A clean list is a well-delivered list
Nomad Goods' Chuck Melber joins us to tell us in details what he's doing in Klaviyo to generate seven-figures worth of revenue annually.
Key Takeaways:
Chuck started his post college life working in the world of ecommerce and marketing and quickly made the leap into the realm of UX/ID. Over the course of a few years he was privileged to consult on projects with companies like GoPro, Mozilla, and LG. Thanks to retail experience he brought a unique perspective regarding consumer electronics and a desire to make navigating the world a simpler, more enjoyable experience.
In 2015 Chuck returned to marketing, advertising, and growth with a broader appreciation for aesthetics and usability. During his tenure at Nomad he has established a strong foundation in advertising, email marketing, affiliate marketing, PR, and influencer marketing.
When not working, you can find Chuck adventuring, fishing offshore, or in the kitchen.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
10/6/2020
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking with a tremendous email marketer that has quite the portfolio of clients in his resume and works with a current Shopify Plus client that is just tremendous. We’re talking today with Chuck Melber. Chuck started his post-college life working in the world of eCommerce and marketing and made the leap into the realm of user experience. Ooh, a man after my own heart. Over the course of a few years, he was privileged to consult on projects with companies like GoPro, Mozilla, and LG. Oh, that’s some big boy, real deal brands, some Fortune 100 stuff.
Thanks to retail experience, he brought a unique perspective regarding consumer electronics and a desire to make navigating the world a simpler, more enjoyable experience. In 2015, Chuck returned to marketing, advertising, and growth with a broader appreciation for aesthetics. #Aesthetic and usability. During his tenure at Nomad Goods, he has established a strong foundation in advertising, email marketing, affiliate marketing, PR, and influencer marketing. And when not working, you can find him adventuring, fishing offshore, or in the kitchen. He’s not kidding about the offshore fishing thing.
Mr. Melber, how are you doing?
Chuck Melber: Kurt, it’s great to be here, man. Doing good.
Kurt Elster: All right, Chuck. Up front, I want to establish one thing. Why the heck should we listen to you? What is… Give me some metrics, some stats on your current work with Nomad Goods, which I love Nomad Goods. I’ve got the AirPods Pro case in front of me and the iPhone case. They both use Horween Leather, which I love. Amazing tannery from Chicago. So, I’m sold, but we gotta sell our listeners. Why should they listen to you? Give me the rundown, the stats.
Chuck Melber: For sure, Kurt. So, I’ve been with Nomad for about six years now, running their email game since the start. At this point, we’re sending out just over a million emails a month. Our average open rate’s about 40%. About 20% of revenue is attributed to email marketing in general.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I mean, man, email’s a… It’s a fun little beast to play around with. That’s for sure.
Kurt Elster: What kind of list size are we talking about here?
Chuck Melber: So, it’s actually not the biggest list in the world, but it’s a solid list. We got about 320,000 people on there.
Kurt Elster: Wow!
Chuck Melber: But we’re constantly adding and removing people depending on their interaction with our list.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re big on list hygiene.
Chuck Melber: Oh God. That’s the biggest thing of all. List hygiene is easily the most important thing with your deliverability, your open rates, et cetera, et cetera. So, like if someone signs up for a list or gets added to our list, but doesn’t open a single email in 120 days, they’re gone. Every now and again we’ll tap back into that pool of people that aren’t opening emails, but that’s once in a blue moon. So yeah, I think we’ve had well over a million people on our list overall, but at this point, we have 320,000 active subscribers.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so my immediate first key takeaway here is that list hygiene is tremendously important.
Sound bite: Major key alert!
Kurt Elster: Why is list hygiene so important? What is… Why not just… You said, “Oh, yeah, a million people have run through this list.” Why not just leave a million people on the list? Other than like the cost, because you pay by subscriber at most platforms.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Exactly. So, a clean list is a well delivered list, is the most important thing. You have a list out there that people aren’t engaging, aren’t opening your emails, Google, Yahoo, whoever, whatever ESP the end consumer is using is going to see that. They’re gonna be like, “Wait a second, no one cares about these emails from this company, so let’s put it in the spam folder. Let’s put it in the promotions folder. Let’s bury it.” But if you have a healthy list with people engaging and opening, 40%, 50% open rate, all of a sudden they’re like, “Wait a second, this is actually really important content. These people care about it. So, let’s make sure the consumer is seeing these emails from this company.” In this case, Nomad.
Kurt Elster: What would you say, just for… Not for Nomad, unless you want to give us the number, but for an average Shopify merchant sending out Klaviyo emails, what’s a typical open rate like? Give us some range or benchmark.
Chuck Melber: What I’ve seen from talking with other marketers and just reading different blogs and stuff like that online, it seems like 25 to 30% for a random email send is pretty average. Versus like an abandoned cart, I think it’s gonna be more in the 40% range. For us, a random email, just sending out a blast about some new product or a flash sale or whatever, tends to be in the 40-plus range, and then browse abandonment, cart abandonment, that kind of stuff ends up being closer to 50, 60%.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Chuck Melber: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: These are some great open rate numbers.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I mean, the fact that the ESPs seem to like our emails because of those open rates I think begets better open rates, because all of a sudden stuff’s showing up higher in the inbox.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. So, we’ve got way better open, not just like a little bit better. Way better open rates. Reduced cost. Improved deliverability. All great reasons to engage in list hygiene. You’ve sold me on it. Let’s say… But it’s easier for you, because you are a marketer coming in from the outside, like you’re not the founder. Your ego is not… Well, a little bit.
