w/ Laura Palladino, BOOM! & oVertone
What makes a store more than a marketplace but a community? The answer might be sitting in your inbox. With insights from Laura Palladino, we explore how the right email strategy can turn one-time buyers into lifelong customers. In this episode, we demystify the elements that make an email campaign truly resonate.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
10/3/2023
Kurt Elster: Let’s try and switch this up. What if I read this intro like a local news anchor? Ever wonder why some stores seem to connect so well with their customers that sales just keep rolling in? The answer could be in your inbox. All right, that was pretty good. All right, so today we’ve got Laura Palladino, who I met face to face recently in New York and enjoyed quite a bit but was so impressed by her approach and her email knowledge, I said, “You gotta come on my show. We have to talk email. You gotta teach me about this.”
She’s the Director of Engagement and Loyalty for two major Shopify brands: BOOM By Cindy Joseph and oVertone Haircare, and of course, I’ve had the honor of working on both of those sites with our agency, but she’s also a bit of an educator. She’s a course creator for Smart Marketer. That’s where I met her. And a public speaker, as well. And so, Laura and her team manage collectively… Laura, what is it? One and a half million email subscribers?
Laura Palladino: Yeah. Around there. And growing every day.
Kurt Elster: Quite a few. And so, if you’re a Shopify merchant, email marketing, this is not just a nice to have. It is a must have. This is table stakes. And in today’s episode, we’re gonna dive into all things email marketing. Laura is gonna tell us about what email flows we gotta have. We’re going into Black Friday. How to use content wisely in email. And of course, those insider tips that are always game changers. When you’re already doing the work, familiar with email and Klaviyo, and then someone says that one thing where you’re like, “Oh, that’s the part I’m missing.” So, Laura, welcome. How you doing?
Laura Palladino: Yeah. Thanks. Excited to be here. I’m doing good. Thank you.
Kurt Elster: I am thrilled to have you. How did you get into email marketing in the first place?
Laura Palladino: It’s a funny story. I actually kind of tripped and fell and landed here. I have no background in marketing, or email marketing, or any type of digital marketing in general. I had no background in it at all. I actually met Ezra Firestone because my husband and I own a martial arts gym. We own a jiu-jitsu gym. And he moved into the area and started training with us. He trains jiu-jitsu. So, he found us, started training with us, and at the time I was working at Cracker Barrel as a server. I was a server, I was a cook, I was a massage therapist, I was a Zumba instructor. I was doing all the different things at the time. I want to say I was like 24 years old or so. No, I definitely was a little bit older. Maybe 26, 27.
And he said, “Hey, do you enjoy working at Cracker Barrel?” And that seemed like a silly question to me. I didn’t really enjoy working there. You know, I was doing it for the money. And he said, “You know, I have this brand. Are you interested in learning eCommerce or digital marketing?” And you know, I wasn’t doing anything serious at the time, and so I said, “Sure. I’ll give it a shot.” Started in customer service. Worked my way up to learning about social media managing, and content marketing, and then eventually ended up doing all of the emails for BOOM By Cindy Joseph, and it kind of took off from there, and I’ve been in that realm ever since.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like you were in the right place, in the right time, an opportunity came along, and you said, “Yes, please. I’ll give that a try.”
Laura Palladino: That’s exactly what happened, so I’m very grassroots, homegrown, started from the bottom now I’m here kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: For sure. And that’s… You know, learning through experience, trial by fire, in quite the organization such as Ezra’s, really quite an incredible way to go. Yeah. You went from… You got coached up. Learned on the job. And now you’re teaching it.
Laura Palladino: Yes. Which is pretty cool.
Kurt Elster: And so, from your perspective, you were an outsider who came in, and so I think you’ve got a unique perspective here. Why should Shopify merchants care about email marketing?
