Leveraging Ecommerce Email Marketing To Drive Revenue – Chase Dimond

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About this episode:

In this episode of The Ecommerce Insights Show, we interview Chase Dimond, Co-founder of Boundless Labs, and a top ecommerce email marketer who to-date has sent over 1 billion emails resulting in $75+ million in email attributable revenue. 

During the interview, we cover topics like:

• What are the most common mistakes and misconceptions about email marketing
• What are the best ways to grow an email list
• How to make sure that your emails are read
• What email workflow works best for ecommerce brands

So if you are interested in maximizing your ecommerce email marketing strategies, then this episode is for you.

Learn more about Chase and his resources here:

• Visit Chase’s personal website
• Visit the Boundless Labs website
• Subscribe to Chase’s newsletter
• Sign up to Chase’s Ecommerce Email Marketing Course
• Follow Chase on Twitter and Instagram
• Connect with Chase on LinkedIn
• Check out Chase’s YouTube channel

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox. 🙂

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers: So here’s the question. How can you, Congress leaders make sure that they are producing a great product, providing a world-class customer experience responsibly managing the finances and still reserve time, energy and resources for marketing their products. My name is James Sauers, and you’re listening to the e-commerce insight show.

[00:00:16] The podcast that gives you a specific, actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business. Every Monday, you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better. Every single. Every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business.

[00:00:34] It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us. We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are. So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place. Roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to work.

[00:00:52] Hey, chase. Welcome to the e-commerce inflate show. Really excited to have you on to talk about all things. Email marketer. You’re widely regarded as the email marketing guru in the e-commerce space. And I’ve been following you on Twitter for a long time, watching you build boundless labs and just share your knowledge.

[00:01:04] So I’m really excited to have you come on the show. Could you give me a couple of sentences about who you are, what you do, and maybe what has you excited to fire up your laptop in the morning? These days?

[00:01:12] Chase Dimond: First off, thanks for having me excited to be. So I’m a partner at an e-commerce marketing agency.

[00:01:17] All I ever talk about is email. That’s really the channel that I feel like I’m really good at. And that’s the channel that I really own. And I started an agency about three years ago, doing specifically e-commerce email marketing today, we’ve expanded to SMS. So that’s really kind of the retention arm. We also do paid social and content, our team about 50 to 60 folks, us international.

[00:01:37] And we work with about 110 to 120 clients. And all those clients do between about seven to nine figures in annual revenue. Partner and an e-comm agency decided to talk about agency life and or email today.

[00:01:48] James Sowers: Awesome. So that’s a pretty incredible number. So 50 to 60 folks, a hundred to 120 clients. How long has your journey been from day one is just, you sit in front of a laptop, registering a domain name to today.

[00:01:58] Like how long does it take to grow to that scale?

[00:02:00] Chase Dimond: So I guess I’ve been out of college and doing kind of work for the past six years, but in terms of the actual agency that I’m building now, I started as like a freelancer, probably about three and a half years ago in the economy. I did my whole thing for about six months found someone that was doing something similar.

[00:02:15] I’ll linked up and partnered up with him. About three years ago, we started our agency boundless. And then for about two, two and a half years, we ran that just as an econ email shop. And then we merged with a paid social shop and those guys were called structured social. I led by Nick Shackleford. So now we kind of just call ourselves structured.

[00:02:32] That’s kind of confusing. People know us as boundless labs or structured agents. Restructured social or people don’t know us by any of those. And we have no idea which one to say we are. Right. So it started officially about three years ago. Awesome.

[00:02:43] James Sowers: Well, that’s still quite the trajectory. I mean, people chip away at this stuff for decades and don’t make it to where you are today.

[00:02:47] So congratulations. We could do a whole hour just on that because I know a lot of people struggle to break from freelance or into the agency, world and scale at that level. So that’s not the purpose of this show. Maybe I’ll have to start a second show and we could talk about that one, but what I did catch that.

[00:03:00] Okay. Seven to nine figure brands. These are big, significant operations who are probably fairly sophisticated about a lot of things, including email marketing, and you’ve got a hundred plus of them. So you and your team get to dabble in all these different accounts, right? When you think about your work there, is there any time where you’ve maybe worked in one particular industry and taken an insight from that and applied it to something totally different?

[00:03:23] And then how did that go? Was that like a big win or was it just like, oh, we tried this and it really, you can’t. Lawn care and apply it to fitness apparel or something like that. How did that go?

[00:03:32] Chase Dimond: Yeah, two questions. I’d say like in the e-com email world, for the most part, what we do is more or less like highly repeatable across vertical, right?

[00:03:40] At the end of the day, we’re selling a physical good, you know, we don’t do anything. We don’t sound as services. We don’t sell any info products. Right? So in most parts in physical goods, more or less it’s apples to apples, whether it’s fashion, apparel, You know, skincare versus accessories versus whatever it might be, I guess, kind of in a different direction.

[00:03:59] One kind of thought I have, there is back in 2017, I was building this email travel series, essentially scaled it from zero to half a million subscribers. And the way that we did it was something that was like, so opportune at the time where we built basically a tool on Instagram, where we had a private API key, where we were able to aggregate data from Instagram.

[00:04:20] So it would say James you’re based in wherever you are in the east coast, you post with these hashtag. And if you ever use things like hashtag travel, or if you follow Nat geo or if you post it in places like Bali with like James, you probably like to travel, right. Maybe before you had your two kids, you were a traveler either as you were a single or what’s your wife, as you guys were newly engaged.

[00:04:39] So I might reach out to and say, Hey James, we’re building a community of other like-minded travelers. Yeah. Why don’t you join the community, enter your email here, submit content there. So I had this really cool experience of building like, and scaling this newsletter. I got a lot of press and notoriety about it.

[00:04:54] I had a bunch of like really big media company, exact setting me up saying like, Hey, how did you do this? Can you do this? And it was kind of funny. One of the people, the ways it got in was I got him through one of their legal councils happened to hear about me and like my story, I end up doing a call with like the CEO of a media company is to go counsel and some big.

[00:05:15] And some of the stuff I was telling them about like scaling and scraping and aggregating data that the legal guy was like, so like his face shut down. He was like, oh man, I brought this guy on a call. I’m supposed to be the legal counsel. And he’s talking about scraping all these different types of things like this is not going to apply here.

[00:05:31] So it was just kind of funny to see. Being really scrappy on a small scale, which worked and then telling that story to a bigger company where I think it could have worked, but they just were so against anything that was in the gray. I learned over time that you have to be kind of mindful and careful of who you’re talking to, especially if there’s a lawyer on the phone, but that wasn’t exactly what you asked.

[00:05:50] But I just remember that experience being one where it’s like, man, I loved what I did. I thought everyone would love what I did. So I started telling them when I did. And I got the actual, exact opposite reaction of what I expect. I thought I was going to get a killer offer to work with them as a consultant.

[00:06:04] And they didn’t even want to touch anything I did. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a

[00:06:07] James Sowers: lot of sense. I mean, you could see his perspective too, right? Like that opens them up to all kinds of litigation, risk and stuff. And, uh, what caught my attention there was, like you said, you had this private API key. Is that something that like, you just got through a connection?

[00:06:18] Cause it sounds like it’s not something that I can just go to Instagram and generate one of those for myself and kind of replicate your success. How’d you come across that?

[00:06:24] Chase Dimond: We actually had a developer that had the private API key and more or less, like, we kinda like acqui-hire like his company. Like he was trying to build these products in this tech, but he was a Deb.