Chuck Melber: Oh, my ego is fully-
Kurt Elster: I’m sure you get excited by those revenue numbers, but your ego is not tied up in the list size the same way a founder is, the same way Noah is.
Chuck Melber: Honestly, it was.
Kurt Elster: It is? Okay.
Chuck Melber: I was really reticent to start doing list cleaning. At one point, we were working with an agency, formerly Email Aptitude. I don’t know what they are now. They’ve been bought out a couple times. And they came to me with it. They’re like, “Hey, man. We really should start doing this.” I’m like, “There’s no way. We can’t get rid of a bunch of our list. You’re crazy!” But you know, I saw the light and eventually was like, “Okay, cool. Let’s give this a shot and see what happens.” And it’s been very clear that it has a very positive effect, so now I’m a huge evangelist for the idea of list cleanliness.
Kurt Elster: Well, we’ll give them the plug for getting you engaged in list hygiene. Email Aptitude is now Tinuiti. T-I-N-U-I-T-I, and I will-
Chuck Melber: There you go.
Kurt Elster: And I will… I’ll throw the link in the show notes. They can get that free plug.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. They’re good people, but doing it myself now.
Kurt Elster: Okay. As far as… We’ve established why we should do it. The strategic advantage there. What’s the tactic? How do I actually go about cleaning my list?
Chuck Melber: All right, so assuming you’re on day one, you’ve never cleaned your list, you got we’ll say 100,000 people on there. You got your 20% open rate, 25% open rate, like wait a second. Let’s figure out those individuals that aren’t engaging with my email. First thing you do, for me, I’m gonna speak to Klaviyo, because that’s the primary ESP I use, so I’ll talk about segmentation in there.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and I think a majority of our listeners are either on Klaviyo or considering it, so you want to just speak to… I think it’s safe to assume it’s cool to speak to Klaviyo.
Chuck Melber: Okay, cool.
Kurt Elster: And at the same time, your recommendations, even if it’s not implemented exactly the same way, you can get something similar or close in a lot of email platforms.
Chuck Melber: Absolutely. Totally. And apologies to Klaviyo if I’m pronouncing it wrong, because I always bounce back and forth between Klaviyo and Klaviyo, and I’ve never been able to.
Kurt Elster: I believe it’s… So, I at this point second guess myself-
Chuck Melber: Every day.
Kurt Elster: They’re one of our sponsors, and even with me, they always make sure when they give me, they’re like, “Hey, we want to update the ad read. What do you think of this?” And they, like they let me… They’re like, “Here’s the original,” and then I punch it up and make it sound like me. But they always put in the phonetic pronunciation, and even as many times as I’ve done it, I still second guess myself. I’m like 95% confident it’s Klaviyo.
Chuck Melber: Okay. Well, there we go. Okay, I’m gonna run with that then. So, back to what we were saying. You got your list of 100,000 people. You gotta clean it up. First thing you do is you create a segment within Klaviyo, or whatever your ESP is, of people who haven’t engaged with your email in a given period of time. It’s up to you decide what that period of time is. I settled on-
Kurt Elster: What would you recommend?
Chuck Melber: I settled on 120 to 150. I’ve kind of oscillated. I think right now we’re sitting at a 130 window, so basically if someone is added to our list, or is a buck purchaser, or maybe we got them from a cross promotion, whatever it may be, they’re added to our list, we give them 130 days. If they don’t open a single email, they’re added to that segment. So, for you as a new person that’s just starting to clean your list, you create a segment of someone who hasn’t opened an email in 130 days. Okay, cool. There’s 15,000 people now that aren’t engaged with my emails.
You’re gonna want to build out a flow for those folks, and an email flow is gonna be pretty aggressive, because basically if they haven’t engaged with you up until now, it’s gonna be hard to get them to engage. So, you gotta give them something really good to get them to bite. So, you want to offer a crazy deal. I hate using them, but a super clickbaity subject line. Something to get the person in the door to actually see your email for the first time.
Kurt Elster: All right, so some clickbaity email lines. You do like one word email, that’s brutal. You do the one word email.
Chuck Melber: I’ve never done that.
Kurt Elster: I’ve got people mad at me for a one word subject line, which is funny. But all right, give me a… Off the top of your head, you got any clickbaity subject lines?
Chuck Melber: I mean, a deal like this never happens. I don’t know, something just so painful and so… I hate those, but for this kind of situation it makes sense, because you really want to get someone to look at your email for the first time. And the hope is that they see that first email from you and they’re like, “Whoa, this content is actually really cool. I like what these guys are doing.” And then they’re gonna continue to engage with emails subsequently.
