Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there, it’s Catherine Langman back with another episode of The Productpreneur Success Podcast. And we’re into February now, and so that means we’ve pretty much just wrapped up a pretty crazy holiday season. Some of you guys might’ve been super busy through January whether with summer promotions in the Southern hemisphere or clearance sales, perhaps, or back to school campaigns, whatever it is for you. Some of you might’ve been a little bit quiet. I know in my business, whenever it was school holidays the revenue would dip, and then when school went back things would go a bit crazy. So you might just be gearing back up into the new year. So for whatever stage that you’re at, though, really the stores that I saw making the absolute most of the holiday sales season were definitely the ones who made the most of their email lists.
Catherine Langman:
So this is why this is one of the reasons why I really want now to be the time that you start putting a plan in place for this year, so that come the next crazy sales season at the end of this year, you are in a really, really good place. Now, the reason why I really, really want to dive into building a lucrative email list is because of all of this Apple iOS business that has been going on. And so if you’ve been listening to this podcast or reading any of my emails or blogs, or following me on social media, you will know that Apple has been rolling out some big updates to their platform that are going to have, or are already having, a really big impact on other platforms like Facebook advertising, but also any other platform like Google that uses pixel tracking on the platform as well.
Catherine Langman:
And obviously you can go and listen to recent episodes and read some of my content to find out how to go about moving forward with your Facebook ads in light of that big update, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about in this episode. But what we are going to talk about is really focusing on how to grow a lucrative email list. And one of the biggest reasons why we need to do this, and certainly this is not coming to me now just because of this impact on Facebook ads, I’ve always been an advocate for building your email list, and I’ve banged on about it for years, but the biggest reason that everyone needs to be on it now is we need to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to owning our customer data and our subscriber data and our audience, basically.
Catherine Langman:
We can’t just rely on other platforms to have our back when it comes to that audience information because other platforms change things on a dime, and then we are left scrambling and trying to mitigate the impact of those changes. So of course, that will be happening right now for many of you. So let’s turn our mind to growing a lucrative email list to fuel your e-commerce store. And I guess the first thing that I really wanted to touch on here was the fact that email marketing actually does still really, really work. And I know over the recent years that a lot of potentially younger people, I don’t know, I don’t feel like I’m that old, but anyway, I guess I’ve been in marketing for a couple of decades now, but there’s a lot of people over the last few years that have really formed the opinion that email marketing is old and it’s dead and it doesn’t work because people get slammed with so many emails in their inbox and nobody’s going to open them or click on them, and so what’s the point? We may as well just focus on Facebook ads, for instance.
Catherine Langman:
But the thing is, email marketing still really, really works even now. And in fact, the return on investment for email marketing is still sitting at around 3,800 to 4000%. So 38… 3,800. Let me get my numbers out. So, it is pretty, pretty high, right? And I think that in fact, if you adopt the kind of strategy that I’m going to speak about today, the actual long-term value that you can obtain from building your email list the right way and using it really, really well will actually give you an even bigger return on investment because there’s just so many ways that you can build this into business and into your marketing and your sales generating efforts. It’s just amazing. But email marketing itself alone can account for somewhere between 20 and 35% of your revenue. We have clients who regularly achieve that.
Catherine Langman:
So if you’re not doing any email marketing or you’re really not doing very much, and you’re getting very, very small trickles of revenue coming from email marketing, then please know that there are ways to actually really, really improve it, the results that you’re getting from your email marketing, and just think about it once you’ve spent the time and the money to build that email list, basically from there the cost for your email marketing is so low. Having a subscription to a decent email marketing platform is about the only cost, and then of course, it’s your time or your team’s time to prepare the emails, but it’s such a low cost marketing strategy, and yet it can yield such amazing results. And as many of you who have been listening to me or reading my content for a while, you would know that I’m a big fan of automation as well, so there’s a big portion of that revenue that you can actually automate. And I love setting things up so that it’s like an automated… it’s like that automated portion is the backbone of your business, which is pretty, pretty cool.
Catherine Langman:
So how… before we get dive into the way we should be doing it, let’s maybe just touch on what so many people do poorly with email marketing. And I think that there’s a couple of bugbears that I want to highlight here that I think really a bit rubbish. The first is so many businesses literally just want to bribe you to jump on their email list and buy straight away. They don’t even give you the opportunity to look around the store. It’s like, you’re immediately hit with a pop-up opt-in form with a big discount or an incentive, some sort of a financial incentive. And it just kind of feels like, well, hang on a second. I don’t even know if I want to buy from you yet. Just give me an opportunity to look around the store first before you hit me up with that.
