokesperson, and there’s one email that comes to mind. It’s not a client of ours, but someone that’s on Twitter that some of you guys know. His name is Patrick. He runs a company called Supply Co. And he has this email around this time of year, I think at least from last year I remember it, where he tells people, “Don’t buy from us right now. Do not buy from us right now in the middle of October. Wait until we run our biggest sale of the year and buy from us then,” right?
So, I think things like that are really great. Plain text, being… Again, going back to the whole transparency. Letting people know that these things are coming.
So, kind of going back to the iOS thing, though, just understanding kind of your audience, and unfortunately with a lot of this stuff, the bigger your audience is, the more that you’re gonna get. So, again, the big guys are gonna keep winning because they have such a massive dataset that they can still run open rate A-B tests, because they have a lot of other people that aren’t just on Apple devices where they actually can get kind of a pulse on what’s happening. So, there’s also some interesting things there, where like I think initially when it first rolled out, I thought, “Oh, man. A-B testing open rates is dead forever.” And to some degrees, it’s not gonna be as effective and it’s not gonna be as accurate, but it’s still actually giving us some indication for some of our lists that have 100,000, 500,000, a million people, just because there’s enough people that aren’t on Apple that at least tells us if something’s skewing one way or the other.
But still being able to test content within the email is super important, and now that we’ve been doing more SMS, kind of jumping to that thing, they have never had open rate, right? And SMS still lives, and it still is a great channel. It’s increasing in popularity. So, long winded, iOS 15 is not ideal. I wish I still could see open rates. It’s not the most important metric but it’s a nice kind of pulse of figuring out how are we trending, who’s semi-engaged, who’s not engaged, but it’s definitely not the end of the world. I think it’s gonna be a great channel, especially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because you don’t have to pay more money to reach these people. You’re gonna be able to hit them one, two, as many times as you want, and hopefully be able to drive a lot of revenue at a profitable amount.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. As far as this iOS privacy changes, these features that they’re adding, this very privacy-focused… This is clearly where they’re going. And that iOS 14.5 change, that really wrecked up Facebook attribution and in turn seemingly… The effectiveness of the algorithm and lookalike audiences in general, that was detrimental. That was painful. The open rate issue I have found to be significantly less impactful. I mean, just straight up, like it’s not ideal but this one really… I don’t think this should be keeping people up at night the same way the 14.5 change related to the Facebook pixel did.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. 100% agreed.
Kurt Elster: What’s the number one thing merchants get wrong? What is the… I bet you have a pet peeve. What’s the thing that drives you nuts about people getting ready right now for Black Friday?
Chase Dimond: I think two things come to mind. I think one is just doing blanket discounts and offers without any testing or rationale behind why you’re doing it, right? So, I think in the weeks leading up to BFCM, really starting to test offers. And it can literally be as simple as this: Say you’re a brand that has a $50 AOV, so a $50 average order value. You literally could test the difference between a 10% off versus a $5 off. It’s the exact same amount, but believe it or not, just the positioning and the psychology of a percentage off versus a dollar off might move the needle in a significant way, or at least some meaningful way, and at scale, obviously that compounds.
So, I think testing offers right now, dollars off versus percentage off, free products with purchase, free shipping, really trying to nail down like what you’re gonna go with, and also keeping a pulse, honestly, of what the competition is doing. What are your competitors doing? What’s the industry doing? And you want to make sure that you’re benchmarking around the same. You don’t want to be way over because you’re probably leaving money on the table, and you probably don’t want to be way under what your competitors and other people are doing, because you’re probably not gonna be getting the sales.
So, I think that’s one, right, is people just do these blanket offers, and they have no idea why they do this. They have no strategy behind it. So, really getting aligned on what’s happening in your industry, what’s happening with your competitors, and what is the best for your particular audience, and you have to test that. I think that’s one.
Two is the whole batching and blasting, right? For whatever reason, BFCM, people just throw out the window all the rules that are applicable for 99% of the year. They just batch and blast without any kind of warmup or any kind of increase in frequency. So, let me give you kind of an example. I think most brands that are probably listening to this, and most brands that probably aren’t listening to this, they’re probably sending maybe one to three campaigns per week, right? Three is probably the upper end of it and one campaign a week is probably maybe average.