[00:06:33] He wasn’t a marketer, so he never got any kind of scale. So we actually ended up kind of just absorbing him and his company. And we ended up building and adding on certain use cases that he didn’t have before he was more building like an Instagram bot of sorts, more like an Instagram analytics tool. And one of the things that we added on in technical.

[00:06:51] Adding aggregating follower, account likes comments, all those types of things that we were going to basically take the email as well from the bio for he never was grabbing the biotechs. And then we were able to grab biotechs and kind of parse that out. And this was before like all like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

[00:07:06] So it was a little bit, I’d say easier to get. This kind of access back then today. I don’t think it would even be possible. I think it’s probably like a walled garden and, you know, good luck in that now.

[00:07:16] James Sowers: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like you were effectively taking like the Facebook ads manager targeting functionality and it’s like interest based follow these pages, this kind of geographic location.

[00:07:25] But instead of saying, okay, put my ad in front of those folks, you’re saying, let me export a list of those folks. And then let me, did you manually outreach and send them an email and just say, Hey, we’re building this newsletter. We’re building this community. It sounds like it was kind of like a combination.

[00:07:37] Fortuitous timing and falling upon this API key, this access to this data, but also a lot of hustle and manually reaching out to these folks and saying, I’ve got somebody I think you’d be in, interested in.

[00:07:45] Chase Dimond: Yeah, it started manual. Like we were in the very beginning, just sending one-off emails, just testing.

[00:07:49] Would this work, how’s it going to work? What’s the type of messages that people are going to resonate with. So it was pretty manual in the beginning. And then we ended up scaling it to where we are. No hundreds of thousands of emails a month and people loved it. And we were getting 50, 60% open rates, 10, 15% click-throughs and replies, like people loved it because we were not selling anything.

[00:08:08] We’re basically inviting them to join a community and they would join our Facebook group. Right. And we’d ask for their email there. They would submit their email onto a landing page for our newsletter. They would enter into some kind of giveaway. We had tens of thousands of people submitting content on Typeform about no I’m chase.

[00:08:23] I live in orange county. You know, the cool places to eat here, the cool places to stay here, where the levels go here, what tourists do. So we’re collecting tens of thousands of these people every couple months, submitting content. If you look at the time on site, these people were spending 10, 15, 20 minutes actually filling out these forms, you know, attaching really high quality photos that they take.

[00:08:43] Uploading really cool videos. Right? So what we had done, basically, no one had really done around travel travel obviously has been a big category. There’s obviously massive newsletters. There’s obviously massive communities, but no one had ever done like essentially what the scam or the hustle or morning brew did for newsletters, but specifically for travel where there was no.

[00:09:02] Bias and kind of non-sponsored content. It was just all user generated. So I think the fact that, like we were one of the first big communities, this was like four plus years ago. Now I think people really wanted to get on board and really wanted to support what we were doing.

[00:09:14] James Sowers: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:09:15] And travel is just so hard because there’s so much segmentation that has to happen to make it relevant to each subscriber. I mean, they could be anywhere in the world and they could want to go anywhere in the world or they could want to go to 10 different places. And so how. Filter that down and make sure that they’re only hearing about what they care about.

[00:09:29] You know, I know we’re going to talk about segmentation a little later in an e-commerce context, but here’s some of those metrics, like what was it? 50% open rate is somewhere between 10 and 20% click through rate, adding tens of thousands of people every couple of months. Like people are just salivating listening to that.

[00:09:41] Right. So like, we can’t do that anymore. Thanks to Cambridge Analytica. Like you said, Let’s talk about some strategies for growing an audience today, like with the assets that are available to most e-commerce founders, if they’re early stage or marketing teams, if they’re a little bit more established, like, what are your favorite ways to kind of present those signup forms or get out in front of potential subscribers?

[00:09:59] Folks will get added to a list after they purchased. Of course, but if we’re talking about folks who maybe aren’t going to make a purchase right away, we wanna get them on our list and start that relationship. How do you advise clients to get the most out of their, their audience growth efforts?

[00:10:11] Chase Dimond: Like in terms of like top of the funnel, right?

[00:10:13] Like there’s hardly any substitute for paid social, right? Like you typically, if you’re an e-com brand have to run ads and most of the time you’re leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and additional channels, right. Maybe you’re leveraging influencers or affiliates, whatever. Right. So you need some traffic source.

[00:10:28] That’s. To then, as we’re optimizing to your point, us forms typically their pop-ups sometimes they’re fly outs. And other times it’s like the bottom of a website or in a blog post, you have what’s called like an embedded form, right? Static. It stays there. It doesn’t go away and whatnot. So typically I think pop-ups are the most common, probably the most effective they’re a little bit more in your face.

[00:10:48] It’s kind of like a flat. Flowers. Exactly. Like, it sounds, it just kind of comes out of like the right-hand corner. It’s like a smaller window, a little less intrusive. So the pop-up right. Like there’s multiple ways that you can fire it. One is you can do it on immediate, you know, page load. As soon as someone hits the website, you can load it up.

[00:11:05] Probably not the best experience. Right. But if you want to do that, you can try that you can weight them based off of some kind of time delay or some kind of page scrolls. So someone’s been on your website for four seconds, six seconds, eight seconds, or someone scrolled 25% of your page, 50%, 75% of your page.

[00:11:21] Right. And then you also could do it on exit intent, right? So I think you have to be testing the different types of offers and the different types of times. On your website, right? Depending on how easy it is to understand what you do. And more complicated products are probably going to have to wait a little bit longer for people to read the website and understand like who you are, why you matter.

[00:11:39] And then more simple things like a makeup, right? It’s like makeups, makeup, and t-shirts, and t-shirt like, you probably could fire something a little bit quicker. Cause people, hopefully at first glance in your website are going to understand what you do. And even before they do that, right from your ad or however they found you, they should have some sense of who you are and what you do.

[00:11:56] So I think the current. And kind of the perception, even before people enter the website thinks is important, but from there, right? Like why do people give us their email? Typically it’s some kind of incentive or offer. It could be a percentage off, could be a dollar off. It could be free shipping, be entering into a giveaway.

[00:12:11] It could be a free product with purchase, right? There’s a whole suite of things that you could do. There’s some data out there if I think from privy and also data that we. Just by sending people to sign up like no offer, no discount, nothing exciting. You can expect about one to 2% of people potentially to give you their email.

[00:12:26] Right? So not that great with some kind of offer or incentive, 10% off, $10 off, whatever it might be. You can expect between five to 10% of people to give you their email. And then through like an enter to win some kind of giveaway, you can probably expect eight to 10 to 12% of people to give you their email.

[00:12:43] And they all have their pros in there. Yeah. I love

[00:12:45] James Sowers: that. I love that you call it out. Like maybe don’t have the pop-up appear immediately after landing on site or even just a few seconds after. Cause we see that all the time and uh, we always say like, man, scroll depth feels like something that’s.

[00:12:57] Appropriate for the customer experience, right. Or exit intent or something like that. So pre with the concept, they were like, let’s test it and figure out what works best, but maybe like splashing it on page with a 10% discount offer. As soon as I hit the site, especially if it’s cold traffic or something that came in through SEO versus like an ad.

[00:13:12] I don’t really have any context for yet. Like, I need a little bit of time to understand who you are and who you serve and whether it’s right for me. Those statistics you shared, it’s like one to 2% on just a pure signup. And then I think it went up to like five to 8%. Like that’s a big lift right there, but for the giveaway, it’s almost like six or seven times the conversion rate.

[00:13:29] So that feels pretty compelling because most folks it’s like I have enough margin in my business or average order value or whatever customer lifetime value where like I can offer a product like a free product, either my own or an iPad or something like that, that a lot of people would be. And that feels like an easy, obvious way to get a lot of subscribers without just defaulting to the same 10%, 15% off discount code that every other store on the web has.