Laura Palladino: Because if you do it right, it equals about 30% of your revenue. It should equal about 30% of your revenue. It’s really a great… I think it’s one of the best ROIs you can achieve in digital marketing. And it really gives you a way to connect with your customers in a way that most platforms do not. You can really kind of drive the experience here, right? Someone is signing up, saying, “Hey, I want to hear from you on any platform.” Facebook’s gonna… You know, there’s an algorithm there. Instagram, there’s an algorithm there. All these social platforms, there’s an algorithm there. Ads, you’re gonna have to pay for. There’s an algorithm there, right?
Email is really the one spot that you can kind of deliver the content in a way that you see best fit for your customers. So, as a digital marketer, caring about email, I think it’s one of the best things you can do for your brand to build that kind of community that really turns you from a business to a brand.
Kurt Elster: And we’ve got that owned channel, where now we’re taking it… Just because we have the person’s email and we have their permission to talk to them, now we call it the… I love that Klaviyo coined this term, owned channel, right? Because if I’m on a social media platform, I’m on some other platform, really I’m at that platform’s mercy. Whereas, email is a protocol, right? If I have the list and the domain name to send from, that’s that. The actual… Klaviyo, Send Lane, Mailchimp, Shopify, however I’m sending those emails, that’s just a tool. I like email lists a lot for that reason.
And it’s one on one, but it’s one to many. We can automate it. And it help… We can leverage this in other ways, as well.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. There’s also a lot of personalization we can do with email.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. Good point. You’re right.
Laura Palladino: In a way that you can’t do.
Kurt Elster: Social media, you really can’t personalize to the person.
Laura Palladino: Right.
Kurt Elster: That was redundant. Personalize to the person.
Laura Palladino: Still made sense.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, certainly you know what I was talking about. Okay. When we talk about email, I send email campaigns. Once a week, every Tuesday, people are getting the Tuesday newsletter from me. The Ecom Recon report. I gave it a branded name. I thought that was cool. But a lot of when we talk about email, the advice, what we go over is email flows. Email marketing automation. For people who are new to it, can you give us just a simple explanation of what email flows are? Remind us.
Laura Palladino: Simplest explanation of what an email flow is is it’s automating your recurring conversations. So, things that are happening over and over again, right? Someone’s placing an order. You want to talk to them. Someone’s abandoning their cart. You want to talk to them. Someone’s signing up for your newsletter. You want to talk to them. These are things that you’re not gonna do on a campaign level. You’re going to put them in a flow so when these actions are triggered, it's happening automatically. You don’t have to be on 24/7. That’s the simplest explanation of an email flow. It’s just automating things that are happening over and over again so you can speak to your customers any time of day when they’re on.
Kurt Elster: Right. With an email campaign, it’s the trigger is send it at this time and maybe that time is right now.
Laura Palladino: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And it’s gonna be to a bunch of people. Versus email flow is send it to one person at a time based on some trigger, but we can get really clever with the triggers.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. Which makes it a lot of fun.
Kurt Elster: What do you think? What’s the breakdown as far as effort, time, emails sent? I don’t know how you want to quantify it, but what’s the split between standard email campaigns and email flows maybe in your work?
Laura Palladino: You know, so campaigns, we’re sending specifically at BOOM, we send about three a week. Three pieces of content a week. We’re trying to stay top of mind with our customers, with our subscribers, and flows, we have a ton of flows live, right? But one requires more day-to-day work than the other.
So, when I was setting up all of our flows, I would say a lot of my time went into the flows. A lot of my time went into testing the types of content that we have in there to really optimize our click rates, our open rates within our flows. And then the campaigns, our copy team is spending a lot of time on the campaigns. My team specifically spends a lot of time building the campaigns and scheduling them out. So, I would say most of our day-to-day work is spent in the campaigns. If you’re talking about setting them up, sending them out, working with the team, trying to figure out the schedule, things like that.
