11: Tips For Better Results From Your E-Commerce Email Marketing in 2025

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Fickle. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or investment. Each episode, we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we are here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. Welcome everyone. Hi, how's it going today? Sorry about last week's episode. We actually had a tech snafu happen where our software that we record in literally ate 52 minutes of podcast. Now you guys, you wouldn't have gotten 52 minutes if you're like, oh God, thank you platform for eating that. It's, it's okay. You would've gotten one, but just, we ended it. And it went poof. And we should have known something when the screens went all wonky about 20-something minutes in. We should have been like, hmm, is this still working right? But we didn't, and we suffered, and you suffered for not having an episode. So that aside, let's move on. We are back again today. Andrew, how's it going?

It's going good. I am excited to have an— well, I shouldn't jinx it, but hopefully I have an episode go out. Please leave us a review. It, it is not a podcast expert. We just kind of went and decided to make a podcast without knowing anything about it. But I believe that's the thing that makes podcasts grow. That's what everyone always talks about is please leave us a review, it helps others find us. I'm like, okay, so leave us a review. We have like, I think we have one review on Spotify and like no reviews anywhere else. So please leave us a review.

Especially if you're on a platform other than Spotify.

We're on Spotify too, cuz there are a lot of listeners there. I think Apple is the one. They always tell, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm like, okay, they always talk about Apple Podcasts. Give us a podcast review on Apple. Yeah. Apple and Spotify. Actually, okay, no good on tangents, but there's in our podcast platform, there is stats on what thing you listen to us through. And I— Oh, are we ethically spying? Analytics. That's something we'll talk about.

That's a great episode for the future. Ethically spying.

Yeah. Looking at your analytics, looking at your traffic sources, who is sending you traffic, and it helps you kind of focus your efforts because like, just like with Anthem, there is 8 billion podcast platforms to listen to us through. If I'm sharing a link, it would make more sense for me to send you a link to the platform that people are listening to us on and not have to like list where Spotify and Apple and Amazon and whatever else is.

They killed Google Podcasts and I was so upset. I hate Spotify in comparison.

It's, it's on YouTube.

Uh, it's on YouTube.

Being installed as our, our feed on there. Okay, 52.9% of you listen to us through Chrome, 17% are on Apple, 12% are on Pocket Casts, another 12% are on unknown, and 6% are on Spotify. So most of you listen on a desktop and compared to on a phone. No, actually, that's Most of yous own Macs, most of yous in the United States, but hello to everyone in Hong Kong and Russia listening, because they're in our top 4. I promise we'll actually talk about stuff that you want to listen to soon. What are we talking about today, Melissa?

Today we are talking about your absolute favorite topic, Andrew, how to email with confidence in 2025.

Bad choice of topic for the week when we're the most cramped for time is getting me to email.

So you're going to pick like one thing to talk about in email.

Okay. So what do you want to talk about for 2025? There's like, there's lots of stuff. I would say email. Why should you do email? It's the one platform that you own. Well, you own the list. You don't own the platform itself, but the list is movable. Like if TikTok goes and April or whenever it's gonna go. You have to do a lot of work and like beg into, please follow me on Instagram, please come to YouTube.

Whereas I recommend Klaviyo for a whole bunch of reasons and the list keeps, uh, I feel like you've dropped two sentences and you've mushed them together there, Andrew. Instead of begging them to go to another platform, beg them to follow you, just sign up for your email list. And the platform you recommend, Klaviyo.

Yeah, but if you're wanting to move into a new social platform, like, if you're moving to a new social platform, you have to, like, ask them and try and give them links. And I'm sure TikTok probably limits your reach if you start on Instagram. And, like, there's a lot of work to do that. Whereas if Klaviyo, the one I recommend, decides tomorrow they're shutting down, I can export my list and import it into Another platform. I'm not even gonna listen, 'cause all the really bad ones came into my head and I'm like, please don't choose that one.

Mailchimp was the first one to pop into my head.

That popped into my head. And another one I won't even dare mention. Oh, if you know us well, you'll know which one I'm thinking of. But like, it's the one platform where you can actually do that. There's pretty much nothing else out there. And it also has the biggest return on investment, the more like the money you put into email marketing is the easiest to get something back from.

Obviously, as long as you're actually sending emails. Yeah, I don't know what you want. People who say, I'm not making any money off an email, but they're not sending any.

I spent the last hour before we started recording the podcast doing a big complete Klaviyo audit of two of our clients' accounts. It was like, okay, we looked at forms and like the form, like we had one person who was kind of in benchmark, one person wasn't. We're looking at consent and how we get people in. And then we got to part of my— I have like an audit spreadsheet with like yes or no questions. And it was like, do you send at least 2 emails a week? No. Do you send around 12 months? No. And it's like, okay, none of the rest of this really matters because we're not getting any of the— you're not doing any of the work. We're not putting our card in the ATM. Like, you can't take the money out if we don't ask for it. Yeah, yeah. My card's in the ATM, but like the Screen is up with like, how much do you wanna take out? How much is the button?