So, they’re sending a handful of campaigns a month. Email is a channel that they do but it’s not the primary focus. So, they go from doing one to three, now all of a sudden for Black Friday Cyber Monday, they’re sending a daily campaign maybe every day they’re sending a resend, or maybe they’re doing multiple campaigns per day. So, just that fluctuation and that frequency and going from one to seven-plus, that does a couple things. I think one, for your team, just being able to actually have the bandwidth to do that, that’s gonna be challenging if you don’t work up to it.
Two, that’s gonna set off some red flags with the ISPs. The Googles, the Yahoos, the Hotmails of the world. If you go from not sending super frequently to just sending every single day, they might think you got hacked, or you’re kind of a spammer, it could be you’re kind of doing these behaviors, right? So, I think leveraging these coming weeks ahead of time to go from one, to two, two to three, three to four, four to five, slowly increase that pace. Obviously, you don’t want to go daily before, especially if you only went once per week, but you want to kind of inch up.
And then alongside that, I think people just are gonna batch and blast their entire list without actually warming up to it. So, in the weeks leading up to it, start with your engaged segment if you aren’t hitting them already. Slowly incorporate… So, let’s just say for easy numbers you’re leveraging a 60-day engaged right now, so it’s people that had opened or clicked in the last 60 days. Fortunately, we still have metrics for the last few months based off of people that had opened, so we can still leverage that to some degree. We’re gonna want to hit those people, right?
And then as the campaigns allow, we’re gonna want to increment out to like a 75-day engaged, a 90-day engaged, a 120-day engaged, and eventually over time, on Black Friday Cyber Monday, for one or two sends we might want to hit the full list, but then we really want to come back to just hitting kind if your engaged, core segment, and not hit the full list on every single send of that entire week. I think those are the couple things. The offers, not testing them, and then batching and blasting and just ramping the frequency of sends without actually working up to it.
Kurt Elster: So, I test my offers by saying, “Okay, here’s… I want to try…” Either in my email software I can do split testing, where it’ll let me do it and I do it to a small sample of the total list, and then if I… Or if my software doesn’t support split testing, I just send it to a small percentage of the list, right?
Chase Dimond: Yep.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and then that way I can compare it, so I know like, “All right, this was or wasn’t effective.” And then I need to be segmenting. So, you said, “Well, let’s send it to an engaged list.” Define a couple segments for me.
Chase Dimond: Yeah, and real quickly on the offer side, I was kind of talking about email, but that advice is applicable to anything, right? On your Facebook ads and Instagram ads, test different offers to different audiences to see what brings in the most number of people at the last cost of acquisition. On your website, maybe you A-B test different popups to different groups of people for this offer or that offer. In your email, you could test it to a small portion or maybe you’re just saying, “Hey, I’m pretty bullish on these two offers. I’m just gonna split it 50/50 because I want a lot of data to see which is gonna work.” Because right now, it’s great if we get conversions, but we’re really gearing up for BFCM. We really want to know what’s gonna work then. It’s great if we drive conversions now and we could leverage Halloween. By the time this episode’s out, Halloween will be about a week, week and a half away, depending on when people listen to it, so test it for Halloween. That’s a great time to do an offer, obviously if applicable or relevant. Test it for there, like what offer makes sense?
Does someone want a free product when they buy something from you over a certain AOV? Do you want to try to do a bundle to increase the amount of money that people are spending with you? Do you want to have tiered incentives where the more that people spend, the higher discount they get? So, say your product has a $50 AOV. Maybe from $0 to $50, someone gets 10% off. Maybe from $51 to $99, they get 15% off. And maybe any orders over $100, they get 20% off, right? So, there’s so many ways that you can take this and really be creative with it and just have some fun. So, that’s on the offer side.
And then what was the next question?