[00:13:51] So I think that was a really a Stuart recommendation there. And then in terms of like, when folks come in, right. How do you think about like list hygiene for these folks? So depending on the offer, you’re getting different quality subscribers in there. Right. And we’re going to get. The post subscription experience soon.

[00:14:07] Cause I know that’s really where you play, but I imagine folks are asking you questions about this, right? So if I have a discount, I’m going to get like discount divas, right? Somebody like always seeking a good deal. Versus if I lead with value and I have like, maybe my product requires a little education, I have a free ebook or something like that.

[00:14:21] Like that’s a slightly different subscriber coming in, probably. And even down to the point where like, if it’s black Friday or cyber Monday, Those kinds of subscribers and customers are a lot different than someone coming in, in the middle of the summer for most businesses. So like, how do you think about list hygiene on the backend?

[00:14:35] And some folks will say, keep it clean. Like if they’re not engaged, if they haven’t opened emails in the last 30 days or something, then cut them because it’s going to improve like your KPIs and stuff like that. And some folks are like, Some of those analytics, aren’t perfect. Open rates. Aren’t tracked a hundred percent.

[00:14:48] So keep them on because what’s the harm in it, right? Like the incremental cost of keeping them on your list isn’t that high. And they might buy someday. They might buy a year from now. So how do you think about list hygiene after somebody signs up through one of those pop-up forms? Yeah,

[00:15:00] Chase Dimond: I think about it in a couple of ways.

[00:15:02] One of the ones that comes to mind is like how frequently you send an email will depend on how many days you want to kind of sunset someone. So for example, if you send a daily email, you’ll probably want to set up. Up to kind of be turned or kind of suppressed earlier than you would, if you do it weekly or monthly.

[00:15:18] Because if you send every single day over the course of 30 days, you give the people 30 chances to open and engage and they’ve opened or zero. If they flip zero, if the purchase you’re out, right. The likelihood of them ever opening after that, 30 is probably pretty slim, right? With the exception of like, if they’re a black Friday cyber Monday, Right.

[00:15:35] Like I would leave him. So if I send every single day and I’d probably want to get people out in the next, like a month, and if they don’t open a single email or engage with an email or a purchase with email, and they’re not a black Friday, cyber Monday shopper, I’ll suppress them. I always depressed. I never delete.

[00:15:48] If you delete the data it’s gone. Like you can’t see what happened. You can’t look back at that history. If you suppress the profile, at least you can go search and seed certain things. Maybe the customer had a question about something or whatnot. They said they opened it and they clicked. You can’t see that.

[00:16:03] So at least suppressing them at least keeps them in your guys’ account. You don’t have to pay for them, but at least you can see them. However, if you’re sending, let’s say instead of every day, you’re sending a couple of times a week, a couple times a month, then you can lean out towards like a 60 or 90 or one 20 day window, because they had less times to open that.

[00:16:21] You want to give people in the ballpark of. 10 to 20 maybe or so times to open. I think ten’s a little bit aggressive and that’s probably a potentially a little quick, I think, 20 or 30 and onwards, probably a little bit to allowing them to kind of lax in terms of who we’re going to hit. So you got to find that sweet spot of your list of like often you send the types of content that you say.

[00:16:42] Those types of things. And that’s how I think about on at least initially in terms of sunsetting people, you know, in terms of, I think you talked about it too. I briefly mentioned it. Like, we will make sure that we kind of check our records to see if someone ever has purchased varying like one or two windows of black Friday cyber Monday.

[00:16:58] And instead of deleting those, we’ll basically just put them into a segment that we exclude in 11 out of the 12 months of the year. And during like November, we will include those people back into the Mexican. They’re going to only buy them because they want killer and smoking. So that’s kind of like a high level and like a really quick level of how I think about it, like holistically and kind of, I guess, general.

[00:17:20] Yeah.

[00:17:20] James Sowers: So it sounds like maybe 15 touches is about right. Like if they don’t open any or click links in any of the last 15 emails, then suppress them, don’t delete them. Just kind of pull them out of the sequence and save them for a rainy day or just keep them to look at that data or wait until black Friday, cyber Monday.

[00:17:35] If they came in through that window, you kind of only want to talk to them in that same window or whenever you have a big sale, like father’s day, depending on what the product is. The

[00:17:43] Chase Dimond: advice. Yeah. And one other thing to add. So essentially what we do is we have a segment within, let’s say Klayvio, um, that says unengaged, right?

[00:17:52] And then that unengaged segment, as soon as people become engaged, then triggers an automation, which is called the sunset and engaged, which basically is a fancy way of saying it’s a breakup. That breakup series, basically that won’t be triggered. Say, James wrote my list, and then you just hit email 15 or 16 in a row that you haven’t opened.

[00:18:08] Right. You then go into this breakup series, which is like a one or two last emails, kind of a last ditch attempt to get you to open, to click, to buy, to say that you want to be on. And then from there, if you still don’t open or click or purchase, you basically automatically get tagged as unengaged equals.

[00:18:25] True. And then on a, let’s say on a monthly or every other month basis, we’ll go into Klayvio or the ESP look at the people that are unengaged equals true, upload those people in the suppression. And then unfortunately, James, like, we’re not going to be contacting you.

[00:18:38] James Sowers: It makes a lot of sense. I’ve gotten some of those, not in the e-commerce world, but more thought leadership info, product courses, type of stuff.

[00:18:44] Like I’ve gotten those. Maybe come back or break up emails before, and I’m like, man, I’ve read all your stuff what’s going on here. So I know like the tracking for those, isn’t always perfect, but at least like you’re talking to that person and giving them an opportunity to click a link and get assigned as engaged or something very specifically because it’s like, man, I’m opening these, I’m reading them.

[00:19:00] I might not be like staying in there for 10 minutes. I might be glancing at them, but I’m doing stuff and I’m still getting these like breakup emails. So I know it’s not perfect, but that’s why we send them is if I explicitly click the link in that. Then I get marked as active and then I don’t go back into that queue and I don’t get lost in the shuffle and automatically sent to that sun-setting or suppress list.

[00:19:17] So I think that’s super important in terms of like, okay, so somebody signed up for our list. I think the next thing that you’re probably thinking about is like, how do I make sure our emails get in that inbox, right. Deliverability? And I know maybe this isn’t your area of expertise because I know it gets really technical in terms of.

[00:19:30] Send a reputation and all that kind of stuff, but like, are there things that you’re doing for your clients before you start the heavy lifting of taking over their email marketing or supplementing that to make sure that emails are in fact hitting the inbox? And is there anything that like somebody listening who’s a brand owner can apply to their own business and kind of a do it yourself model

[00:19:48] Chase Dimond: again, like I think it’s a more like the mindset of like being preventative is way easier than you actually get into spam and getting out.

[00:19:55] Preventing yourself from going to spam is a lot easier than once you go into spam. Being able to actually get out. That’s a lot tougher of a journey. So more of like my deliverability knowledge and expertise is more on like staying out of spam versus getting out of spam. So the best thing that you could do.

[00:20:10] Since I got into email about six years ago, the biggest change that I’ve seen is back then, it didn’t matter. Like you can batch and blast whoever. And some are these. I felt like we got rewarded by just sending bulk emails and volume. I felt like it was rewarded where today it’s like the complete opposite.