But anyhow, I would build out a flow of two to three emails, extremely clickbaity, offer a sweet deal, 50% off, 40% off, I know it’s a lot to swallow for a lot of people to do that kind of a discount randomly, but again, these are people that haven’t engaged with you at all, so odds are they’re probably not gonna engage with it anyways, but hopefully that extra incentive gets some of them to. So yeah, you’re gonna run that cohort of individuals through that flow, and that’s your initial list cleanse. So, you went from in this example 100,000 to 85,000 people, because you cleansed out 15,000 that just aren’t engaged.
That’s great. Now, what do you do going forward? Going forward, you want to build out a flow that’s gonna continue running, where basically you’re creating a segment, like a segment that’s continually updating of people who haven’t opened an email in 130 days. And they’re gonna get this same flow that you just ran the initial 15,000 people through, but it’s gonna be a much smaller scale. So, for me, I send out maybe five or six of these flows a week at this point. Our list is extremely engaged, so there’s not a ton of cleaning that’s going on on a daily, weekly basis at this point. But for you initially, you’ll clean out your 15,000 people that are disengaged and then on a rolling basis you’ll see like at first it’s gonna continue to roll out pretty strong. You’re like, “Okay, wow. There goes 100 people. There goes 100 people.”
But as you get your list more and more refined, you’ll have to do less refining on it, so to speak. Imagine you’re carving a marble statue. At first, you’re carving off big hunks, but then when you get to the end of it, you’re just like sanding off little bits here and there.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s a good analogy. I like that.
Chuck Melber: All right. Yeah. I think that’s tremendously important. If you participate in list generation promotions, like cross-promo giveaway type stuff. You’ll see spikes of list client cleansing 130 days after you initially send to that list, because anytime you do one of those promotions, they’re great, and it’s super fun to get an extra 10, 20, 30,000 emails, but odds are a lot of them aren’t-
Kurt Elster: They’re low quality.
Chuck Melber: They’re low quality. So, you’ll see spikes here and there if you’re doing that kind of stuff, but it’s to be expected and it’s part of the game.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. We have a client who has been giving away cars, plural, this quarter.
Chuck Melber: Oh, man.
Kurt Elster: And like sequentially, like one car a month, and just tremendous for email opt-in, but as part of that, there was a very serious discussion about like, “Okay, how do we tackle list hygiene with this?” And we need to really be careful and double down on it, because you don’t want those low quality subscribers. And one of the things I learned the hard way was there are services out there whenever you do a giveaway, and I love giveaways, but there’s services out there that people subscribe to that do nothing but they’re like, “Hey, here’s all the giveaways we found today.”
Chuck Melber: Yeah. They get a ton. Oh, those are the worst.
Kurt Elster: And those are like utter garbage, because they knew nothing about your brand, they don’t care about your brand, they just want the free thing. So, you gotta be careful with the giveaways, but they are… It’s a valuable tool. You just need… It’s not a free lunch, is my point.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. No, exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, obviously you use Klaviyo, and I wanted to ask this as my first question, but we jumped into list hygiene, which is a hot topic for me, and I think it’s such an underutilized thing. What’s your tech stack look like? You use Klaviyo and you’re driving a ton of revenue through it. What’s the… Within Klaviyo, or other than Klaviyo, are there any other tools you use?
Chuck Melber: For me personally, Klaviyo is definitely the biggest one. I’m messing around with Tone SMS right now for some SMS messaging and abandoned cart stuff.
Kurt Elster: Now, hold on. You’re using it, but Klaviyo supports SMS.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I’m testing Tone. They have some really cool… I don’t even know how to phrase it. They have some really cool. All right, you know, I haven’t tested Klaviyo’s SMS, to be completely transparent. But my personal experience with SMS tools as a consumer is it tends to be a lot of very botty, like okay, this is clearly not a person to me, whatever, I get it, experience, which I don’t like. Tone has a much more humanistic experience, so like you’re actually having a conversation. So, the end consumer has a much better experience as a result, I believe, but we’ve only been testing it for a month and a half at this point, so it’s pretty new for us. But I’m into it so far.
Kurt Elster: Okay. No, and so what… You’re new to SMS, but what’s kind of… What’s your impression of it like so far? Because this is… I think everyone is interested in SMS. I think they’re also scared of SMS.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I fully agree.
Kurt Elster: I know a lot of people who are like, “Well, I would never want text messages from a brand, therefore I’m not doing this ever.”
Chuck Melber: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: It’s like, “Well, are you your audience?” But-
Chuck Melber: That’s the hardest part as a marketer, I think.
Kurt Elster: Did you go through; did you have that experience? Where you’re like, “I don’t want to do this.”
Chuck Melber: I’ve evaluated SMS tools… I mean, I’m sure you have a similar experience. You get all kinds of emails from people trying to sell you their services.
Kurt Elster: Oh, honest, it drives me crazy how many people… And not because I don’t like the ideas. On rare occasion, I will actually take part in one of these things if it’s like, you know, like I wanted to split test shipping rates for a Plus client recently. And then I got an email, or yeah, someone pinged me and goes, “Hey, have you seen this tool?” And it was like I can’t… Like are you reading my mind? Occasionally… They had a tool that would split test shipping rates. I’m like, “How is that even possible that you knew this?” But for the most part it’s just like, “I love Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I like the episode where you talked about eCommerce. You should attend this-“
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Test my tool.