I have a different analogy for you, Andrew. That's not ATM related. So the people who send, and if you send one email a week, I'm gonna preface this with saying I'm proud of you for sending one. That is much better than sending zero emails a week. But if you really wanna bank on that ROI that you can get from email, unfortunately you do have to send more. Unfortunately or unfortunately. So it's the same thing as being like, well, I ate a salad once this week. Why aren't I losing weight? I send emails once a week. Why aren't I making as much money as I want to? I replaced one Big Mac with a salad. I thought I'd be losing weight by now.

Yeah, a little bit. But the, like, if it seems a lot, like the, when I said the 12 cents a month, if you think about it, when you have We get to that 2 emails a week, which if you're just starting out, start with one. For things like deliverability and just getting quality content out there, I'm totally fine and would recommend you start with one and we gradually increase. But say you're sending 2 emails a week, that's 8, you know, adding a flash sale. If you have 2 emails a week and a flash sale, you get to your 12 emails really easy because you're sending like just a week of flash sale, you're sending those extra 4 emails over that weekend. That's it. And that is really easy to do, and I have a whole ton of resources out there if you need help to do that. Also, automated emails can— and this is where I really get Tiki Cat— is, I mean, like, okay, maybe I don't get to 12 a month, which I still like to get to, campaign, like, 12 campaigns a month, but you also have all of the You're welcome to see what's going out. Abandon cart, abandon browse, whether it's someone's anniversary, whether it's someone's birthday, what if they reach a specific spend, what if they've made an order and you want to follow up, what if you want them to leave a review. And like, obviously we're not going to like just flood people with millions of emails, but there's a whole bunch of automation you can add in there to bump up the amount of emails you're sending without you even having to do anything other than that initial setup. Those emails make you money. Those emails build relationships.

You, they get you to your 12 very easily.

Yeah. And I'm going to let you off of that. If you were, if we were working together and like doing well, I would still say, okay, you should still have your 12 people a month. But yeah, what I was trying to say is it's all based on customer action. Campaigns are very Like, apart from your segmentation of like email and engagement, it's all kind of, I'm just sending you products, um, and we'll personalize it a tiny bit. But all of that automation is completely personalized. Someone has to take some sort of action to do that. For them to get the abandoned cart email, they have to have visited your site. To get a post-purchase email, they have to have made a purchase. So it's all really hyper-specific and relevant to that one customer. It's like, it's obviously they're pre-written as well, but it's like sending a one-on-one email to someone to like actually sit down and be like, okay, here's an email just to you. You're not sending out a mass email. Melissa, because she came and she wouldn't buy the light-up shoes, we're going back to earlier podcast episodes, and because I sent the abandoned cart email, I sweetened the deal with a bit of a discount, Melissa bought two pairs of light-up shoes. Unnecessary subscription, and she gets a new pair every month. Plus, I then did a post-purchase email, and she now also in her subscription gets a new pair of glow-in-the-dark laces every month, plus glow-in-the-dark socks.

I want glow-in-the-dark socks. That sounds awesome. You had me thinking, it's like you could create a charm club because they have like those Croc charms. I'm sure they have ones you can put on shoelaces.

The gibbets.

Is that what they're called? Is it gibbet?

The Crocs ones are.

Okay. That sounds like the stuff you take out of a turkey. That's giblets.

Yeah. There's, there's a massive market for gibbets.

Huh. My nephew went shopping on Amazon. I don't know why my sister gave her, him her phone so he could go shopping and just load the cart. For the one pair of fake Crocs he has. He's 6.

So just thinking about that consistency, like, there are so many ways to get around it. Even if you aren't able to for whatever reason, if it's mindset or time, you can still incorporate automation to try and get some of that consistency. In there, and then over time we work together in whatever capacity we get you to the point where you're sending those 12 emails a month. But it doesn't have to be overnight. But if you want to, if you want to have a success from your email marketing in 2023, send more emails. Like, when I was going through with our clients and going, okay, okay, okay, do you have this, and do you have this thing, and do you do this? And then I was like, okay, do you send this many emails? No. I'm like, I'm on your email list. No, I know you don't. Otherwise I'd be getting them. It's very easy. Okay, this whole section of the, of the audit where we talk about consistency, like establishing a weekly campaign schedule and sustained engagement in the— it was all nos for this section. It's like, okay, well, all of the experimentation you'd be testing is your list clean? Like, none of it matters if you aren't actually using the list. So that's like the first important thing is email your list more. Find a way around it if you're not gonna be able to consistently do it. And again, with all this AI and stuff, it's even easier than ever. I hate to say it, like, you have no excuse and just do it. We're, we're to the point where I feel like I can say, okay, I think you can probably do this.