[00:20:25] Everything’s about the quality of the email that you’re sending and the quality of the person that you’re sending. And how do you find the quality find the people that are engaged? So, um, popular, engaged windows are anywhere from like, let’s say 30 to 90 days. That means someone has clicked or open the last 30 to 90 days and are basically back into picking the segment through figuring out what open rate we’re hitting.

[00:20:46] So a lot of DSPs have a metric where on a campaign and the campaign is a one-time sent to a group. I think about a holiday email or a promotional email or a new product launch. So you want to hit a 20% open rate there, and you basically want to straddle the line between if you’re getting a 50, 60, 70% open rate on a campaign.

[00:21:03] Sure. That sounds great. But you’re actually leaving probably a lot of people on the table that you otherwise could be. So say for example, you’re sending to a 30 day engage and you’re getting a 40% open rate. That’s fantastic. That’s awesome. That’s really healthy. However, you probably could be hitting a 45 or 60 or 75 and 90 day engaged and looping more people in and still keeping your account healthy and get closer to that, that 20% open rate.

[00:21:24] So you really want to straddle that line of getting 20% open rate, not being too strict, where you’re having way, way high open rates and not being too, um, kind of lax and like easy going with it where you’re getting five, 10, 15%. Oh, the automation side, right? The flows, which are basically set off of a trigger or behavior that occurs.

[00:21:42] Think about someone entering their email into a pop up that triggers a welcome series. Someone’s on your list. They add to cart, they don’t start checkout. They don’t buy that triggers the abandoned cart. Now with those emails, those could be getting 30, 40, 50, 60, 70%, maybe even 80% depending on email.

[00:21:57] Right welcome series. Typically the first email can get 50, 60% open rates customer. Thank you. Email reference ones purchased. 60 70, 80%. Right. Potentially even more. So I think about keeping your lists really clean and making sure that you have really strong deliverability by sending to the people that are highly engaged.

[00:22:15] I out of 10 of your seven should be the people that are super, super engaged and focused. And again, depending on the brand, that’s a 30 day engaged. It’s a 60th and 90, maybe it’s even sometimes a one 20. So that’s practice number one. Number two, I think is testing different things. Yeah. Plain tax versus like HTML and designed emails.

[00:22:33] Right. You know, are you inboxing better on plain text? If so, maybe you find ways to leverage some of that. You know, are you doing decently on designed emails and that’s kind of what your audience wants. Okay. Do that. Right. I don’t think it’s an or situation. I think it’s an and situation, or I think both have a lot of room to be highly applicable.

[00:22:51] I even think certain emails lend themselves better to one or the other, like a customer. Thank you. Email from the founder. That’s a really great plain text email, right? Hey, James takes them for purchasing from the chase diamond shop. You know, it means a lot, so. We purchase is going to be shipped soon.

[00:23:07] Here’s some information education, thanks, chase. Maybe my signature or something. Right. So I think there are certain places. And then for example, if you’re doing a new product lodge, those probably need to be highly visual, right? You probably need some kind of cool graphic or a gift or something that shows people what they want to see.

[00:23:23] And also the demo matters, right? If you’re writing to an older demo, say our parents, our grandparents. Maybe not our parents had five parents fellows, and they’re probably gonna hate me for saying that. Let’s say our grandparents are older demo, right? We’re probably going to want to go play in texts.

[00:23:36] They’re gonna want the font size to be a lot larger. So I’d like the 12 or 14 size font you’re going to want, like 16, 18, 20 size fonts. That way it’s really easy for them to read. Just keep in mind that they’re probably in the opening on like a desktop or like an iPad, whereas like the younger demo, you’re gonna want to be a little bit more like direct.

[00:23:52] You can be a little bit more fun and witty. The font doesn’t have to be as much in your. And they’re going to open it on mobile. So basically what I’m getting at is like design into email for conversions. And for experience of your audience is also really important because you get these people to engage.

[00:24:07] That’s a huge thing. If they’re clicking, if they’re replying, if they’re forwarding, all of these types of positive engagements are really important. We’re making sure that the Googles, the yahoos, the Hotmails of the world rewards your emails. And they’re also looking at things on the negative side.

[00:24:22] That’s your bounce rate, too high it’s you’re marked as spam highs or unsubscribed high. So those are all the things that matter. So again, send it to the right people, making sure that the content is really engaging so that. People hopefully stay on your list and don’t mark you as spam because all the negative things actually really hurt you.

[00:24:38] So that was really long winded. Hopefully that answered the question.

[00:24:40] James Sowers: No, no, I think I got it. I mean, the central theme that I heard there was like this customers centric focus on email and not what do we want to tell our customers, but more, what do they want to hear? How do they want to hear it? When do they want to.

[00:24:53] If you keep them at the center of your email strategy, especially in those critical, like first two or three touches, that’s going to generate more engagement from them, opens, clicks, replies, whatever. And that is the positive signal. Going back to those emails, service providers and say, Hey, keep putting this in the inbox because people are liking it.

[00:25:09] Right. And so you’ve got to start with the customer. I think your observation about increasing the font size is really astute. Like that’s one of those things where I feel like a lot of brand owners and even marketing people just take the default formatting out of their tool and they just use that. And they’re like, that’s good enough.

[00:25:22] And they don’t take the time to think about like, Hey, if our demographic is 60%, 50 and older, or even 65 and older or something like that, then we should increase the font size. And oftentimes it’s somebody under 65 working on that email. And they’re saying, well, I can read this. I can read this on any device that I have.

[00:25:36] And so I think that’s one of those things. You as an agency owner who works in all these different accounts, like you get down to that level of detail and that’s part of the advantage of working with an expert. It’s like you think about it in the minutia there, but that’s one of the things that I could see being like an 80, 20 investment, right?

[00:25:50] Like just changing the font size, really increased the number of opens and clicks because the email’s more usable right. To the end user. So I loved all that advice. My next question to you, but you got to, it was going to be, Hey, do you, what about, um, specific activities, like in that immediate post signup email, are you asking anybody to do something very specific again, in other industries like courses or info products I’ve been asked to literally drag an email from the promotions tab to the primary tab or the inbox or whatever.

[00:26:17] I’ve been asked to reply with the biggest business challenge I have or something like that. Like. Advising your clients to do anything specific to make the subscriber take or request that the subscriber takes an action as a positive signal back for reputation.

[00:26:30] Chase Dimond: Um, so less than of the deliverability side and more like in terms of social proof.

[00:26:34] So we’ll have like the customer, thank you, email, right? Just a thank you email from the founder and delivery. Any kind of education if needed. So say for example, Someone sells like a CBD or a supplement or a product that’s expensive that needs some coaching or some training, right? Delivering those instructions for lack of a better word within that email, I think is really important.

[00:26:52] So one example that comes to mind as we were working with this company at Australia that sells like these weighted blankets when they’re called, like these calming blankets. And one thing that we noticed as a customer support was constantly getting bogged down with. Yeah, it was this working. How do I use this?

[00:27:07] Maybe I should return this. I don’t think I’m getting the maximum benefit from it. So what we basically did is we summarized the top three ways in which you actually use it while people were waiting to wrap their head around. Okay. I can use this, like basically like a warm hug, right? Like I can kind of hug it.

[00:27:21] I can use it to kind of calm myself and ground myself. I can use it as this, that, or the other who basically wrote up three different ways. And that’s the explanations of a wish. And just by sending people like, this is how you use it. This is how, you know, it’s working these types of things. I think we reduced like the customer support tickets by like 50%, we basically decrease the number of returns by like 10 or 20% because people actually understood like what they were using and how it was supposed to work.