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez. I don’t remember. I got excited because you rattled off literally my three favorite promotions, which is tiered discount, free gift with purchase, where it’s like minimum… You take your AOV plus 10%, okay, you have to hit that and then you get a free pin or whatever the heck. And then the third one, was it bundle offer?
Chase Dimond: Yep, yep. And I remember the question. You asked about segments-
Kurt Elster: Segments. That was it. Thank you.
Chase Dimond: Cool. So, a couple that come to mind are your VIPs, so that could be defined as, again, it might be different for you, but just on average it could be defined as someone who’s placed an order that’s three to five times more than someone typically spends, or someone that’s spent two to three X to AOV, right? So, someone’s that’s spent… Say if it’s a $50 AOV, if someone’s spent $100 to $150. Or if you wanted to do it the other way based on LTV, someone’s spent three times the amount of your average customer. So, if you find your average customer is spending about $100, maybe someone that’s a VIP could be spending $200, $300, $400 with your store.
So, a VIP is a great one. One interesting thought that we had a little earlier this year that we’ve been starting to test is not just VIPs based off dollars spent, right? That’s obvious. That’s great. You have to take care of those. But VIPs based off of engagement, so people that are opening every email, people that are clicking every single email, people that are active in your community, people that are hitting reply. You can build out a sliver of those people and kind of reward those people for their engagement throughout the year and give them an extra offer, right? Those people that are heavily engaged in your brand, and maybe they purchased from you once or twice, but they haven’t purchased three or five times, those are gonna be the future VIPs based off dollar spend. So, having a sliver of people that are heavy engagers and basically calling out and rewarding those folks is a really nice thing to do, and that’s something that we’re testing and seeing a lot of success with these people that are VIPs. Sure, they want to save money, but that’s not really their incentive. That’s not really their goal.
VIPs want to be the first to know about things, right? They want to be on the inside loop. Those are typically the people that are gonna join your SMS, right? SMS is typically like this VIP club of like your top 10%. So, trying to incorporate VIPs not just on dollars spent, that’s important, but also based on engagement. You’ll have things like the… I mentioned before like the 60-day engaged, the 30-day engaged, the 90-day engaged. That’s basically someone has opened or clicked over the last 30, 60, 90, 120 days. Maybe someone that’s purchased in the last 90 days, right? So, purchased in the last 60 days, 120 days, things like that. Those are some ones that come to mind.
Other segments that we’d been leveraging in the past had been around geography, so if people were in the U.S., maybe you’re doing a free shipping offer in the U.S., segmenting those people out and internationally you just sent a separate campaign. We were segmenting based off of gender in some cases, so Klaviyo is one of the email platforms we use. They have this thing called predictive analytics where you can basically say someone’s likely male, female, or unsure, and they’re basically just taking census data based off someone’s first name and they’re gonna say-
Kurt Elster: I was gonna ask, like how accurate is that? Because I’ve used it with a client that had a big list and a varied audience, and I would randomly pick profiles and look at the name and try and make a best guess, or like look at what they’d purchased, and it was remarkably accurate. It wasn’t always perfect, but it worked pretty well.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. In our testing, again, we’ve just been spot testing on a couple accounts, it’s more or less like nine out of 10 times been pretty close. And what we do in the case of leveraging gender is we’ll have a fall back. So, say we’re sending a campaign to men, we’ll have all the men’s kind of items and men’s products up front on the top, and the bottom half will then be the women’s, and then for women’s, it’ll be women’s on top and men’s on bottom, so we kind of cover our bases in case they’re wrong, because they’re gonna be wrong. They’re not gonna be perfect.
But it’s been pretty interesting, right? So, like for example, your name, Kurt, they’re gonna say that you’re likely male, right? There’s probably not any females that are named Kurt, right? And if they are, I apologize, but for example, like the name Taylor, they are gonna say, or at least they should say that they’re unsure, because Taylor is both a male and a female name. And a name like Veronica, they’re gonna say something like that’s likely female, right?
So, in a lot of cases, just because they’re pulling from a large pool of data based off census, and they’re basically saying with 99% accuracy if this name is male versus female, they’re gonna indicate it, so that’s kind of an interesting one that we’ve done. And just showing the order in which products for that specific audience, so men seeing men’s products first versus kind of a combination, and women seeing women’s stuff first, we have seen kind of a small increase and uptick in clickthrough and conversion.