And then once a week or so, every other week, I’m going in and I want to spend an entire day deep diving into these flows. So, it really depends, I think, on what’s going on. So, if there’s Black Friday Cyber Monday going on, a lot of our time is being spent in the campaigns. But before Black Friday Cyber Monday, I would almost say it leans more towards flows because we want them set up for when we go live.
So, it’s really an ebb and flow as to what’s getting more attention.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, that makes sense, because what’s nice about the email flows is they’re set it and forget it to a point. Obviously, you don’t want to ignore it forever, but once it’s set up and running, it’ll just keep running on its own. Whereas with the email campaign, each one is one and done. It’s sent and that’s it. Now I gotta go make another one the next time I want to send one out.
Laura Palladino: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Generally, what we see people do is focus on the flows first, because once I have that figured out, now they’re just running. And then on top of that, I’m gonna do my email campaigns. So, what are the top three email flows? If you gotta pick, like, “These are the must haves. I don’t care what your store is, these are the three you gotta get working.”
Laura Palladino: Yeah, so when we’re talking eCommerce specifically, the top three flows that absolutely will be driving really most of your revenue from automations are gonna be your welcome flow, so people sign up for your email list or the popup on your site, you’re talking to them there. Your cart abandonment flow, so someone adds something to your cart, they filled out their email address. You’re gonna talk to them a little bit there if they don’t complete their order. And then your post-purchase flow. This flow is one of my favorites and I think a super, super important one, because after someone buys from you, you have an opportunity to create a long-term relationship. And the post-purchase flow is really one of my favorites, so those are the top three. Your welcome flow, your cart abandon, and your post-purchase flow that every eCommerce business should have live and optimized, for sure.
Kurt Elster: I agree with that. And the welcome flow, I think that’s the one where we really see people skip it, and they really shouldn’t. So, could you walk through? Welcome flow, we’re assuming this is for a new subscriber. Someone who visited the site. You’ve got that popup that’s like, “Get 15% off.” They sign up for that and they get their coupon, but then there needs to be more emails that come after that in a sequence. What kind of welcome emails are your go-to? What are you putting in a welcome flow?
Laura Palladino: Yeah, so BOOM’s welcome flow specifically is pretty long. We’ve tested it so many times and we… I think we have like 12 emails in our welcome flow. It’s pretty long. But it doesn’t have to be for every eCom business, right? The top emails in your welcome flow are going to be one, the initial welcome email. Hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s a little bit about us. Maybe sending them over to your other channels for a little bit of omnichannel presence. Send them over to your Facebook, your YouTube, wherever else you are on the internet for them to kind of engage in there, as well.
And then we want to say, “Hey,” if you offered that 10% off, that 15% off, whatever offer you offered on that popup, you’re gonna give that. This is what we promised. And then I love to pepper in additional content. So, either more about the values of our brand, or what they can expect from us from signing up to our email list. “Hey, we’re gonna deliver you a piece of content every week, or we’re gonna give you information every week on new fun things.” Ask them what their preferences are. This is a great spot, the welcome flow, to ask them if you have set up an email preferences, once a month, or maybe they only want sales and discounts, or if you have a lot of SKUs, if they’re only interested in one or two specific types of product. Finding that out here is a really great flow to do that in because they are expressing initial interest, right? They signed up for your email list.
And then peppering in things about our product and pre-sell type content we love to do in the welcome flow, as well. So, not pushing the sale yet in this pre-sell, I mean in this welcome flow. If they haven’t placed an order let’s say by the fourth or fifth email, we’re really giving them just content to engage with us. “Hey, this is a little bit about our Boom Sticks. This is a little bit about our mascara. Here’s some ambassador…” So, we have some ambassador content in there, some customers that are showing how-tos of our product. So, it’s really a great opportunity to showcase your best content and offer some education on your brand in the welcome flow.
Kurt Elster: So, we want that combo. We want to stay top of mind. One thing that I’ve always wondered. How important is the content? Is just having the email where it’s got my brand name as the sender, it’s got the subject line, is that by itself the magic? Is the content just an excuse to get that reminder into their inbox that is… You know, an inbox acts as a to-do list for so many people. How important is the content I think is the question.