[00:27:45] So that was one another for like, let’s say that same company, what we would do is after people receive the items. So let’s say. Day 17 or day 20, right after they purchased, we would hit them up saying it, James, you know, we hope that you’re loving your calming blanket. We aim to have a hundred percent customer satisfaction and we love for all of our customers to be five stars.

[00:28:04] We’d love for you to leave a video, a photo of comments on this Facebook post that we have. And essentially what we would do is we were sending traffic to. And we were basically getting people to like, and comment and share their positive interactions. And that was able to help us decrease our cost of acquisition because there’s a lot more engagement and the click-through was high and other people that clicked through, they already had this frame in this context that, wow, like there’s hundreds of these ratings spans.

[00:28:29] I think we were getting dozens and dozens of people leading this type of feedback on a weekly basis number time, right? Like over the course of a stem month, we could have like a hundred something people. That left a positive review on this ad. And then it kind of trained other people. I’d seen the ad to start leaving reviews and feedback that were all positive.

[00:28:46] And then we kind of rotate ads in and out like on a monthly or quarterly basis as we wanted to test new angles. So that was actually something really interesting that we had done. Also with that company. We had noticed that, you know, like in Australia and New Zealand and some of those. They consulted third-party review sites at a really high rate.

[00:29:03] And we found that out through doing a customer survey. How did you find out about us? How did you make the decision between us and competitors? And they were saying like, oh, we went to the site called product reviews, dot com.edu. And that’s kind of like the equivalent of like our Trustpilot. So what we then started doing is sending positive reviews to product reviews, dot com.edu.

[00:29:21] Hey James, would you mind leaving a five-star review here? This is where you and a lot of our customers have mentioned that you guys find us or. Found that we were recommended and trusted. Could you leave your positive experience here? We want other customers to have the same type of impact that you’ve had on your life through this product.

[00:29:39] So we were sending tons of reviews there, again, that increased our conversion. So we were just finding like these quick and kind of simple ways to collect reviews because we already. Hundreds of reviews on our website, we’re getting another a hundred to 200. Like we already got to the base where we thought that the conversion was going to be strong.

[00:29:55] We started studying at other places and getting really crafty with

[00:29:58] James Sowers: that. That’s great. I love that you tell real-world stories because that really like solidifies and makes this tangible. And I mean, I think, again, that’s an example. This general concept of critical thinking. Like we have plenty of reviews on our site.

[00:30:11] So why don’t we start channeling these folks to Facebook, right? Because putting those comments and that feedback on Facebook drives prospects to our site who can then become customers, right? Same thing with the review of the product reviews.com.edu. Like let’s get reviews on there because that is lead generation for us.

[00:30:27] We don’t need more on our site. We have minimum viable. Social proof now. So it’s really savvy to like, kind of change that call to action and point it in another direction that helps you kind of build a foundation. That’s not throwing money at Facebook, right. For advertising or something like that. So I think that was really smart.

[00:30:42] The other thing I caught was that that initial email that was basically like FAQ’s, and we always say, when we’re reviewing sites, like you don’t need to put FAQ’s on your homepage because FAQ is where great content goes to die. Like nobody reads those pages, but if you layer it into that kind of confirmation email, that first welcome email.

[00:30:57] That makes it useful. It’s like, Hey, I know you’re going to wait on this for three to seven days, whatever it’s going to take while you’re waiting. I bet you’re getting excited. Here’s some of the most common questions we get. Here’s how to use the product, use how to get the most out of it. I think that’s super savvy and something that a lot of brands can probably take and apply pretty quickly to see a lift.

[00:31:13] Initial engagement early on in that customer life cycle. So we talked about audience building, we talked about deliverability. The next thing I typically see is some kind of like transactional email, like a confirmation email, if they bought or an automated workflow, like you talked about a welcome series, right?

[00:31:27] Like maybe they didn’t buy, but they’re on our newsletter now. And so we kind of bring them on slowly. There’s also marketing campaigns, but hopefully somebody is not immediately sending them like a marketing email, like a sales promo or something. Hopefully there’s a little bit. Onboarding that happens there.

[00:31:40] We could spend an entire hour just talking about all the different automations and workflows that a brand could have if they want to be best in class. Maybe if I had a question for you, like what is maybe an entry-level one that everybody should have? And then what is a more advanced one that you’re using in your practice as the expert to kind of like, there’s more mature brands, like the big players in the space they’ve already checked the box on all of the essentials, what are they experimenting with?

[00:32:01] Right. Like, what’s that more advanced level tactical.

[00:32:04] Chase Dimond: Yeah. Okay. I’ll mention three. And on the kind of basic side, and you can tell me which one you want to go deeper in. So the three that I think all brands need to have habit. The core is a welcome series for non-buyers right. Great way to educate and nurture people at the brand, deliver any kind of code or offer that you promise in the pop-up right, right.

[00:32:20] Way to set the tone of the relationship. That’s the welcome series for non-buyers. The next one is the abandoned checkout, which is different than the abandoned cart. If you think about the customer journey, people are on your homepage, right? That most of our people are at the top and the least number of people are at the bottom of the.

[00:32:33] Um, so the van checkout is right above right before people actually make a purchase. Whereas the abandoned cart is one above that people have added to cart, but they didn’t start checkout. So the abandoned checkout basically takes the people that are furthest engaged with your brand and furthest down the funnel.

[00:32:46] And it takes them from heavy consideration and hopefully pushes them into conversion territory. And then lastly, it’s the, post-purchase kind of some of the things we’ve talked about, customer, thank you. Review requests, product education, so on and so forth. So those were the three. Must have first have standard e-com email flows.

[00:33:04] Okay,

[00:33:04] James Sowers: awesome. Yeah, let’s start with the foundational one. I like the checkout abandonment, cause I think a lot of people talk about welcome series, but it’s super like nuance to the brand and their team and their backstory and their customer. Like, I think it’s hard to give definitive advice there without being in like a consulting setting.

[00:33:17] And then I think a lot of people are focusing in on kind of post-purchase and nurturing there, but I don’t see a lot. I see a lot of abandoned cart. I don’t hear a lot about checkout abandonment. So let’s talk about. Yeah. So in

[00:33:26] Chase Dimond: the Ben check, I like, again, you can keep this one fairly simple, at least to start having something is going to outweigh having nothing.

[00:33:34] So typically, like, we’ll start with like a two part email sequence there, or email one is literally something just around. Reminding people of the item or the items that they left at checkout, having a link or called action or a button that automatically drops you back to checkout. Again, we don’t want to drop them back to the homepage.

[00:33:51] You don’t want to drop them back to the items or to the cart. We want to take them down to the further step in the funnel. So that way all they have to do is typically enter their card info and then they. And then if you can leverage any kind of like reviews or social proof within these emails around the specific product, even more general reviews that apply to your collection that they’re looking at, or even the company as a whole.

[00:34:11] So typically email one is just like the reminder of what they left behind and showcasing trust and credibility through the. Social proof and reviews, and then an email to, if they don’t purchase, you can kind of more go and select the brand story, addressing kind of the brand product quality. So this one company that we work with in the past called IBEX, they make like this really nice.

[00:34:30] If I’m really expensive, like Merino wool and make like these clothings that like don’t make us sweaty or as damp or like. You know, moist, like when you’re out working out and sweating, right. It’s a little bit more breathable and lightweight. So to talk about that within the abandoned checkout, like, Hey, you know, you’re looking at these items, those are great.

[00:34:48] If you haven’t tried our product before, wanted to let you know that our products are lighter, weight, more breathable, less sweaty, right. They’re going to be performance driven, whatever it might be with show kind of some cool lifestyle photos within that of like you’re actually other people using it.