Kurt Elster: My census data says that a name like Chase Dimond is most likely the protagonist in a heist novel.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. Well, let’s test that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Let’s try a couple of these… This census data. See how it works out. No, that’s good to know, and I think that’s… It’s a neat feature and I’ve used it successfully, and really, like anything you could do that increases relevance, makes your marketing more effective, because ultimately, it’s like it’s less annoying. The worst is when you open your mailbox and you get junk mail and it’s not even addressed to you, right? That’s the feeling and the situation you’re trying to avoid with these tools.
Let’s move into planning. We’re still pre-Halloween but we have the specter of supply shortages. So, we’re in the pre-phase. What should I be doing now?
Chase Dimond: Yeah. Break down, so we’ll talk about campaigns, flows, and popups, and I’ll kind of breeze through each one quickly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I love it.
Chase Dimond: So, on the campaign side, pre-Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign side, you really want to focus on teasing upcoming sales, right? But we largely want to focus on getting people to engage. We want people to reply. We want people to click. We want people to move us from the promotions to primary. We want people basically just to engage and be kind of very top of mind with them. And we don’t want to burn them out with too many promotions before Black Friday Cyber Monday, right? We want to do some. We need to do some testing. But we don’t want to do as aggressive as we typically do or overly aggressive leading up to it, right?
Let’s save the big sales for the big week, but let’s start testing here and there, but mainly focus on getting people to engage. Letting them know what’s coming, hyping things up, giving them content, sharing stuff about the team, things like that.
On the automation side, we want to start kind of slowly moving towards being BFCM oriented. And I mentioned kind of this a little bit before and I’m gonna double back on it because I think it’s important. So, let’s say for example in your abandonment series, the browse abandonment, the abandoned cart, the abandoned checkout, and yes, the abandoned cart and the abandoned checkout are two different things and you do need to have both. I think that’s super important. I know it’s probably one of the biggest mistakes I see brands have. Kind of a quick tangent, but if you’re using Klaviyo and Shopify, by default what you have in your account actually is an abandoned checkout. Because you’ll notice that the trigger is started checkout, or checkout started, but it’s titled an abandoned cart. I don’t know why they do that but go in your account after this podcast, make sure you listen till the end, but go into your account right after this and check to see if your abandoned cart title is actually an abandoned cart or an abandoned checkout.
For Shopify stores in Klaviyo, you have to go add basically a snippet of code to your product Liquid theme on Shopify that will enable a custom added to cart metric which will then enable you to do a true abandoned cart. So, if we think about the funnel, and again, apologies for the tangent, but if we think about the funnel, the most number of people are gonna be on your homepage and the least number of people are gonna make it through checking out, right? And at each step in the drop off, people are on your website, looking at a collection, looking at a product, adding to cart, starting checkout, and buying. For each drop off, you want to serve people content. So, if someone is on your email list, views a product, but doesn’t add to cart, doesn’t start checkout, or doesn’t buy, you want to serve them the browse abandonment.
If someone does those things and then adds to cart but doesn’t do the other things, instead of sending the browse abandonment, you want to send the abandoned cart. However, if people do all those things and then start checkout but don’t buy, you’re gonna wanna pause the browse abandonment, you’re gonna want to not send the abandoned cart, and instead you’re gonna wanna do the abandoned checkout. You need to make sure that you have all three of those abandoned flows because they all drive a lot of revenue. The abandoned checkout’s gonna have the highest conversion because people are furthest down the funnel, but it’s gonna have the least number of people. The browse abandonment is gonna have the most number of people because most number of people are looking at collections or products, right?
So, as a percentage of conversion, browse abandonment should be the least, but the revenue could be pretty big because the volume is gonna be there. So, that’s kind of the tangent.