Kurt Elster: No. I don’t want to do the demo. Leave me alone. Anyway, sorry. I got excited.
Chuck Melber: I’ve gotten a lot of those pitches on SMS. I’ve taken a handful of calls over the past couple years. And every time, I got back to the idea of like I think our consumer, or our customer is gonna be really annoyed by it, and I personally would be annoyed by it, just like you mentioned. But then I got a recommendation from a friend, they’re like, “Hey, you should really take the call with these guys at Tone and give it a shot.” And we were admittedly nervous about it. I don’t want to be off putting to the customer, at the end of the day.
So, we started testing with cart abandonment, actually, and it’s been going swimmingly. People are into it. They engage really well with the product. It’s been great. That said, I don’t have it blasted out all over the site yet. It’s not like a big top bar or anything like that, like, “Text us for information.” It’s not in your face. But we’re gonna start testing it a little bit more on product pages and stuff like that and see what the response is like from consumers, see what the engagement rate is like, as well.
Kurt Elster: I saw one, you said, “Oh, we don’t have it on the top of the site.” Beardbrand, Eric Bandholz’s brand, Beardbrand, they did a thing like they ditched live chat on their site and instead just have an announcement bar at the top of the site with a phone number, and they’re like, “Questions? Text us.” And I think that’s brilliant. Now, the downside is you pay per text. Right?
Chuck Melber: Yeah, so you gotta make sure-
Kurt Elster: Whereas with live chat, you’re not. And I asked him about this. I said, “Why do you do it?” He goes, “Well, I think it’s human. I think it’s engaging.” He goes, “But really, it came out of a performance effort.” He’s like, “We wanted to really commit to building a performant website and live chat widgets are bloated monsters.” So, like just having SMS is a no-bloat way to approach live chat. I thought that was clever.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. We don’t have live chat on our site either for that same reason, and it’s like-
Kurt Elster: Some of these live chat widgets are like one meg. Like what did you guys do?
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Exactly. And you want to try to simplify things as much as possible. Yeah, so we got SMS. I use Justuno little bit. We don’t really have the whole pop over, get 10% off, give us your email. We’ve done it. It was cool for a while. I feel like it’s a little bit overused, personally, at this point in the industry, so we don’t really have it on our site very much at all.
Kurt Elster: Well, and you can see, like if you map it over time, you can see kind of the opt-in rates on those things go down, and for that reason, I just refuse to do welcome popup on page load. Instead, I do like-
Chuck Melber: It has to be perfectly done.
Kurt Elster: Like let’s make it on scroll. If someone scrolls to 50% of the page, do the welcome pop up, because at least they raised their hand and said, “I’m interested.”
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I agree. Those are kind of my primary tools right now, to be honest. I don’t know. Not too complicated, to be honest.
Kurt Elster: Perfect. No, that’s great. You mentioned abandoned cart, and you have shared your abandoned cart with me before. I love it. Tell me what you’re doing with abandoned cart.
Chuck Melber: So, we got a little crafty with our cart abandonment stuff, and we’re segmenting within our cart abandonment flow depending upon past purchase behavior. So, we essentially have three flows within one. For zero time buyers, one time buyers, and then I think three-plus time buyers, to give personalized content to a degree depending upon what they’ve done before.
So, our zero time buyers get the most I think interesting deal, where it’s, “Okay, you came to our site, you abandoned your cart. You gave us your email, so you’re clearly interested. Let’s get something in your hands. Let’s get a product. Maybe you don’t want to spend 50 bucks on an iPhone case right now. That’s fine. Here’s a free sticker pack.” We’re just offering free sticker packs to people that abandon their cart, basically. I’m gonna have to look at the stats now after this podcast goes live and see if we see a spike in it, but it’s a way to give the consumer a physical representation of your brand with little to no burden of entry for them. They get this cool sticker pack. They see some really neat stickers from Nomad. They get an idea of the passion that we put into the quality of products we make. And then the hope is that okay, they see that first step and they’re like, “Oh wow, this is actually really cool. Okay. Now I’m willing to invest the extra money on a high end iPhone case or a high end AirPods case.”
Kurt Elster: You’re right, like when you say sticker pack, though, it’s not just you got a sticker in an envelope. It’s got this beautiful case with a… It looks like recycled paper with a topographic pattern behind it, and you open it, it’s got a couple stickers in it, and more importantly, it’s got the story.
Chuck Melber: It’s got the brand story.
Kurt Elster: But you better believe I got… When I bought my AirPods case, that was the first thing I bought, I got the… and it’s not like this was… I was like “Hey, Chuck. Hook me up.” I literally was just like, “Nomad’s cool. I want this case.” Truthfully, I get a lot of stuff for free. I mean, it’s cool, but I actually paid for this.
Chuck Melber: I appreciate the support.
Kurt Elster: And it came with the sticker pack, and whenever a brand sends me a sticker pack and I like them, and I like their product, I put it up in my garage, and then it’s just like this… and then I’ll just re-notice it every so often for the rest of forever. So, I think stickers are a really clever way to keep top of mind, and it feels like it’s had… It’s inexpensive for you to produce, but a sticker for people who are into it has a lot of value.