[00:35:03] You’re not going to be the first person that buys us. Yeah. And reminding them of the item or the items that they left that checkout dynamically dropping them there. And then if at that point, you know, they still haven’t converted. You can add potentially in the future, like an additional email, or maybe you offer a discount or something, then we’ll typically wait at least one or two emails.

[00:35:20] And we’ll just focus on like value and reminding people, because typically these people got distracted. Or if they’re waiting to see if maybe if you have free shipping, if you don’t have free shipping, maybe like a second email is a great place to including a free shipping offer, but people were kind of, kind of wait.

[00:35:33] Consumers are smart to see. Enter any discount codes in the email, right? So you want to probably wait until later because a lot of people will be like, oh man, they didn’t have a discount code in the first email. I really do want this. I might as well go buy it. Right. Or email too. It’s like, oh finally they gave me free shipping.

[00:35:47] That’s all I really needed. I kinda, I really want this product. Let’s get it. And then email three, right? It’s like if people still haven’t converted, which fair amount of people will convert on the first one or two emails, like a couple percent will probably convert on each. Maybe 3% of 5% on the first email potentially have been more, we’ve seen some as high as like 10 or 20% conversion rate on the first email, which is actually pretty cool.

[00:36:08] And then the second email right. Could be 3, 5, 8, 10%. So over time, right? You can then start offering discounts and offers. If you feel like you need that to

[00:36:16] James Sowers: move. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think a couple things that jumped out at me there dynamically inserting the product. I see a lot of brands just like not show the actual product that I abandoned my checkout for.

[00:36:25] If you have a platform and an email service provider that will do that for you, definitely do that. Cause that kind of like personalization makes all the difference in picking up the cart or the abandoned checkout where I left off. The other thing that. I maybe didn’t hear it explicitly, but that I like to see.

[00:36:38] Is it kind of that FAQ angle, talk to your support team or your sales team and go into your FAQ’s. Like, I just call this the questions and objections thing. Like if I know enough about my customer and they’re buying a couch, what are the biggest objections? Like? You’re probably worrying if this is worth the money or what makes this different from a couch that you can get down the road at Ashley furniture or whatever, like, just go ahead and knock those out one by one and kind of bust those objections up that can make all the difference in my experience, setting up email campaigns and I love your.

[00:37:03] Save the discount for the end. Like I don’t hate discounts, but it should be more of a hail Mary. It should be like, Hey, we’ve tried to get this person to come back and pick things up several times. It’s been about a week. We’re probably not going to get them through conventional means. So let’s make our very best offer.

[00:37:15] And if that’s still not good enough, that’s okay. But if that last ditch effort that kind of like digging into our margin a little bit to get that customer feels okay. As long as you have exhausted all other options, any reactions to any of that?

[00:37:26] Chase Dimond: Yeah. That’s exactly it. And a lot of what kind of, what we do through, like the reviews is like they pick reviews.

[00:37:32] Kind of talk about certain things that address like the FAQ to some degree, right. Without actually explicitly doing it. But I think having some kind of section there, or even an email, like say for example, you do the first two emails I sent email three could even be an email from the founder. Hey, James, I noticed my team sent you two emails about the item or the items that you had over the past few days, wanting to see if you had any questions.

[00:37:53] And even it could be just the prompt for someone to reply to the email, learn more, right. Or maybe there’s even like a phone number that someone on your team is willing to field calls or something. So I think incorporating what you said, or even inviting people to like respond and ask a question that they might have at least gets kind of the dialogue open and gives you a chance on the customer side.

[00:38:13] Address that question, hopefully get a sale, obviously, if there’s a good fit

[00:38:16] James Sowers: for the consumer. Yeah. A hundred percent. That’s a power play. As long as you can actually staff the replies and handle those folks. And also just know that that sale might not be attributed back to email necessarily if you get them a reply and then they go into a live chat or something like that, you go into another.

[00:38:31] That might not be reflected in the checkout of Benjamin flow in your analytics dashboard, but it works right. And so it’s like one of those things, those qualitative things that you got to just be mindful of as you assess the value of like your email marketing strategy at large, is like, if you take that strategy and you’re doing that hand to hand combat, so to speak in terms of.

[00:38:46] Picking up on those replies, then that might not always be attributed back to email as a revenue source. So just something to be aware of that that kind of covers the foundational element. What is a more advanced topic? Like maybe not expert level, but intermediate or something like that. A more established brand with more resources.

[00:39:00] What’s a couple of options there, or one that we could talk about for the listeners today. A couple

[00:39:04] Chase Dimond: of thoughts come to mind. And again, I don’t know a kind of class. You’d be surprised at how many brands aren’t doing, like cross sales or upsells. I think that’s one. And then two is like, I guess this probably is a little bit more like granular and advanced, but like within Klaviyo, in particular, you can create these custom tracking links or you basically can tag certain items.

[00:39:21] So super simple example say that I own an apparel brand and I have a category for men, women, and children. Right. So James, you open up this email and I have each of these respective. Tagged. Right. So typically might say like my logo, right? It might say like, chase diamond might have a header that says like men’s women’s children and then it will get into the email, right?

[00:39:42] Like the very classic product navigation header bar. Um, and I might want to track each of those links with custom buttons. So if you click on men’s, I’ll say, okay. In the campaign, uh, James clicked on the men category or in the flow, James clicked on the women’s camp. Or in a different campaign or something, he clicked on kids.

[00:40:01] Right. And knowing you, right. I know that you have a wife and I know that you have two kids, so you might be a kind of someone that’s confusing. You might end up clicking all three of those things. Cause all three of those things matter. Whereas other people typically are going to be shopping for them, maybe themselves or maybe a significant other on the one example I’m thinking about is like, we worked with the chive, which is like the men’s millennial site on their brand, that shy rate.

[00:40:21] And most of their demo was men. Most of the people buying their stuff was men say probably three quarters of the people were men. So a lot of people are hitting that typically shopping for themselves. So we would get a sense of great. They clicked on that button. And then we would start looking at the things that they were, were viewing that in decarceration.

[00:40:39] And we start creating like these really gender specific automations, where it’s like, James, we noticed that you’re a dude that looks like you also have something called predictive analytics where they can tell you someone’s likely a male, a female, or they’re unsure. And they basically just take my understanding census data where if someone’s name is like 10 out of 10 times a male, they’re going to do that.

[00:40:57] Right? Like James, I think probably 10 out of 10 time is a guy, whereas Jamie could be either. Right. So James you’re likely a male. Jamie are probably the. Whereas something like a Veronica, they would say likely female, right? There’s probably not any dudes named Veronica. And if there are, I’m sorry for saying that, but they would give you this data.

[00:41:15] So we basically would be taking this data that Klayvio says around what their likely we’ll be looking at their viewing and kind of their purchase behavior. We also be kind of surveying them through these custom tracking links based off the things that they click. We’ll be trying to classify them as this gender or that gender and serving them content that was highly specific at James because you’re interested in stuff.

[00:41:35] Wanting to show you our six most popular products that men have been buying over the last month. Now, even sorted them from least to most expensive, by the way, all these items are under $40. So the first item I show you is going to be our most popular t-shirt that’s $20 and $25 and then 30 and then 35 and then 40.

[00:41:51] Right? So I’m really showing you items that are super specific to the time and very specific to men. And you want stuff. That’s the latest and greatest, right? You want stuff that’s popular. You don’t want to buy something that no one has. Uh, you want to buy things that people love. So that’s one example.

[00:42:06] Another example of that same type of thing is like, say for example, I run a weekly e-commerce newsletter. I can start asking people questions of like, Hey, please click on the one that classifies you. I work at an agency, I work on an e-com brand. I’m a freelancer, right? And depending on which one you click, I’m automatically going to tag your profile that says James you’re part of an agency.