But going back to the content, so for the browse abandonment, the abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, you want to allude again to the fact that the product that they’re interested in might not be in stock due to heavy promotions, due to inventory shortage, due to all these types of things. So, instead of going heavy on discounts in these abandonment series, these people obviously have some level of interest. They’re on your email list, they’re viewing your product, they’re adding to cart, they’re starting checkout. You want to just say, “Hey, this item that you’re looking at or these items that you’re looking at, these are great. Just to let you know, there’s a good chance that these might sell out in the coming weeks, so if you want this, please grab it now.”
And you don’t have to relegate to doing as many discounts. Maybe you still could have a 10% off or something if it’s standard, but you don’t need aggressive 20, 30, 40% off.
And then lastly… Oh, sorry?
Kurt Elster: So, hold on. Let me recap here. I should… All right, so even if I’ve got the Klaviyo integration app installed in Shopify, there’s a couple snippets it doesn’t necessarily do. It does not add the add-to-cart event snippet, because that really… It’s so theme dependent it would be kind of a nightmare to implement automatically. I say that as the owner of a few Shopify apps that have to install Shopify theme code. So, that part you have to do manually, and like you probably want someone with theme development experience to do it.
The other one, does it add the product viewed code?
Chase Dimond: You have to do that one too. And you have to do that one first. So, for the active on site or the viewed product, you have to do that one first, and then you do the abandoned cart, the added to cart metric second, so that’s a good point.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right, so we do that, and then once I have that, now in my automation flows I can distinguish between you looked at something, you added it to cart, you went to cart, you started checkout.
Chase Dimond: Exactly, so the browse abandonment will be viewed product metric. The abandoned cart will be added to cart or add to cart. And then the abandoned checkout will be checkout started or started checkout. That’s how you’ll be able to distinguish between the metrics.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then, so I update the messaging on those emails, the flows, to make it really relevant to right now and say, “Hey, you’re checking this out. It’s in stock right now and ready to ship. May not be later.” And then I don’t have to discount. And I’m doing this in a really personalized, one-to-one way.
Chase Dimond: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I like it. This is very… It is smart and easily overlooked.
Chase Dimond: Awesome. And then the last one on the pre-side, and we can talk about during and post if you’d like after, but the popup really should excite customers by mentioning that they’re gonna receive special deals once they’re on the list. That being said, you can expect that these leads might be cold until the actual BFCM time period, right? If you’re kind of hyping and teasing that in a few weeks we’re gonna have the best sales of the year, and you only have a 10% off sale now, they’re probably not gonna buy right now.
Again, unless they get into your flows, or get into your content, and they’re more driven by FOMO and by the kind of potential limited inventory. And again, this is probably gonna be better for brands that are doing probably like eight figures, low eight figures or less, right? If you’re Walmart, or Target, and you’re listening to this, you have a lot of inventory. Don’t trick people, right?
But for everyone else that’s medium or small size, I think this is heavily applicable. I also think too, we saw a really big movement going back to I think to the first question you asked me on the start of this, I think we saw a big movement over the past year and a half towards wanting to support small and local businesses, right? So, I think being able to leverage some of that in your messaging in a way that doesn’t seem like you’re asking for a donation or asking for like a charity, right? You’re not begging, but I think leveraging some of the fact that you’re a small, family-owned, local business, whatever it might be, whatever is part of your story, I think leveraging some of that stuff within some of your campaigns and your automations in this time ahead of it might sway someone towards supporting and buying from you over your competitor that’s this massive company where they get a couple extra sales, it doesn’t really mean much for them. But for you, couple extra sales might be impactful.
Kurt Elster: So, this is where I want to, and immediately I thought story, and then you mentioned story, so here’s where I want to know and leverage and communicate that story of the brand, like here’s why we do this, that kind of thing. And really, be a person as opposed to a brand, where it’s like, “Hey, I’m the person behind this.” One great example I like is Very Good Bra, and this woman who makes Very Good Bra, it’s in Australia, and they send… She sends these wonderful plain text emails but it’s always like it’s first person, it’s from her, and you get the story of like here’s why we do this, here’s what’s going on with inventory, here’s, “Oh, hey. We restocked but here’s why we were able to do that.”