Chuck Melber: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: And I’m a big… I love stickers. I love stickers to the point I bought my own vinyl plotter. I make my own stickers.
Chuck Melber: That’s awesome.
Kurt Elster: So, I’m a bit biased in favor of stickers.
Chuck Melber: That’s great. I love it. That’s so cool, you bought your own vinyl plotter.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Chuck Melber: But yeah-
Kurt Elster: It’s a Cricut is the brand. Cricut Silhouette. It’s small. It’s inexpensive. I got it on sale. It was less than 100 bucks, so if you’re at all into stickers, totally cool.
Chuck Melber: That’s really cool, actually. I’m gonna check that out. So yeah, so that’s part one of the flow. That’s for people that are zero time buyers. People that have purchased once before get your standard browse or cart abandonment flow, like, “Here’s a reminder about the product. Here’s a little bit of brand information.” Pretty straightforward.
And then the third part is people that I think have purchased three or more times. They’re clearly a VIP customer for us. I mean, every brand has a different threshold for what qualifies as a VIP buyer, but three times purchasing is pretty legit for the-
Kurt Elster: Oh. I’m not VIP. I’ve got three products, but they were in two separate orders. I should have spread them out, made myself VIP status.
Chuck Melber: You’ll get there eventually. So yeah, for VIPs, we do a similar thing to the free sticker pack, but we’re giving a way a free Nomad keychain. I think it’s like 15 bucks on our site, and it’s just a little like, “Okay, you’re clearly interested in more stuff. Maybe you’re not ready to buy a wireless charger, but we appreciate the support you’ve given us thus far, so here’s your chance for a free keychain.” We don’t just send it out on its own. They have to go to the site and place the order for the free keychain, but it’s a nice little thank you for those types of people or for those customers.
Kurt Elster: It’s very cool.
Chuck Melber: And then actually, something I just did to my cart abandonment that I think is gonna be a little contradictory to a lot of best practices out there is I, for browse and cart abandonment, for that matter, is I got rid of my second and third emails.
Kurt Elster: What?
Chuck Melber: I started doing a deep dive into the stats on it and I noticed they had a surprisingly high unsub rate. So, I was like, “Okay, let’s turn those off for a little bit and see what happens.” So, I actually just did that maybe a couple weeks ago at this point.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re not… It was the high unsubscribe rate?
Chuck Melber: Yeah. It was like-
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Chuck Melber: I think on average, I see like .3 for a normal email as an unsub rate, but for those I was seeing 3% or 4%, so drastically higher. Yeah. I’m curious to see what the effect is on the total sales numbers, but I have a feeling it’s gonna be better in the long term to not have that high unsub rate. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s interesting. It sounds like you’ve got your abandoned cart flows really dialed in. I suspect that you’re killing the game with post-purchase flows. What are you doing there?
Chuck Melber: So, post purchase is pretty fun, too. We don’t trigger post purchase until after the customer received delivery of their product. We want to make sure we’re not being overbearing with juggling both transactional emails from Shopify, as well as the post-purchase flow through Klaviyo, so we use AfterShip to trigger our post-purchase flow. We have a few different ways of approaching post purchase, depending upon user behavior, just like our cart abandonment.
So, if someone has only placed one order ever, they get a fairly standard post-purchase flow. They get a little explainer about the brand, they get a thank you, it feels good, we introduce them to our social channels and that kind of stuff. If someone has placed two orders, they get a totally different flow. For those folks, the first email they get is a personalized letter, “personalized” air quotes, from the CEO, just thanking them for their second order, thanking them for being an awesome Nomad, all that kind of stuff, with a follow-up email introducing them to our Instagram channel, because Instagram’s kind of our biggest, most favorite social channel.
And then for people that have placed a third order over all time, again, like we were talking about earlier, three times placing an order’s pretty important for us. They get another email from myself thanking them for being a Nomad Pro, and that’s another personalized email saying, “Hey, I was looking through the order data last night. I noticed you placed your third order from us. That’s so awesome. Thanks for the support. We love you.”
Kurt Elster: That’s how we got introduced.
Chuck Melber: That’s how we met. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s a plain… I had placed my Nomad purchase, the first one, and I got a… Sometime after I placed the order and I’m like in love with this AirPods case, and I get this plain text email from Chuck at Nomad, and I thought it was really good, so I took a screenshot of it and I posted it online, because anytime I see something cool, I’m like, “Hey, this is great. Share this.” And yours was so good, I said, “Swipe this. Just do what Chuck does.” And I had no idea who you were. I just… And then Andy Bedell, marketer at KeySmart, goes, “I know Chuck. I talk to Chuck all the time.”
Chuck Melber: Thanks Andy!
Kurt Elster: And he introduced us.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. No, I’m happy that you reached that stage in our flow and got that email, and thanks to Andy for the introduction, as well. But yeah, people love those personalized emails, man. We get a surprisingly large response rate to that email, specifically the one that you’re talking about from me, where people are either emailing me directly or emailing into support just thanking, giving commentary on the product, offering advice, just general good vibes. And I think that’s really important for brand building at the end of the day, like you want… It’s great to sell a bunch of a widget, or an item, but at the end of the day, you want a bunch of people that are passionate about your brand and your product, and those are the people that are going to help you grow the brand the best.