Laura Palladino: I think the content is super important. And the reason I say this is because I’ve tested so many times, right? I’ll test an ambassador… So, we’re doing the same thing. We’re sending from BOOM By Cindy Joseph, our subject line or our preview text is not the same, obviously, with every email, but very similar. Our tone is the same. Our tonality is the same within all of these. And then the content I’ve tested so many different times. You know, having a button on top versus the button on the bottom, a bright colored button, and then the content itself, an ambassador versus a product specific focused piece of content. I think it really does matter what you’re speaking to them about. Not just giving yourself a reason to speak to them, but really putting in the thought of what value you are offering to your subscribers in these emails.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, if we’re thinking about in terms of how does this benefit the subscriber, why should they be bothered to open this, read it, and click? What kind of content typically lends itself to that versus soggy content that’s just like, “Hey, you visited our store. Save some money. Click here.”
Laura Palladino: Yeah. And listen, those emails are important, as well. Just tossing those in, like, “Hey, there are some people that just want to buy, and they don’t want to hear your content.” But a lot of people need… You know, they need more time. They need more touch points to go ahead and convert. So, we want to make sure we’re offering high value content. And a lot of times what we’ll do is kind of vet our content through our campaigns for our flows. So, we’ll send out a piece of content that we think will resonate with our current subscribers, and if it does really well, so it gets a high open rate, a high click rate, maybe a high placed order rate if that was the goal of that piece of content, if it does really well we’ll then go back and say, “Hey, let’s look in our welcome flow. Let’s look in our post-purchase flow and see where we can fit that in here. Is there a piece of content that’s not performing that well?” And toss it in there.
Kurt Elster: Well, let’s switch gears. Give me examples of flow content that just nails it, where you’re like… This surprised you or you’re really proud of it.
Laura Palladino: Yeah, so like I said before, we do a lot of vetting our content for our flows with our campaigns. With our current engaged subscribers, we see what resonates with them, right? So, we’ll go ahead and put that in the flow, and what we did recently was our… We have like four different Boom Sticks, they’re called. They’re like blush cosmetic sticks. They’re four different colors. We’re constantly coming out with new ones. And our copy team wrote a blog that was how to find your color, right? We have these four different colors. How do you find your color? And it crushed it. I mean, this piece of content did so, so well in campaigns that I was like, “Okay, let’s find a spot for it in our flows.”
Tossed it in the abandoned… Sorry, I tossed it in actually one of our welcome flows. Tossed it in our welcome flow and we were able to double our click rate on that email just by changing out that piece of content. So, things like that, educational pieces of content really perform, like outperform a lot of our emails in these flows. Those educational, product-specific, really deep dives on how the product works, or information about the products in general and what you’re selling, and some social proof in there.
Kurt Elster: So, this makes a lot of sense. It’s educational content that supports the purchase decision. It’s like essentially you’re busting objections, common objections, with FAQs, but in this very helpful, customer support oriented way. That’s very clever. Like, “Hey, we kind of know you’re thinking about it, and maybe the thing that stopped you was you weren’t sure which color. Well, here’s our guide on how to pick that.” And when I go through that, okay, now I’m more invested. I trust the brand more. And I’m more interested and I’m confident in my purchase.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. And that’s something we do all the time. We’ll reach out to our customer support team and say, “Hey, what questions are coming in?” And see what we can turn into content for our… Both email campaigns, but for our flows, as well.
Kurt Elster: So, once I have this one piece of content, I can make this work all kinds of different ways. You know, flow, email, on site, social campaign, if I know it works, it will work in a variety of touch points.
Laura Palladino: Absolutely. And I-
Kurt Elster: I can kind of get off this treadmill of like having to come up with original stuff constantly.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. That’s one of my favorite things to do, is find something to recycle, you know? Work smarter, not harder.