[00:42:24] And then I can start serving you automation, content, or even campaign content. That’s specific to Asia. Hey, James, here’s my PDF on how agency employees or agency owners can improve their hiring. Hey, here’s my ebook on how agencies can increase their retainers through X, Y, and Z, or maybe I clicked that I.

[00:42:45] Hey, chase. Here are your three best tips, email presenters, all e-commerce brands have to do right after the welcome series for non buyers. If did the abandoned checkout, you have to do the customer. Thank you, right. Or, Hey, I’m a freelancer. Here are ways in which I’d go about prospecting and trying to land new.

[00:43:01] And here are ways in which I approach agencies to try to do white label of your service for them. Right. So those are kind of some, I guess, more advanced flows that we’re building is based off things that people are clicking. We’re automatically tracking them and kind of serving them without them knowing.

[00:43:15] And I know that’s kind of creepy, but we’re using it to serve them more content, which makes the experience better for everyone.

[00:43:20] James Sowers: Yeah. I mean, I think there are different ways to approach it. Like there is definitely a creepy or a sleazy way to do it, but if it’s in the interest of providing more targeted information, that’s actually that.

[00:43:31] When done properly, it enriches the customer experience. So I think it’s like, there’s a solid moral ground. There’s a moral way to do it. It can also be used for bad, right. Or for evil. So to speak. What I love about the UTM thing is conventional marketing wisdom says like you should only have one CTA, right?

[00:43:44] Maybe a secondary CTA, but in e-commerce that’s not always possible. Like you have a bunch of product categories. And if you don’t know a lot about the recent. You’re doing yourself a disservice to only present one, like men’s right, because if I’m a woman and I’m not interested in men’s apparel, then that’s just not going to resonate with me.

[00:43:59] But if you present all, like I can choose my own adventure. So to speak. What I love about that is like, over time you enrich this data. So it’s like, okay, James is a confusing one because he clicked on all three categories, men, women, and. But if you use some of that Klayvio or census data, and it’s like, okay, well, his name’s James, so he’s probably a dude.

[00:44:15] So if he also happened to click on women’s stuff pretty regularly, right around mother’s day, maybe we send him a campaign that says here’s something for your wife, for your mom, for the woman in your life. That increases customer lifetime value, because maybe about something for myself as kind of a treat yourself thing.

[00:44:29] But if you know that I tend to click on the women’s category every now and then it feels smart to put me in that segment to send me a mother’s day thing so that maybe I can do a gifting experience instead of a self. Yes. That’s exactly it. Awesome. Cool. So I got just a couple more questions for you. One is around testing.

[00:44:43] I think that’s a big missed area for a lot of brands. Maybe the more established brands, not so much because they have dedicated teams around this, but there’s smaller medium-sized brands. I think they’re just trying to tread water with getting stuff out regularly, right? Like just staying disciplined about their campaigns and keeping that consistent cadence.

[00:44:57] I don’t think they do a lot of experimentation. You have this unique position where you’ve got a large team, you’re working with a bunch of clients. I know that you’ve tweeted about, like, we try to run X number of tests every month on each client, because we always want to be learning. We always want to be experimenting.

[00:45:09] What are maybe a couple of examples of things that you’re testing people know the basics, subject line, whatever CTA links and the copy in there. Is there anything maybe unintuitive that you guys are testing that you bring to the table to add value?

[00:45:21] Chase Dimond: We talked about like open rates or the right there.

[00:45:23] There’s typically three things that you can control on the open rate side, obviously where you land the primary folder of the promotions to spam. Those inherently have certain kind of constraints on how much opens you’re going to get. But let’s say all things aside, let’s assume we’re going to be hitting the primary inbox.

[00:45:39] There are three things that you control to get people to open. One is the, from name, right? So people look at, if you could just visualize your email, you have the, from name that starts to kind of on the. So from chase from James, from the good whoever’s sending it, you, then you have the subject line, right?

[00:45:53] All makes sense. And then you have, what’s called the preview text for the pre header text, and that’s basically a secondary subject line is. It kind of gives you additional info about the email. So one of the things that like we ignored for a really, really long time was the, from name it’s like, who cares about that?

[00:46:07] Like just the firm name that actually moves the needle matters a lot more than we thought. So for me and my personal newsletter, I’ve been testing everything from like chase diamond. So the capital C and then the capital D and my last name and then everything else. Right. Lower case, just like you normally would write someone’s name.

[00:46:23] So I’ve been testing that. All caps in my name. Right? So chase diamond, that kind of stands out because no one else is doing all caps. Typically as a firm name, I even tried doing chase and then like the diamond emoji. And then I’ve even tried doing chase that chase diamond, which is actually my email as the firm name and all those different types of things have like drastically different types of opens.

[00:46:44] Like the more standard, just chase diamond, upper Casey applications. That does very average, whereas like the one with the emoji, I think performed a little bit under average, cause it was kind of weird, whereas like the all caps like performed above average than sending from my email address, chase the chase diamond based cause as chase at chase diamond subject line and this, so again, that’s the from email, but it’s also becoming the firm name and people are just like, well, this is weird.

[00:47:08] Like I’ve never seen that. Like that really stands out in your inbox, you know? And I was seeing, let’s say. 10 20% lift sometimes on just sending from an email address, which is kind of

[00:47:17] James Sowers: interesting. That is interesting. I mean, maybe it’s not the highest quality signal, right? Like maybe they’re like, oh, this is kind of spammy.

[00:47:23] Like I’m not used to seeing an email address in the, from name field, but that does get them to open the email and they’re like, oh, okay, well that was a little weird, but this top paragraph is pretty compelling to me. So I’ll keep reading. So it did its job, right. It’s counterintuitive. But like maybe originally it was a negative single and like, I’m not sure what’s going on with this email.

[00:47:38] The one they go explore though. If the content is good and maybe that’s the lesson here. If your content is good and you’re leading with value and you’re educating and you’re not always like hitting people with sales pitches, you can do some of this. Like, not that it’s gray hat, but like, it can start off with like maybe a lukewarm or a negative signal and turn into a good thing.

[00:47:54] Right. And the purpose is it did his job. It got more people to open the email and engage with that content. Right. Exactly.

[00:48:00] Chase Dimond: So, yeah. I never want to be clickbait. He don’t want to do that. And that’s why the subject lines and preview text are always like no interesting or kind of on point. And they’re never like misleading.

[00:48:10] So that’s why I think like the, from name is an interesting one to be able to have a little bit of fun and a little bit of leeway with, so again, the front end, I think is probably the interesting one there. And then once people open it, right? Like you kind of alluded and mentioned some of the ones, but there’s certain things that you have to do to get people to, to click it’s testing the plain text versus the designed emails.

[00:48:29] Right. Just running it side by side. It’s testing different offers like 10% versus $10 or free product with the purchase versus free shipping versus whatever it might be. Um, testing the offers, um, those types of things, right? Testing things like gifts versus static imagery. So there’s a lot of things that you can test within the email to try to get people to take the click and the goal of email.

[00:48:50] I think a lot of people think the goal of email is to drive a purchase. And obviously, right, that’s the goal of a lot of things, but that’s further down. The goal for email is to get people to click onto the landing page. And the goal of the landing page is get people to. I had the car start checking out and buy.

[00:49:01] Right. So I really see emails like the vehicle to drive. Whether that’s interest in 10 purchase intent to the Lander and then the Lander needs to do the job of communicating social proof value, benefits to ultimately drive the

[00:49:15] James Sowers: sale. Yeah. I love that mentality because that’s what we use in our line of work.