Catherine Langman:
And I think there are ways about offering incentives that just aren’t so in your face and cheapening as well. I think that where a lot of brands can go wrong is that their constantly discounting right from the get-go, and that does kind of cheapen your brand and it does train your audience to constantly expect a discount. And there’s certainly ways that you can go about offering incentives as well as offering value that don’t always require a discount. So, that’s my first bug bear. And then I think the second punk band that I have… Oh gosh, I just thought of another one as well. Gosh, this is a really big one. People who invite you to subscribe to a newsletter.
Catherine Langman:
I don’t know about you, but I think the last time I woke up feeling like I needed to subscribe to another newsletter was probably about 12 years ago. It’s not a term that’s really enticing, so just don’t use that word. I think it just really does not engage or invite any kind of excited action if you use that word. Obviously it is a newsletter list, right? As business owners, we need to send these sorts of communications out to our audience, but you’re just not going to use that term. People are not going to get excited if you invite them to subscribe to a newsletter. No thanks.
Catherine Langman:
But then the really, really big bug bear, and this is so easy to fall into this trap, is people who are sending discount after discount, after discount, after discount, after discount. It’s like this constant barrage of offers and incentives and invitations to shop at a discount. And I understand how enticing it can be to use those sorts of offers. It can be something that… it’s a knee-jerk reaction if you need to shift some stock or you really need to bank some cashola, the easiest and fastest thing that most people or many people think about is to send out a discount.
Catherine Langman:
Again, there are other ways that you can really prompt that immediate hit of sales without needing to use a discount, and at the end of the day, you’re going to make more money if you can avoid it as often as possible. So, if we can avoid those sorts of pitfalls and start to build our email list the right way, you’re going to put yourself in a really, really awesome position where you own your database, you own this audience and the information about this audience, you own the right to communicate to that audience, and you can make some really good money as a result.
Catherine Langman:
So how do we do it the right way? Now, I’m going to talk about a couple of different aspects to your email marketing. And the first of course is to set up the part where people actually subscribed to your list. Okay, so your email list. And so this definitely does require having some sort of form, some sort of ability to get onto your email list. So usually e-commerce stores will have a form that’s embedded in the footer of the website, and often will also use a pop-up opt-in form as well. There are certainly other ways that you can add in like running a giveaway using… I love to use a giveaway app called ViralSweep, which will host a really good looking entry form and that sort of thing. But at its most basic level, we need to have an opt-in form where somebody can actually opt into your email list.
Catherine Langman:
And so why on earth would someone do that? So often as I was saying, there’s a discount offer and that’s the simplest way to get moving. So it’s like sign up to get 10% off or 20% off or whatever the case may be and away you go. And then I suppose usually what happens next is not very much. So the customer either buys or they don’t, and their email ends up on the email list, but they don’t really hear from the business ever again until that business sends whatever newsletter they send out next, potentially the next discount. We don’t want to do that. We want to do something a little bit more engaging. We want to take a few steps so that we actually can help lead a new subscriber to that point of purchase, which not everybody’s going to buy immediately upon coming to your website or immediately upon subscribing to your email list.
Catherine Langman:
So what we can do is actually have an automated sequence of emails, so a few emails that are really designed to appeal to the types of buyers or the types of subscribers that are likely to buy from you. And at the end of the day, we kind of want to tell a little bit of a story throughout the emails in this sequence. It’s not just sending the subscriber a discount code and saying, “Here’s your discount code. Here’s a button to click here and shop now,” and then reminding them with the same content a few days later. That’s not what we’re talking about. So obviously if you are including some sort of an incentive, then you need to include that in the first… well, in each of these emails in your sequence, but you also need to include a little bit of other information that’s hopefully designed to appeal to your different sorts of customers and entice them to buy.
Catherine Langman:
And usually just in terms of consumer psychology, you’ll find that there are people that are motivated by different information, different sorts of content. And so if we can communicate to these different sorts of buyer personas with different content in each of your emails, you’re going to have a better chance of converting more of them than otherwise. So the first kind of buyer persona that you really want to appeal to is the spontaneous buyer. So this is going to be the person who just will grab something at the checkout because they see it there and it looks really good, or the sort of person who sees a really awesome outfit on Instagram and clicks and buys now without thinking about it, it’s totally spontaneous, but it’s also the sort of person who wants what’s new because it’s new and nobody else has it yet. And they really want to be the first to jump on whatever the opportunity is.