Kurt Elster: For sure. All right, so abandoned cart emails, I think when people think of email flows, like this is the one they really obsess over, because you get a lot of revenue with it and it’s so easy to quantify, and you got some revenue FOMO, right? Where you see all the abandoned carts, you know how much potential revenue people have added to carts and then left… Just if only they would click purchase. Tell me about abandoned cart flows. Give me your abandoned cart secrets.
Laura Palladino: My abandoned cart secrets. You know, they’re not secrets, I don’t think. It’s really you gotta set it up, and you can get really in depth with abandoned carts. You can go super personalized with what are they abandoning. Is it skin care products for BOOM, specifically? For oVertone, maybe it’s the pinks or the blues. You can get really, really granular with your abandoned cart. You can create a bunch of different abandoned carts depending on how many SKUs you have and get personalized with maybe this is their second or third order and they’re abandoning the cart. Why are they doing that? But I like to stay simple, and we might eventually down the road get a little bit more… might piece it out a little bit and do our skin care, versus our cosmetics, versus body care, and do separate abandoned carts for that.
But I like to keep it super simple for abandoned cart. So, abandoned carts for us, we have about… I want to say seven emails in our abandoned cart. So, it’s a little bit shorter. We’re trying to get right to the point here, right? First off, we’re just saying, “Hey, you left this in your cart. We can’t hold it for you too long but we’re gonna hold it for you for right now. Go ahead and shop.” And we get a lot of conversions from just that. Hey, this is your reminder. Go get what you left in your cart.
And what we like to do in abandoned cart is what we call a coupon ladder. So, the next email is gonna be like, “Hey, you have a special offer just for you. 10% off. Go shop now. What’s in your cart? Here.” And a link back to their cart, because that is something Klaviyo can do instead of sending them just back to the store, which I think is a really important part here. Instead of sending them just back to the store and saying, “Hey, complete your order,” we’re going to put in a link there to their cart, so it’s super easy. We’re breaking down barriers here for them to hit that purchase button.” Right back to the cart, it’s filled with what they already have in it.
So, if they don’t purchase there, we’re saying, “Hey, reminder. You have this 10%.” So, we’re not going up yet, but we’re saying, “Hey, reminder, you have this 10% off coupon. Use it before it expires.” Then we’ll give it a couple days. I want to say… I’m not looking at the flow right now, but I want to say it’s like three days or so. We’ll give them a couple days, sit on that, see if they convert.
And then, finally, we’ll offer our best discount. A discount that we don’t offer anywhere else. We’ll say, “Hey, just for you, 24 hours only, 15% off of your entire order. You will not see this discount anywhere else for BOOM By Cindy Joseph.” So, really using that discount ladder, and then we’ll also say, “Hey, last chance to place your order.” And in this flow, we are excluding anyone who placed an order already, right? So, they’re not getting these emails. They’re not getting 15% off if they purchased without a coupon. They’re not getting 15% off if they purchased at the 10% coupon. So, want to make sure we’re excluding people appropriately throughout this flow, as well.
But yeah, offering, saying, “Hey, this is your cart. Go get it.” And then that discount ladder has worked really, really well for us.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s so straightforward and simple. At this point, customers are more sophisticated, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’ll abandon a cart just to see what’s gonna happen and see what they’re gonna send me, because I’m like… I’m looking for the excuse. I’m like, “I want to buy it. You just gotta give me a win here, man.” And so, if I get that discount, I’m like, “All right, that’s it. You gave me my cookie and now I will purchase.”
And in the case of the discount ladder, you’re really playing an interesting game, where you’re protecting profit. Saying, “All right, maybe this’ll get them to purchase.” And you’re starting at zero, right? The reminder is really the zero percent discount. Then like 5, 10, 15, and then, “All right. Well, this for real is the last one.” And then the last chance reminder. “Hey, this is going to expire.”