So, getting those positive feedback responses from people is just awesome to see, and it helps us know like, “Okay, cool. We have a bunch of brand ambassadors out there that love Nomad,” so that’s-
Kurt Elster: It is. Well, and especially for you, where a lot of what Nomad sells is, and I apologize, a lot of it is a commodity.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. No, it totally is.
Kurt Elster: Like iPhone cases are a commodity. Charging cables, commodity. But the stuff Nomad sells is really premium, and that, so that helps separate it a little bit, but certainly you’re not alone in that, but having that tremendous brand building paired with it and that brand story, and the messaging, and just like the aesthetic of it, and the customer service, because like this AirPods case when I ordered it, I think it was in April, just immediately shipped FedEx two-day from Hong Kong. I couldn’t believe it.
So, all of that combined is tremendous, and then when you’ve got brand building like that and you start to take it to a personal level, now every time you launch a new product, you have all those past customers’ attention.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. No, and it definitely proves out, like going back to the open rates on our emails and stuff. People love our email content because of the personalized touch. Personalization is such a buzzword in email marketing right now. It’s not personalization, like I know you live in Chicago, so I’m gonna send you relevant content to Chicago. No, it’s personalized in the triggers based on your purchase behavior. That proves out in the open rates we see across the board, as well as in our product launches, and just generic email sends.
Kurt Elster: So, when that email goes out, it’s plain text. How do you feel about plain text versus HTML?
Chuck Melber: I think they’re two very important pieces of the pie. And I think HTML, if you’re gonna sit down with a pizza, you should be eating three quarters HTML and maybe a quarter plain text.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay. I like it.
Chuck Melber: I think doing plain text all the time, I think too much of anything is bad, right? People are used to pretty HTML emails. There’s the very corporate looking ones, that have a top nav bar, just like if you’re on the website, versus some of the more eCom-friendly ones that are a little bit more design heavy. And people like engaging with that stuff. Admittedly, a lot of our emails are design heavy, and they look gorgeous. Shout out to our graphic designer.
Kurt Elster: They’re very pretty. And they perfectly match the site and it just gives you an overall impression of like, “This is a well-designed product.” Like in the sense that you would never… Like with Apple, where all of their branding also reflects kind of the industrial design. Nomad has done a similar thing.
Chuck Melber: We’re trying. It’s hard to do it, that’s for sure, but it’s coming together really nice. But anyhow, HTML versus plain text, I think plain text, it serves a time and a place. I don’t know if it has any effect on deliverability, as far as where it hits the inbox, but based on open rates I see from plain text, I have a feeling it might. And-
Kurt Elster: I would suspect it does.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. And then I think customers, at the end of the day, they appreciate that personal-feeling email. For example, we launched iPad Pro cases just over a month ago, sent out an HTML email. We launched on a preorder, so admittedly, people are always reticent or hesitant to do preorders and stuff, so we sent out a follow-up email as soon as they were live on the site and that was plain text. I split that into two groups of people, people who either opened the first email and people who didn’t. Blast out the plain text email and it got like a 60% open rate from the first cohort, and then I think a 40% open rate from the second one, so people… When used correctly, I think plain text does really, really well.
Kurt Elster: That’s been my experience, as well.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I try not to overdo it. I don’t want to oversaturate it. But the nice thing about it is plain text is good. It’s cool. And if you have a last minute idea or you need to do a flash sale or something, like maybe you’re sitting in your marketing meeting brainstorming on Tuesday afternoon, you’re like, “Hey, let’s do an email about XYZ.” But you don’t want to dedicate three days of design resources to it. Just do it plain text. Blast it out and see what happens. I think that’s the cool thing about email marketing, is like it’s so fleeting that you can test whatever you want whenever you want. Just don’t be afraid. Give it a shot and see what happens.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely.
Chuck Melber: That’s my favorite thing about plain text, though, is like a quick little update, like don’t spend 24 hours designing it. Just type it up and send it 10 minutes later. See how it goes.
Kurt Elster: Do you do any split testing?
Chuck Melber: Not a lot, to be honest. At least in the email space. We’ll do a little bit of split testing on send times, or actually… Sorry. Send times, I do a lot of split testing on. That’s more or less it. As far as like CTAs within the email itself, subject lines we’ll test every now and again, so we’ll… I always like testing if the emojis help at all in the subject line.
Kurt Elster: What’s the verdict?
Chuck Melber: It doesn’t seem to matter.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that seems like obvious candidates for split testing, that split testing quickly makes you realize like it is so insignificant, I would need a million people on this email list to reach statistical significance in this test.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. I think the most important thing for split testing is send time, though, and getting an idea of when your customers actually want to open your emails. That’s been a big boon for us, as well. In the past, I always thought like morning sends, let’s blast this out at like 8:00 AM local, or 7:30 AM local. I always operated between like 7:00 and 11:00 AM local time, figuring I’d catch people on their way to work, and their commute, whatever it may be, but then I ended up running a test through Klaviyo, like a 24-hour send test, to see does my theory prove out, or am I completely full of it? And it turned out I was completely full of it. Our optimal send time happens to be the evening, which has been-
Kurt Elster: Oh, no way.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. That actually helped a lot with our deliverability rates and open rates, as well. So, now I send out emails at like 7:00-ish PM, local, rather than 7:00 AM. And I’m continually testing that, and I’m not operating on a 7:00 exactly send time. I’m playing around now between like 5:00 and 10:00 PM to hone in on it, and actually the latest data is showing it’s trending even later, so 9:00 PM is what I’m starting to test with now.