[00:49:19] Too many people have products on their homepage and the CTA button says, add. And it’s like, well, I’m not ready yet. Right? Like your homepage is only supposed to get somebody to the immediate next step. So maybe it’s a category. Let me explore a category. And then the category page gets them to an individual product.

[00:49:31] And then the product gets them to add it to the cart and the cart gets them to complete the purchase. Right. That’s the step-by-step process. You’re describing something very similar where it’s like, you want to get them to open the email check. Okay. Read the email check. Okay. Engage with the CTA. Check it’s as a landing page and then let the landing page take it from there.

[00:49:46] Love them mentality because it really aligns with. What we’re doing on our side. Listen, I only want to keep you for a few more minutes. One more question about testing. A lot of people are not testing slightly less. People are running some tests, but I think very few are running tests and kind of tracking those learnings.

[00:50:00] So how does your team, like you’re running all these different tests, how you make sure that. You don’t run the same test next month, or you document those learnings and share them across the organization. What’s your system for doing that? Like do you log that stuff? Yeah, we do. So

[00:50:11] Chase Dimond: we’re used to something called notion.

[00:50:13] It’s not island dot, so notion dot. So as our project management system, it’s like a Monday, a Trello Asana every single week, we’d have a weekly call with our. And we’re tracking what we did. What went well, what didn’t go well, the learning, so every single week we almost have like a report card or a scorecard where we’re tracking.

[00:50:31] Hey, we sent three campaigns, we set up two new automations. We built a new pop up. We ran these three tasks on open rates. We tried a subject line that had emoji and one without the emoji for. I had a demo that was 18 to 25. The emoji worked really, really well. However, the demo for a different client with the emoji for 60 and older performed terribly, right?

[00:50:54] So we’re, we’re kind of writing things down that are granular and specific to a brand like on that specific scorecard. And if there were things where it’s like, Hey, you know, we tried this from name of chase that chase down in versus chase down. Um, and that works really, really well. That’s something that could be rolled out in applicable to all of our brands, right.

[00:51:10] Because that’s not specific to act demo necessarily. That’s something that’s more universal versus like, Hey, this specific emoji worked for this demo. Right. And that’s something that we’ve been rolling out and trying, and a lot of our brands and we’re seeing probably eight out of 10 times, like that same result holding true.

[00:51:25] Try and like the, from name as the email. Um, and again, Because it’s so new and no one’s doing it. There probably is some window of activity where like, it’s going to be way above average. And then there’s this thing called, like the law of shitty click-throughs as more and more people adopted it more and more people try it that 10 or 20% boost that you used to get.

[00:51:42] My only be like one or 2% boost over to. So, yeah, we’re logging in on a specific card for a specific client and any ones that we feel like it’d be more applicable or we want to double down and be like, Hey, this worked really, really well for brand a well that worked for brands, B, C, and D. And we’ll try for brand see if it does.

[00:51:58] It’s like, all right, well, y’all need to roll this out for brands.

[00:52:01] James Sowers: Yeah. Maybe the learning point there is inside of a single organization. Try it for one product line. If it works well there, maybe apply it to another product line or try it in the welcome series. And if it works all there, try tried in the abandoned cart series is kind of like, but you’re not gonna be able to do that.

[00:52:13] So if you just test that will help you learn and grow. But if you test document, share learnings, apply them elsewhere. That accelerates that growth curve exponentially, I would say. So maybe that’s, it’s a key learning point there. Awesome. So one more question. If somebody is listening to this episode and they’re like, ah, man, I really wish that I could just kind of look over the shoulder of a brand.

[00:52:30] That’s doing email marketing the right way. And maybe that’s a client of yours or maybe it’s just some other brand you’re not working with directly. Can I go James and go to the website and put my email in and just watch for the next 30 or 60 days and see how they handle email and learn what best practices look like?

[00:52:44] Chase Dimond: I think my recommendation depends on. What’s your goal is, and kind of like category that you’re in, but a couple that come to mind, like I think a magic spoon makes some pretty cool, like graphic e-mails they do a good job digitally with their emails. So the magic spoon to cereal brand, I think outdoor voices does a pretty interesting job with some of their emails.

[00:53:02] Brooklyn is pretty like aggressive with their emails. They do a lot of offers and this and that and the other, but they’re very consistent, right? Like I think movement’s kinda like probably like the typical classic example. No very like aspirational lifestyle focus, very image, graphic, heavy. There was like a bunch of brands depending on like the goal.

[00:53:19] And there’s probably no, like Chubbies is a little bit out there and crazy and fun and just really leaning into their demo and their group. But as someone that’s not in their demo personally, like some of their emails, the fact that they send them a third day kind of gets to be a bit much. So, oh, my consumer hat Chubbies is a bit excessive to me, but as my marketer hat, I really appreciate it.

[00:53:38] I think it’s kind of funny. So, yeah, those are just a couple that

[00:53:41] James Sowers: come to mind. Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. I liked that you took like the categorical spin on that and like, if you’re looking for X follow this brand, if you’re looking for why follow this brand? My advice to the listener is like, if you’re going to maybe use a burner email, but if you wanna use your main email set up a filter in your email service provider, that anything that comes from a specific domain, put it in a folder and then it’s not clogging up your inbox, but you can go in once a month or whatever the right cadence is for.

[00:54:03] And look at everything they’ve sent over the last 30 days. And then you kind of see the strategy and aggregate. So you see just that brand’s emails, all kind of listed out. You could see their last 12 emails and you’re like, well, they’re really experimenting with, from names or subject lines or whatever.

[00:54:13] And then you click through and you’re like, they’re testing graphic versus text only. And so that’s my favorite way to get like the high level view of cause sometimes if you just like, if it’s in your inbox amongst everything else kind of gets lost in the weeds. But if you could see like this trend line of what they’ve been doing over the last 30 or 60 days, that’s a lot more powerful.

[00:54:28] Awesome. So chase, thanks so much for joining us. So many knowledge bombs, man, I could’ve gone another hour just on the automations or we didn’t even get into segmentation. There’s a bunch of other stuff that I wanted to talk about, but I want to respect your time. So before I let you go, where can folks go to learn more about you?

[00:54:42] I’ll just go with structured. Cause it’s got like three different names. So you could use structured. Anything else that you’re working on this, the opportunity to plug and let folks know where they can follow your journey. Yeah. For daily,

[00:54:51] Chase Dimond: the tweets and whatnot on email agency being a dad, whatever it might be.

[00:54:56] Follow me on. Handles e-com chase diamond. No end diamond, such as D I M O N D. So e-com chase diamond, uh, tons of great tweets and threads on e-com email.

[00:55:06] James Sowers: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks so much again for your time today. We’ll link all this stuff up in the show notes. Go follow chase. He’s a great follow on Twitter.

[00:55:12] If you’re over there and subscribe to his email newsletter to cause shocker, he’s pretty good at that chase. Thanks again for your time today. And we’ll look forward to having you back some time in the future. Thanks for having me. Hey everybody. This is James again. And before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on as director of marketing here at the.

[00:55:29] It’s called the e-commerce insiders list. And it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, Q and a sessions, website, tear downs, and anything else we can dream up. It doesn’t cost you anything, but your email address. And we promise to always respect your inbox.

[00:55:45] This is just our way of forming strong relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business. If you’re in. You can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page, we’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed and you’ll be off and running.

[00:56:05] Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders. Just like you. If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications until then keep an eye out for the next episode of the e-commerce insight show.

[00:56:19] And we’ll talk to you soon.