I think that… Tried and true. I think it works. We talked about welcome flow. We talked about abandoned cart flow. Are there extra email flows that could boost sales? I’ve seen surprising success from just browse abandonment flow.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. So, cart abandon and browse abandon, if you said, “Give me 4 of those flows that you need to have live,” I would have put browse abandon in there. I think that they complement each other. The difference with browse abandon is obviously you have to have their email already in order for Klaviyo to recognize that they have been browsing your store. Browse abandon I love because this one you can add in some dynamic content blocks and show them exactly what they were looking at, you can talk about that product a little bit so if someone was browsing a… Let’s say a rose nude Boom Stick for BOOM. We can show them a couple different ambassadors that have used it, a couple different how tos. For oVertone, if they were browsing a specific color of hair, we can show them different people who have used that color on them or offer them the try on. We have this little try-on app. We can show them that.
So, browse abandon, you could be a little bit more directly personalized, which I really, really love. But a couple other really cool flows that we’ve implemented are one, our happy birthday flow. So, in our welcome flow, we ask them to provide their birthdays. This goes in with that email that I was talking about asking them for their preferences and things like that. You can also say, “Hey, we love to celebrate birthdays and we’re gonna offer you something special on your birthday. Give us that birthday here.” And that’s a property you can put in right in Klaviyo and then trigger that happy birthday flow.
This happy birthday flow is one of our top performing flows underneath those top three that I talked about, the welcome, the post purchase, and the abandoned cart. So, a happy birthday flow performs really well for us, and it’s really just offering them… We offer them a 15% off coupon. We tested this. We said, “Hey, maybe we’ll offer $10 off, 10% off, 15% off.” The 15% off performed the best for us, so we stuck with that one, but a happy birthday flow, super, super simple. There’s three emails in this flow. We’re saying, “Hey, your birthday is on its way. Let’s celebrate early.” A week before their birthday, offer them 10%. Then we remind them that they have this birthday code if they didn’t use it. And then on their actual birthday, there’s two separate emails. One, we want to wish them a happy birthday. If they placed their order already, we’re still sending them the email saying, “Hey, it’s your birthday. Happy birthday. If you purchased your BOOM, we’d love to see what you’re doing with it.” A little bit of call for a piece of user-generated content. Hey, if you’re enjoying your BOOM, share it with us. We’d love to collect user-generated content in any way we can, so that’s a really great spot to do it.
And then if they haven’t placed their order yet, we’re again reminding them of that coupon and still saying happy birthday to them. So, really simple, but really high, impactful flow, because again, we’re creating that community. We want to create a relationship with our subscribers, with our customers, and this is a really simple and really caring way to do that, is wishing someone a happy birthday.
Kurt Elster: No, that birthday flow, we only have a handful of clients that run it, and I remember setting it up for the first time for Hoonigan, just sells lifestyle apparel, and it is still in play today largely unchanged from when I first set it up probably five years ago, and because it just works. One of the better performing flows, so we just leave it alone.
Laura Palladino: Yeah. I think this is in business and in life, I think people underestimate the impact you can have by just wishing someone a happy birthday.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They appreciate it. It’s just… You know, you’re being human.
Laura Palladino: You know? Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Any other flows you love?
Laura Palladino: Yeah, so one of the other ones that I love is the win back flow. So, this one’s a pretty high… And this one’s a good way to pick up… I don’t want to say lost revenue, because it’s not like the abandoned cart, where someone is very obviously placing something in their cart and then… You know, if you’re not purchasing for whatever reason it may be. But a win back flow is kind of reigniting past customers. So, what we do in the win back flow is the trigger of this flow is someone places an order. And then we set a time for 60 days, and then the filter on this flow is has placed zero orders since then, right?
So, they placed an order, 60 days have gone by, they haven’t placed another order yet. We’re then sending an email telling them, just giving them an opportunity to place an order, right? We’re saying, “Hey, we miss you. Here’s 10% off to place an order.” So, it’s a way for us to kind of bring back expired customers, people that may have not placed an order, or didn’t place an order in the last 60 days but have placed an order in the past.