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Chuck Melber: And I have no idea why that is. I just discovered that, so we’ll see if we can come up with a good theory as to why so late, but-
Kurt Elster: Hey, do you have any one-off emails you trigger in Klaviyo?
Chuck Melber: Any one-off emails? Not… Let me see real quick here. I don’t think so. I mean… Well, all right, I take that back. We have some one-off emails we send, and it’s usually product specific, so it’s like, “Did you order…” We have a titanium and a stainless steel Apple Watch band. We send a tool with it to adjust the length, so you don’t have to take it to a watch shop and have them do it. So, that one it’s like okay, the person purchased it, let’s make sure they get the communication, like this is how you adjust the tool yourself, so that is a one-off email. That one’s not revenue driving, it’s just customer service experience-
Kurt Elster: It’s customer experience.
Chuck Melber: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: But still, that’s important for the customer experience, and that pays dividends on its own.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Exactly. And people seem into it. And then I guess another one we do is predictive next purchase within Klaviyo. I’ve been pretty into that one. I started testing that when they first launched it, and a customer lifetime, or customer re-purchase rate for us is fairly slow, because most people buy an iPhone and they don’t buy another one for two years, and they buy one case and they’re not gonna buy another case for two years.
So, when I first started testing predictive next purchase, I was testing two different styles of it. One for people who have made one purchase over all time, and then one for people who have made two or more purchases over all time. And the one-time purchaser predictive next purchase just did not go well at all. I think just because their data was so limited for those folks, so I ultimately turned that one off. But the one for two-plus buyers, that one is awesome. It’s been a really, really nice flow to have running, driving a lot of incremental revenue. I’m using that now rather than the like, “Happy anniversary, thanks for being a Nomad for one year.” I know a lot of people like those emails, but I’ve gotten rid of that in favor of the predictive next purchase, just because I think-
Kurt Elster: Have you ever tried the birthday email flow, where you ask them their birthday and then you send them-
Chuck Melber: No. We actually just had a conversation about that not too long ago and ultimately decided no, we’re not gonna do that. I don’t know. It feels a little hokey. It’s cute. It feels good.
Kurt Elster: So, this is what… I agree with you, but if it makes sense for the brand, and especially lifestyle brands, I think it makes more sense. So, it might make sense for Nomad. But what’s interesting about it is it does better than you’d think, because it’s reliant on the person putting in their birthday, so by virtue of them putting in their birthday, only the people who are interested get the birthday flow email.
Chuck Melber: That’s a good point.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s kind of they’re self-selecting. And so, it actually… I bet it would work better than you’d think.
Chuck Melber: That’s a good point. I might have to circle back on that. Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I like the… The only pain with the birthday flow email is like you have to have a system to get them to put their birthday in, and the easiest way is just to be like in the order confirmation, like as part of your post-purchase sequence, “Hey, we got you something for your birthday, but you gotta tell us where to send it first.” And then you just have them, like you add birthday as a field in the subscriber preferences, and then you’re like… The call to action is really just they go update their subscriber preferences.
Chuck Melber: That’s a cool idea. I think it’d be really awesome if like… For a consumable brand. If you could get their… If it’s a post-purchase thing, you get their birthday, you sell bone broth, whatever it may be. Don’t even send them an email on their birthday. Just send them a free package of a free thing. You already have their address. You already know what their birthday is. I think that’d be amazing from a consumer experience or customer experience.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, that’s really good, like a literal gift, like a surprise gift.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Any of the subscription services should be doing something like that, like if you have a sock club, cool. Send them a pair of socks. Shave club? Send them a razor.
Kurt Elster: That’s brilliant.
Chuck Melber: Especially… Oh, man. This is fun. Especially if they’re like dropped off as a customer, maybe they’ve unsubscribed or whatever it may be, then what better way to get them back to shopping with you? It’s just like, “Hey, it’s your birthday. Happy birthday. Here’s a free thing from our subscription. Do you want to come back?” I like that.
Kurt Elster: I like those. We’re coming to the end of our time together. Let me hit you with some lightning round questions.
Chuck Melber: Fire.
Kurt Elster: All right, gun to your head, you can only save one flow, all the other flows aren’t gonna make it. What’s the flow you save?
Chuck Melber: Cart abandonment.
Kurt Elster: Cart abandonment? All right. Biggest surprise in email marketing, where you’re like, “I’m 100%...” Actually, you know what? What’s your biggest failure in email marketing? Let’s go that way, where you’re like convinced this is gonna work and then it just didn’t live up to your expectations.
Chuck Melber: Honestly, I don’t know. I was gonna say biggest shock-
Kurt Elster: You’re just too busy winning.