So, it always comes across as like total transparency and that makes the brand trustworthy. So, when they come to me later and say, “Hey, we’ve got this item. It’s back in stock but it’s limited and here’s why,” it also… and it helps justify the value and the cost as opposed to buying from discounted items from a Target or a Walmart. So, yeah, I think that that’s the hard part, is writing your story, but I think that really is… That’s the value to this medium.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. I love that. I do want to jump into one of the things you just said that’s actually really important. So, if your items do go out of stock, that’s probably gonna be inevitable, make sure that you have an email collection for that item so that way when it comes back in stock you have a list of potential buyers, right?
Kurt Elster: The back in stock form.
Chase Dimond: Yes. Exactly. So, you’re gonna sell out of inventory on something, right? Maybe not everything, but something. Obviously, your popular products are gonna sell out. Make sure you have on that product page a form where you can actually collect the email. That way you can notify those people when that item is back in stock. And one hack there that I have that I haven’t seen anyone ever do this, or talk about this, is okay, so back in stock, typically people wait until the item’s actually back in stock to send an email. What we do and what we see work really, really well is we send a confirmation once people actually opt-into the back in stock, saying, “Hey, Kurt. For this wallet that you wanted, we will let you know when it’s back in stock. But in the meantime, as our way of saying sorry, here’s a 10% off discount that you can shop on anything else that is in stock. And don’t worry, we will let you know when this wallet’s back in the coming weeks.” Right?
And that email just confirming that item, hey, you’re gonna get this notification when it’s back, but in the meantime as our way of saying sorry, here’s a discount on anything else, we are seeing that email drive a lot of revenue and a lot of engagement for our clients. Have never seen anyone do that, never seen anyone talk about that, but it’s really successful. So, we typically send it five minutes after someone opts into receive notifications on that product.
Kurt Elster: That’s clever. I have never tried that one. I will say definitely set up that back in stock flow and form, and that’s another one where it’s built into… It’s a feature in Klaviyo but you need to do a little bit of theme customization and again, it’s hey, you gotta mess with that product form, which is rarely fun, so you better know what you’re doing.
Chase Dimond: Yep. Exactly. And one other thing now that we’re talking about forms, again, I’m an email guy through and through, but I’m seeing the kind of the increase in terms of conversion and success with SMS, so even if you’re not doing SMS now, I highly recommend that you start collecting those SMS consent. And the order in which you collect it from my testing matters. So, asking for the email first performs better than asking for phone number first. So, what I would do is if I have a two-step or a multistep form, where you ask for email, so that way you collect that, and on the next step, you ask for SMS. All you really need to do is have an SMS confirmation email that goes out that says, “Hey, Kurt. Are you sure you want to opt into this? Hit Y.”
At the very least during this heavy traffic time, start collecting SMS consent. Even if you don’t do anything with it until Q1, you’re gonna want to build that list. You’re gonna get a percentage of people, maybe 5%, maybe 8%, maybe 10% of people that actually opt into your SMS list. And if you’re getting increase in traffic, you could be getting 100 people. You could get 500 people. You could get thousands of people onto your SMS list. That will really make that a really viable channel for Q1 and beyond.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You’re not going to regret collecting those opt-ins and having the option. And with SMS, the timestamped opt-in is the critical thing that you have to have to be able to use it. And so, maybe you’re like, “Well, you know, I don’t know. I might not use it. I don’t care.” If you change your mind later, you’re gonna regret it. If you don’t and don’t use it, you probably won’t care. It really… It doesn’t cost you anything. So, I agree with this advice. And Shopify now supports… They’ve got in you go settings, checkout, and you can enable just an SMS opt-in checkbox, same as that email opt-in checkbox, whereas previously, like an app had to do it for you. Now, it’s native in Shopify as of I think this month.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. I think before it was Shopify Plus exclusive and now it’s universal Shopify.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Chase Dimond: Which is… That’s a huge one, right? Because when people are at checkout, they’re gonna fill that stuff out. You have to… You’re basically hurting yourself if you’re not doing that, right? It’s a no-brainer. Just do it.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. Okay, so that’s our pre. Now, during the event. So, when do my sales start? When do I start firing off emails? Just like it’s going out of style.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. It’s a good question. It depends. So, the big guys, we were studying some of the data off of like the Macy’s, and the Nordstrom’s, and the Targets of the world. So, from what I remember, I think Macy’s starts launching their stuff the first week of November, right? So, the first week of November, they’re kind of doing their sneak peek into what’s to come. Target, I think last year started doing it at the end of October, started doing weekly deals every Thursday, and it was doing something special for their Red Card holders or something where they offered price adjustments if the product changed to be more discount later. I think Walmart was starting early kind of November. Home Depot was starting end of October, early November, so the big guys are starting early, and I think a lot of them benefited greatly from that.