So, yeah, the win back or a re-engagement flow, those ones are great little bonus flows that if you have the other three set up, good, ready to go, those are fun ones to add into your mix, as well.
Kurt Elster: So, with these flows, you mentioned testing. Give us some tips on auditing them, improving them, making sure that they’re working to their fullest.
Laura Palladino: Yeah, so I think once a month at bare minimum we’re looking at the bigger picture. We’re looking at how are our lists growing, how are our segments, our main segments, so for campaigns, for example, we send to our engaged list. Is that growing? We’re looking at the overall email flow revenue. Is that staying consistent throughout the month? Has it dipped? Is there a reason for it dipping? Things like that. And the reason we’re doing that is a big reason is to catch any little things, right? So, there was one time where we noticed the list that our popup contributes to is… We call it our hot list, right? These are people that are hot, they’re ready to purchase. We call it our hot list. So, when our popup comes up, says, “Give us your email,” we call that our hot list.
So, I was doing our monthly analytics and I noticed that that list was not growing, and it had nothing to do with our emails. It had to do with our popup. The rules were competing with each other, and our popup was actually not showing to as many people as it typically would. So, at bare minimum, we are looking at our numbers monthly to catch anything like that, to see, to make sure all of our flows are performing well, and that’s also to catch anything outside of Klaviyo, right? So, it might not be anything with our email specifically. The problem, it might have to do another app.
And then beyond that, I’m looking at one flow per quarter. I look to go in and really say, “Hey, is there any content that we can switch out? Is there anything that’s outdated? How are our KPIs for this specific flow? Is there anything we want to add? Is there anything we want to remove? Is there any information that we’ve learned?” Because this landscape is changing constantly, right? “Is there anything information that we learned that can optimize this flow? Or maybe this flow, is there any way that we can give some love to this flow?” Essentially, I’m doing that once a month to a specific flow. I’m picking one to dive into and seeing what we can do with it there. I’m sorry, once a quarter I’m doing that.
So, once a month we’re looking at the big numbers. Once a quarter, I’m picking one flow to optimize individually.
Kurt Elster: I think one of the interesting things I’ve noticed about probably the BOOM emails specifically, they create a sense of community. But really, it’s just talking to me, to one person. How do you use email marketing to build that sense of community?
Laura Palladino: Specifically for BOOM, when we talk about email marketing or any of our marketing, really, social media marketing, we are at a bigger picture talking about content marketing, right? We want to deliver our highest value content. We want to engage our subscribers in a conversation that they’re already having. So, for BOOM, that might be… So, our demographic there is women over 50 experiencing aging in this society. They might be seeing wrinkles, their hair might be going grey, they’re being told in a way… And this has definitely gotten better over the years, especially just in my position, but they’re being told as a woman aging in society that you’re losing your value. That’s just like a general thing that we’re told here.
So, at BOOM, we want to say that you are valuable, and this goes to our higher level, kind of our values as a brand. We want to tell these women they are valuable. If you want to let your hair go silver, we support you. If you want to dye your hair, we support that. Your wrinkles aren’t ugly, they’re beautiful. They’re a sign that you’ve lived your life, right? So, everything, every piece of content that we’re sending out has that kind of energy to it. So, we’re creating… We’re selling moisturizers, right? And it’s not this crazy gonna age you backwards kind of thing. It’s olive oil, it’s shea butter, it’s very simple stuff. But where the community comes in is the conversation we’re creating around our products, and the values, and the conversations that go with it.
And we’re using email marketing to deliver those values and that conversation, and to have that conversation with each other.
Kurt Elster: It’s smart. It’s so smart. What do you think the biggest mistake is that you see? Obviously, when you get email marketing, it’s probably different when you’re opening it, since you see how the sausage is made. What’s the biggest mistake you see these brands, these Shopify merchants making with their email marketing?