Catherine Langman:
So, that’s the kind of angle that you want to take in that first email that you send. Obviously, you also need to introduce them to your brand or your store, what are they going to find there? Why would they love what you have to sell? That sort of stuff. So that is the angle for that first email. And then… and just I guess as an aside here, I do actually advocate for using some sort of an incentive. I just prefer to find something that’s a little bit different to a discount because of that brand cheapening effect. So if you can have some sort of other incentive, like a gift with purchase. I love using gifts with purchase, especially if it’s an item that helps customers to really enjoy or get a better experience from whatever it is that they’re buying, or value packs work really well for many brands as well.
Catherine Langman:
So that’s a couple of options. Free shipping might be another one, or even just a gift voucher. Spend a hundred dollars and get a $10 gift voucher or whatever the case may be. It’s just the language is different, right? But the reason you want to have some kind of an incentive is that then you can use that offer expiring after seven days as a means for really enticing them to make a decision sooner rather than later. Okay. So we’ve got that bit out of the way. And we’ve talked about that first email. It should really kind of go for that, I want what’s new and I’m appealing to the spontaneous buyer. The second one I like to… there’s a couple of ways that you can approach the second email and it kind of depends on what you sell and who your customers are, and if there’s any particular problems or perceived risks or anything like that.
Catherine Langman:
So there’s definitely a lot of products out there where there is some sort of perceived risk around buying online. So it could be a fear that it’s not going to work or that they won’t be able to use it properly, and that was certainly the case for me with my cloth nappy diaper brand. So, we had to have some education and some risk mitigation content in there. Another business that we’ve worked with in the past, istillcallaustraliahome.com sends gifts overseas, and there’s a lot of information required around that shipping piece because they’re sending stuff overseas.
Catherine Langman:
And there’s another branch that we’ve worked with for many years is Babiators kids sunglasses, and they’re not the cheapest kid’s sunglasses. So there’s that kind of… not fear, but it’s a friction point where people need to go decide, is it worth spending that kind of money on my kid for a product that they might break or lose in five seconds flat? And so their way of mitigating that is a lost and broken guarantee. So, if there’s something like this, like a risk or a friction point that really stops people from making a purchase decision, you really need to that in your email sequence. But if there’s nothing like that going on, you might just need to have a whole heap of social proof. So, cool user generated content, customers posting on social media or reviews or testimonials, that sort of thing. So social proof really, really grabs the humanistic buyer, the people who really need to see other people loving and enjoying your stuff. Super powerful in your email sequence.
Catherine Langman:
And then the very final one that you want to use in your sequence is really about fear of missing out. I like to call these people deadline dancers. They’re literally going to make a decision when you tell them if they don’t make a decision right now, they’re going to miss out. So this is where having that incentive, the non-discounty incentive with the expiry on it can be super influential at encouraging a purchase. So that’s the way that we want to entice people onto our email list, but also to help move more of those subscribers from being subscribers into buyers. And then from there, obviously, they’re going to either buy or they’re going to sit around on your email list.
Catherine Langman:
And so there’s a few different ways that we want to go about communicating with these people. So obviously if they go on to buy, we don’t want to just go, woo-hoo, we’ve just got a customer. We want to acknowledge that to that new customer, and of course we can use some email automation there as well to thank them and welcome them as a customer. Depending on what you sell you might have more or less content in that particular email, or it might be just a standalone email, or it might be an email sequence. You might want to link them to some blogs to show people, educate people how to use stuff. I remember buying some protein shakes at the start of last year when I was really trying to get stuck into my fitness journey, and it was a really cool strategy that that particular brand used where once I purchased, they sent me this awesome thank you email, but they also linked me to some really useful articles around fitness and health and wellness and stuff like that. So, that was very cool.
Catherine Langman:
I’ve had other clients and myself in my last business, I would send some how-to video type information to train people so they knew exactly how to use the products. But then of course there’s other things like if you’re selling clothing, you probably don’t really teach need to teach people how to use the products. They probably got that down pat. So it is very dependent, of course, on what you sell. But beyond that thank you and welcome welcoming the new customer to your kind of brand family, then you’d definitely want to be hitting people up for a review or a testimonial, and you want to automate that.