For kind of the smaller to midsize brands, the ones that may be listening, and the ones that I work with, I think starting probably like a week or two early could be good, right? You don’t want to obviously go a month, two months early, but I think a week or two earlier than the actual week is probably a good amount of time to at least get things going, or at least launch early to your VIPs. Again, the VIPs based off dollar spends, and or the VIPs based off engagement. I think at least giving those guys a heads up like a week or two out is really helpful.
In terms of the actual content itself, so on the campaign side, I alluded to this earlier, but your campaign strategy should be more aggressive than average. Again, please work up to it. Don’t go from zero to 100 overnight. Work up to this because you might be sending a daily email from let’s say Monday to Monday, right? The week before Cyber Monday all the way through Cyber Monday. Maybe you’re even gonna do an extension, right? I see a lot of brands extend it to the Tuesday or Wednesday. You might even do a resend to non-buyers or something.
So, there’s gonna be a lot of campaign sends. You’re gonna be more aggressive. And you know, customers and subscribers expect it during this week, so don’t be scared of that part. And then on the same note, your flows should trigger a lot earlier. So, let’s give the case of the abandoned cart, right? So, say the abandoned cart email one typically sends let’s say two hours after someone abandons their cart. Let’s say if they don’t convert, email two probably goes a day after email one. And then maybe email three, if they still don’t convert, goes another day out, right? So, now we’re out about two and a half to three days out that someone might have received potentially this abandoned cart sequence. We want to be way more aggressive. We’re gonna want to send that first abandoned cart like 15 to 30 minutes later, right? The window of time to be able to convert these people is really small. Email two, we might want to follow up like four to six hours later. And then email three, we might want to follow up 10 to 12 hours later, right?
So, that might be a little too aggressive and a little bit too much for you, but I would rather be a little bit more aggressive and squeeze more revenue during this period of time than let them buy from a competitor. So, I would just increase the frequency of the time delays by at least half of what you have it now, if not more.
Kurt Elster: I like it. Yeah. No, that’s a really smart, solid point. My gosh, I can’t believe I missed that. That’s a good… All right, so take whatever, on those abandoned cart flows, my viewed product, browse abandonment flows, those things, take however much time it’s running, minimum cut it in half, and ideally just run it a lot quicker. Because it is suddenly my sales cycle got really compressed. And people have a finite budget. They’re not gonna wait around and be like, “Well, I impulse bought this thing because it was on sale and this thing. Well, I’ll buy your thing.” No. There is a budget. There is only so much to spend.
And same with just gifting in general. You have an idea of how much you want to spend on a person, or per person, or total. So, you’ve got… it’s the one time of year where everyone is screaming for those dollars, so you really have like this… You’re right. You gotta move fast.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. Agreed. Should we dive into the post real quick?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Let’s jump on post.
Chase Dimond: So, on the post-BFCM, the campaigns, again, for a little bit of time we want to refrain from mentioning discounts or promotions, right? Maybe a couple weeks. Maybe like a month or two. Don’t go back into discount mode. Give people some time to breathe. Or at least exclude, if you’re gonna do heavy discounts or campaigns, or some discounts, at least exclude people that bought from you during that period of time, right? Those buyers are gonna be exhausted. You’re just gonna burn them if you keep hitting them with discounts.