Chuck Melber: I wish I could say that, too. I’m just not introspective enough. The biggest shock was the send time stuff. Thinking morning send times would be the way to go and then finding out no, I was totally wrong on that.
Kurt Elster: How about biggest win?
Chuck Melber: Biggest win? Cleaning-
Kurt Elster: Or biggest surprise?
Chuck Melber: Yeah. Cleaning the list was the biggest win, for sure.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I love it. And if you could add any feature to Klaviyo, we’ll do a little customer development for them. If you could add any feature to Klaviyo, what do you wish it had?
Chuck Melber: Oh, man. These aren’t lightning questions. These are in depth.
Kurt Elster: I’m just trying to come up with stuff.
Chuck Melber: No, I like it.
Kurt Elster: Like for me it would be if they added on-site personalization, because I’m already building this profile of the customer and what they do. If I could just be like… If I could remove… If I could hide elements on the site based on their behavior that I’ve stored in Klaviyo.
Chuck Melber: Oh, that’d be interesting.
Kurt Elster: That would be next level.
Chuck Melber: Like if someone only purchased Android devices, let’s only show them stuff-
Kurt Elster: Right. Exactly.
Chuck Melber: That would be really cool. I don’t know, man. I mean, the Facebook integration, that’s an old tool. That’s so rad. I’m so happy they have that now, so I can sync my segments with Facebook automatically. Their API is awesome, so I’m able to tie in different tools whenever I want, which I love. And their flow building and reporting is getting stronger and stronger.
One thing I think would be really cool is like being able to benchmark against everybody else in the industry, and not knowing-
Kurt Elster: Oh, that would be cool.
Chuck Melber: I don’t need to compare myself to Brand X directly, but similar brands. And just know, like I think I’m doing good, but am I really? Or am I doing terrible and I just don’t realize it? You know, with the lack of data it’s hard to know exactly where you measure up.
Kurt Elster: I think you’re doing great.
Chuck Melber: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: For the record. And finally, predictions for Q4. What do you think Black Friday is gonna be like this year?
Chuck Melber: Oh God. I think it’s gonna be Black November, for sure.
Kurt Elster: I heard a lot of people saying… The common thing I’m hearing is the sales are gonna start earlier, because we don’t know what’s gonna happen with supply chain.
Chuck Melber: Oh, I didn’t even think about the supply chain side of things. I’m just the past three years, it’s been trending earlier and earlier. You know, at first it was only Black Friday, then it was okay, let’s try it on Thanksgiving proper, let’s try it on Wednesday, and this year we launched Black Friday sale on Sunday before Black Friday.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. For a couple of our brands, we did that last year too, and it worked.
Chuck Melber: It’s huge. Yeah, it was amazing. So, I also noticed, anecdotally of course, was seeing a lot of sale stuff pre-Black Friday. And it’s not like teaser emails. It’s like, “This is the sale. Come shop now.” And I think capturing those consumer dollars before they get spent elsewhere, or the need to do so, is gonna force the trend to go earlier and earlier.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely.
Chuck Melber: But the fact that all the retail stores, brick and mortar stores are gonna be potentially still closed is gonna… I think there’s gonna be a big year for eCommerce sales. Not that last year wasn’t, but even more so.
Kurt Elster: No, fingers crossed. I think you’re right and I hope that is the case. But I think we should probably all start earlier this year than we think.
Chuck Melber: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: If someone were to go make a purchase from Nomad Goods, is there a coupon code they could use? Is there like a welcome code?
Chuck Melber: Yeah. So no, we don’t have a welcome code, but for the podcast, I will make you all a 20% off full price, in stock items code. So, if it’s a preorder or backorder, the code won’t apply. And the code will be UNOFFICIAL.
Kurt Elster: I’m putting it in the show notes. Use code UNOFFICIAL for 20% off in stock goods until October 1st.
Chuck Melber: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Got it. Cool. That’s very kind of you.
Chuck Melber: I’ll make that up for you.
Kurt Elster: And if someone wanted to learn more about Chuck Melber or connect with you, where can they go? Or do you just want them to leave you alone?
Chuck Melber: No, feel free to hit me up.
Kurt Elster: You don’t need the tech demos.
Chuck Melber: Yeah. No sales pitches, but if you want to chat about marketing or anything like that, please feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. I think it’s just Chuck Melber Jr. Always happy to chat. I honestly love chatting with marketers in other verticals, just because I’ve been in the consumer electronics space for so long that talking with someone in apparel, or backpacks, or I don’t know, sunglasses, anything else, it’s always a, refreshing, and then b, just forces you to take a new look on things that will help educate myself. Hopefully, it’s a win-win conversation kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: I love it. That’s a great way to look at it. A rising tide lifts all ships.
Chuck Melber: Exactly. But as far as LinkedIn goes, it’s LinkedIn/ChuckMelber.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Yeah. Connect with Chuck. He’s a super cool guy. Chuck, thank you for doing this. This was incredibly valuable.
Chuck Melber: Oh, it’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate you having me on. Like I said, I love talking about marketing, so it’s been a true pleasure. Thank you very much, Kurt.