Catherine Langman:
I love to use the app Stamped because it is… you’re more likely to get a review from an app like Stamped where the review request form goes in the email, the customer does not need to leave the email and go to your website and log in and try and find the product that they bought and then type a review. No one’s going to do that. They just don’t have the time or the inclusion really, it’s too hard. So with Stamped, literally you just fill out this form in the email, you hit submit and the app knows exactly where to post it on your website, which is super, super cool. And it also has the ability for the customer to upload a photo, which can then sync over to social media, and it can also automatically post on Google reviews. So you’re kind of hitting all of those awesome points all at once.
Catherine Langman:
So I’m going to link to that in the show notes, and then beyond that, we need to have something in place that is going to automate the process of enticing a first time customer to come back again. And so we can create a similar sort of sequence of emails as that new subscribers sequence, but done in a way that makes sense to someone who’s already bought once. And the reason we really want to get somebody to buy more than once is because you’re not making a huge amount of profit off a first time customer. Typically, it costs some money to win a first time customer, you’re paying for traffic, you’re paying for incentives, you might be… Well, hopefully you’re paying for somebody’s time, whether it’s your own or a team members.
Catherine Langman:
So it does cost some money to elicit a first sale, but the minute you get somebody to buy twice, they are much more likely to become ongoing repeat customers and therefore way more profitable to your business because it’s so much easier to sell to that existing customer than it is to win a new customer over. And at the end of the day, if your customer’s happy, it’s much easier for the customer to come back and buy from you as well because they’re familiar with your website, they’re familiar with your products. They know where to go to find stuff. They know it’s going to do what they want, and how to use it, and that it’ll fit and all of that kind of good stuff. So it is in their best interests to have a good experience the first time and then come back.
Catherine Langman:
Well, it’s in your best interest that they have a good experience the first time and it’s in their best interest to come back because then it’s just easy and there’s less work for them, less brain calories that they need to burn up. So we can automate all of that. But then of course, in between all of that we do want to be engaging with our growing email list on a very regular basis using email newsletter marketing, or email broadcast style marketing, whatever you want to call it. Obviously you’re not calling it a newsletter when you send it to your customers. But the reason that you really want to keep having these regular email communications going out to your list is because as your list grows, there’s going to be new products and new promotions that you’re rolling out. And there’s going to be people on your list that are going to be… might just take a while longer for them to decide to buy from you.
Catherine Langman:
I’ve got many clients that customers will sit on their email list for months and months before they decide to buy. And then they’ll just buy because they’ve been receiving some good email communications. And then in terms of the repeat purchases it might just be this new product or promotion works better for some, and that one works better fathers, or just might suit their buying cycle. So you definitely want to have the broadcast style regular emails going out as well. And in fact, I actually did an entire podcast episode, it was a really thorough training, all about email marketing and how to kind of design and craft those sorts of email marketing communications.
Catherine Langman:
So I’m going to link to that in the show notes as well so that you can go and listen to that. I don’t want to totally repeat myself, but you certainly want to plan out your emails over the year so that you are sending them weekly on average. Now there’s a little bit of a caveat with that. If you are just getting started and you have your mom, your dad, your dog, and your sister on your email list, you don’t need to send an email weekly. So obviously you want to start growing that email list first. So you might start sending them out monthly, even if it is just those people on your list, at least you start to get practice doing it. But then as your email list grows, you want to work towards doing them weekly. And once you become really, really big, we’re probably going to send it more frequently than that, two to three times a week, potentially.
Catherine Langman:
And if you want to know what size you might be doing that, just have a look around, even hit up your own inbox and see what kind of stores and brands are emailing at what sort of frequency. So just as a bit of a loose guide with how you plan out those sorts of marketing emails, typically you want to plan out four major promotions in a year, and those sorts of major promotions are either going to be new product launches or big sale promotions. So a sale promotion would be something like a clearance, end of financial year sale, or a Black Friday, Cyber Monday type sale. So you’re probably going to do one of each of those and then new product launches, or it might just be a time of year product launch.
Catherine Langman:
So it might make sense that you do… For instance, one of our clients is upontherooftop.com.au, and they sell these amazing gardening products. And of course, spring is a time of year when their audience is really going hard at it with their gardening, and so it’s a time of year product launch really. Sometimes they have new products to launch as well, and that’s really, really cool, but essentially with your emails, you really just need to have something new that you’re going to be talking about. And sometimes you’ve got to manufacture that. So that’s okay, but for big promotions and with big promotions, you’re going to be sending a lot more emails, sending them more frequently.