Laura Palladino: Yeah. The thing I see the most is trying to put too much in an email. So, one thing I see a lot, and like you said, I do look at email a little bit differently than I think the average person would. But one thing I see a lot are these long emails with… I mean, like 20 different calls to action. One specifically that’s coming to mind is a fashion brand that I follow and it’s like there’s dresses, and there’s sweaters, and there’s shoes, and there’s this, and there’s this. There’s just so many options.
And a few options is okay in an email, but I think the number one mistake I see when it comes from looking at the side of the consumer is offering too many options. You almost get decision fatigue, right? There’s too much. That means I can’t choose anything. So, really narrowing it down and personalizing your email communications based on someone’s interest can have a huge, huge impact.
Kurt Elster: I believe it. I mean, increasing that simplicity, relevance, the goal is to not make them think about what they should do because the easiest choice is, “I’m just gonna archive this email.”
Black Friday, coming up. It’s around the corner. Any tips for people who are eager to get started with their Black Friday email marketing?
Laura Palladino: It’s going to depend on the capacity and it’s do you have one email person? Are you the everything? Are you the business owner, and the email person, and the social person? It’s gonna depend on your bandwidth here. But one thing I saw that we did last year that performed really well was really mails cohesive with our Black Friday branding. So, we didn’t just leave our flows as they were typically. We hopped in, we changed some email headers, we changed some colors in there, we changed some of the content all to be kind of related back to what our Black Friday Cyber Monday sales page was looking like, what it was sounding like, the communications that we were coming across with.
And that helped our email, so our post-purchase flow, for example, spoke more towards the seasonality, towards our Black Friday Cyber Monday. We like to implement a two-time buyer flow during… This is a flow that only happens during Black Friday Cyber Monday. When someone places an order during that sale, we will, “Hey, you placed one order with us. Get our best discount ever if you placed a second order with us.” And offer them 20% off. And this is the biggest discount we ever offer. And that flow really performs for us every single Black Friday Cyber Monday. Just implementing an additional flow saying, “Hey, you placed one order. Place a second order for a bigger discount.” Now, that flow does piss some people off, because they placed this first order, and let’s say they got a free gift with their order, or they got 10% off, whatever we decide our sales to be for that Black Friday, and then we’re offering them another big discount. So, it does piss some people off.
But it also makes us a lot of money.
Kurt Elster: That they’ve got another discount? Or they’re mad that the perception is like, “Well, I should have been able to get a discount on my previous order and I missed out.”
Laura Palladino: So, the wording here matters, right? What you’re saying in this email matters a lot. You can’t just be like, “Place a second order. Get this big discount.” Because yes, exactly. People are like, “Well, shouldn’t I have gotten that big discount with my first order?” And you know, it’s few and far between, but just a side little note to prepare your customer service team with some sort of macro to handle that. But it does… It’s such a high performing flow for us during the holidays.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I believe it. I know Ezra has talked a lot about that one and how powerful that is to extend customer lifetime value in a short period. So, you have done some course creation. You are now an educator, a teacher. How many courses do you have with Smart Marketer now?
Laura Palladino: I did a past version of Smart Email Marketing. John Grimshaw took over the most recent version of that. I did Smart Social. And most recently, Smart eCom. Yeah, there’s four that I have in the Smart Marketer ecosystem.
Kurt Elster: And which is the one we should check out?
Laura Palladino: Smart Email Marketing is going to give you… I don’t want to say the biggest bang for your buck because our courses are fantastic. We go in depth. And what’s great about it is we all do this on a day-to-day basis, right? We’re not teaching it and not actually being hands on, which I think is fantastic. But Smart Email Marketing, there’s just so much to it and so much value you can get from setting up a fantastic email system.
Kurt Elster: I’ve seen it. I know it. I believe it. Laura, this has been practical, and educational, and I appreciate it. Laura, thank you so much.