Instead, you want to focus on engaging the customers with stories, educational content, getting them to reply, getting them to take actions. That’s on the campaign side, right? You really want to just get them to engage, get to know you, get them to learn, but really give them some space to breathe. Don’t hit them every single day. Don’t overwhelm them with discounts.
And on the flow side, we will really want to position this and focus this on asking new customers for reviews. Kind of taking the chance to introduce the brand story, and the team, and really just keep the audience interested in the brand as much as they were interested in the product they bought from you, right? I guess one of the things I always talk about kind of lately is BFCM is the season of acquisition, right? It’s when brands can drive a significant amount of revenue compared to other holidays, but it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be the most profitable. You’re probably gonna be the least profitable. You might even be breakeven. So, after you acquire customers, you want to nurture them and engage them for as long as possible because you’ll make up for that money that you spent to acquire them on that next purchase and that purchase after, right?
So, you want to be able to just engage and nurture these people over time to be able to eventually be profitable on that. So, I don’t know, our team has been saying BFCM, the season of acquisition, and that just to me is like our whole mindset going into this.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea. And I love the idea that like, okay, Black Friday is done, you’re not. You have to now go, you probably acquired new customers, now it is time to nurture them. I think that’s a very clever idea. I have loved this because there have been so many out of the box ideas that I… and I’ve done this many years, that I had not considered or even heard of. Like just brand-new stuff to me that I went… and then when I heard it, I went, “Well, oh, duh. Of course. Why weren’t you doing that, Elster? What’s your problem?”
And so, I know that you have a fantastic offering in which you have brain dumped all of this great knowledge. Tell us about your info product.
Chase Dimond: Yeah. I have a couple info products. My main one is a course that basically teaches people all about email marketing and really the foundation and the core. So, I have… It’s a 49-video lesson course. I think that’s the one I talked to you about. I don’t remember if I talked to you about the BFCM one. Which one did I tell you about that I wanted to share with people because I was really excited about it? I was too excited. I can’t even remember now.
Kurt Elster: Ultimate BFCM Email Marketing Playbook.
Chase Dimond: Okay. Amazing. I’m glad I asked you because I was going in the wrong direction. So, I put together basically a lot of the stuff that we talked about today. I put together… It’s a 92-page PDF that covers pre, during, and post, showing you the exact campaigns you should send during Black Friday Cyber Monday. I think I came up with seven or eight or nine different ideas. I have a bunch of examples. I have some subject lines. I got some swiped copy that people can actually use. So, it’s 92 pages of nothing but email marketing content.
I think I launched it about a week or two ago. I’ve had about 250 to 300 people purchase it so far and the feedback’s been really, really good. So, I wanted to give your audience a special discount on that, and I think it’s really just gonna help them crush it for their brand or for their client’s brand for BFCM and really feel really secure in terms of what in the world do I send, how do I send it, and really understanding the why behind what we’re doing.
Kurt Elster: And what would I expect to pay for this email guide?
Chase Dimond: So, I think the full price is $749. I want to give an offer to your audience. I’ll make a code for you after for 30% off.
Kurt Elster: Cool. I will put that in the show notes, so I’ve linked to the product in the show notes.
Chase Dimond: Awesome.
Kurt Elster: And will add the discount code in there for 30% off. If it’s half as valuable as the info that Chase has given today, totally worth it. I will probably pick one up myself. Chase, thank you so much for this. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Chase Dimond: Yeah, I appreciate you having me. If you want to be blown up on Twitter with tons of things on email marketing and copywriting, go shoot me a follow. Every single day, I’m posting email marketing tips, email marketing hacks, scaling, growing an agency, copywriting. My handle is @ecomchasedimond and there’s no A in Dimond, so just D-I-M-O-N-D. @ecomchasedimond.
Kurt Elster: I’ll put that in the show notes, as well. And yeah, I have been following him a while. It is nothing but valuable content. No BS. I’m really quite, quite impressed by it.
Chase Dimond: Appreciate you.
Kurt Elster: Excellent. Thank you. Chase, thank you so much for doing this. Make sure you get me that discount code and will leave it there. Let’s get out of here.
Chase Dimond: Thanks for having me, man.
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