Catherine Langman:
And then in between those big promotions, you want to sort of pad out the rest of the year so that you’ve got something that you’re sending out each week, and it might be engaging content that you’re sending out. So an excerpt of a blog post, or you might share some really cool stuff that you’ve got going on on social media. If you’ve had some really awesome customer content shared on social media, you might send that out, or you might send out some little ad hoc mini incentives, like free shipping for this weekend only, that sort of thing. So, really plan out the year so that you’ve got the big deal type promos and then little filler type emails and incentives as well, and that will get you to the point where you’ve got something going out at least weekly. So, that’s how you plan out those email newsletters.
Catherine Langman:
And then beyond that, the other thing that I wanted to talk about just to round out the episode is what email marketing platform you should be using, and there’s so many different email marketing platforms on the market. It can be a little bit confusing watch to choose. I know many people like to go for a free option. MailChimp has been around for a million years, so a lot of people know about that and start using that, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of the name of it, but there’s a free option that’s becoming a bit more popular with Shopify users.
Catherine Langman:
I don’t advocate for using either of those because they’re not that suited to the sort of sophisticated automation that I like to teach and use. Additionally, because we’re such fans of the Shopify platform for websites, MailChimp doesn’t actually integrate with Shopify anymore. So it’s really not a good option to use, but it’s also not really designed exclusively for e-commerce either. MailChimp’s one of those platforms that they kind of try to work for any sort of business model, but as a result, they’re generalists, not specialists. So it sort of misses the mark a little bit with some of the stuff that you really want to be doing for e-commerce.
Catherine Langman:
But the other reason that… so what platform do we choose? What do we recommend? Let me state that first before I move on with the why. And so our preference for e-commerce is to use Klaviyo as the platform, and I’m going to link to that in the show notes as well and I definitely recommend that you check them out. Klaviyo is purpose built for e-commerce, so all of the functionality is designed to help an e-commerce business to launch, scale and grow. I love the fact that with Klaviyo, you get all of the functionality out of the box. It doesn’t require you to be on a really expensive premium plan before you get all the cool bells and whistles. You get all of it.
Catherine Langman:
They do actually have a free version that you can get started with. So there’s no reason not to start with it, but certainly once you want to start getting really good with the number of emails that you’re sending, all the automation stuff as well as your newsletters, you will need to be on a paid plan, but realistically it is a small amount to pay for the amount that you can earn in return once you start using it in the way that I’ve been describing through this episode. But one of the really, really cool things about it, and this is harking back to the start of the episode where I was talking about the impact of the Apple iOS update on Facebook advertising, basically we’re going to be able to, or we are already able to integrate our Klaviyo list and segments of our Klaviyo list into our Facebook advertising, our Facebook ad manager.
Catherine Langman:
So basically we can build custom audiences in our Facebook ads manager from this integration with our Klaviyo list, and even segments of our Klaviyo list. So basically it enables us to run ads re-targeting people who might’ve abandoned cart, or retargeting people who’ve bought certain product categories, or however we want to do it because we own that audience and we own that list in Klaviyo and we can integrate it into our ads manager, we are able to show ads to these people in a way that we can’t now do based solely off the ads manager alone thanks to that Apple update. So, that there is just going to be such a boon for so many e-commerce businesses who really need to figure out a work around with the Facebook ads changes since their Apple iOS update.
Catherine Langman:
So, I know that does sound a little bit techie and tricky. If you are really loving the ideas that I’ve been sharing today, but you want to learn how to do it, you can certainly join our community. We will be running some training courses very soon to teach a lot of this stuff. So definitely check out that content when it comes out. One other last point that I want to mention about Klaviyo as well. So one of the other impacts with the Facebook ad up… sorry, the update from Apple and its impact on Facebook ads, is the ability… well, the inability to accurately re track performance metrics and results. So, Facebook ads manager itself is not going to have the kind of accurate data that it used to have in terms of return on ad spend and purchase results from ads and that sort of thing.
Catherine Langman:
So we will be able to get a lot of that information now from within Klaviyo, because it actually integrates so deeply with Shopify or WordPress or whatever e-commerce platform that you use. So, the reporting within Klaviyo is also another thumbs up in my books, and another reason why we love to use it and recommend it for e-commerce. So jump on the podcast show notes, check out all of the links there. The URL for the show notes is catherinelangman.com/episode-55. So go and check out all of those links, and look forward to seeing some of you guys really take things to the next level with your email marketing. And if you can do this now and get onto this now and be consistent about it throughout the year, you’re going to enjoy a fantastic fourth quarter when things start to go really bonkers for e-commerce businesses through the Black Friday to holiday sales season. All right, guys, that’s it from me for today and I will catch you all later. Bye for now.