Even, and even if you do it poorly. As long as you're not like straight to spam on everything, you should still get some kind of return or signaling from your audience beyond unsubscribe.

I wouldn't want you to stay poor forever because obviously it starts to affect some stuff, but if it's between I don't email at all and I send out not my best email, at least you got that email out and you got some data. Did no one open it? Okay, maybe it's the subject line. Did people open it? But then they didn't actually click the call to action. Okay, either it's the content of the email, and the subject line is obviously good because people opened, but either something in the content of the email isn't connecting and people aren't moving down the page, or your call to action itself sucks. Did people do all that but then they didn't purchase on the website? Well, either you had mismatched expectations between the email and the website, or there's a problem on your website, and then that's a whole different podcast episode. But Yes. Look at me. Okay. I have that data. Before, if I didn't hit send, I don't know if I can, if I can create a good subject line. I don't know if my email content's any good. I don't know if I can write a good call to action. I don't know if my website is set up for conversions because no one's visiting it. I would much rather you sent the email and got the data. Then we can look into it and actually start to improve.

Okay. I want to. Go back to what you said there, because you went really fast through all of that, Andrew. I just want people to know, like, well, one of the steps to emailing with confidence is knowing what piece of data relates to what. So you sent an email. Now you have data. That was the big thing Andrew was going to add right there. If they opened your email, your headline worked. Okay, your subject line worked if they opened your email. Next question. Did they click your email? If yes, your content and your CTA, your call to action, your button, worked. If not, it didn't. So there was a mismatch between they opened, they were curious, but they didn't do anything. Okay. Now, you know, that headline you can run again, maybe down 3 months down the line and try different content, different CTAs, any of that stuff. And then if they opened and they clicked, because they can only click if they opened, the next question is, did they buy or did they take whatever action was on the page where you sent them? So if you took them to a product, did they buy the product? If you took them to social, did they react to the video? Did they, whatever you were doing on there. And then you have more data right there. Okay. Did they buy? If yes, fantastic. Everything is great. If no, why didn't they buy? We can do a whole episode on why don't they buy things, but like, that's the 3 critical data points that you have right there. Open, click, and conversion. I just want you to recap that.

I'll say for most of the why didn't they buy is on-site stuff. But the, the one part is an email is that mismatched expectations. If Melissa emails me and says, I have the best piece of jewelry ever exist, like it comes in all these colors and you can totally customize, like she makes those big promises. I go to the website, they're like, oh, it's a team of people. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna leave. And that had more to do with the email setting up something that she didn't deliver on, on the page itself. And that is, well, it's kind of 50/50 between the two because here half of it is email and half of it. But that's the one part where it's like, okay, you need to make sure your email has promises enough. And again, I think this is happening more often now with AI because the AI is writing stuff. They always promise this, you're like, I don't have time to read this. I'm just going to copy and paste into Klaviyo.

Yeah, that looks good. So I just click.

Yeah. Klaviyo, like me, I've seen it like I'm on a lot of lists for courses and like sometimes people just like FAQs and like, I can tell the FAQs are written by ChatGPT and I don't know if these promises it's making are true. It told you there's a guarantee. That's not what the guarantee on the website is. Like, which one, which one did you actually write? Because you've just sent out some false promises there. Like, and just make sure you're checking and that does it actually do. Sometimes people are like, oh yeah, that sounds good. You actually need to sit down and think, okay, wait, ChatGPT said this and it does sound good, but doesn't match what's actually going on in my product. Yeah. Although ChatGPT said like this fully customizable, go with any outfit necklace. And it's like, well, that sounds really good. But when I, like Melissa's like, wait a minute, this thing is really, like I'd say This says evening statement jewelry only. It's not customizable. It comes in one option. So I like that. And it also is like a really big statement thing in like bright green. It's like, okay, well that doesn't go with anything. There's not even a color option. Like, okay, it sounded good, but does it actually make sense? It's like, take the time and sit and look through that. So that's a big AI thing is there's a lot of, I'm just going to copy and paste this. Make sure you actually read it and improve some stuff there. Okay. We're— what else am I talking about for email in 2025?

You mentioned this, uh, oh, okay.

I was gonna say segmentation. Making sure you— not never, because there is a, like a 10% of times maybe I email my whole list, but you're very rarely just going, okay, who I sent this to, newsletter, click. Create segments. Email your engaged people. The kind of strategy I spoke about today is 70% of the time you're just emailing engaged people. You're keeping your open rate high, your click rate high, your bounce rate and unsubscribes low because there's people who are actually engaging with your stuff. 20%, you go a little bit broader. I mentioned that first segment, that's where you get like the, like the, you don't have to be super worried about being really specific in your targeting because they're kind of just like every view. You do more of the kind of bingeable-y, uh, like, it doesn't all have to be product-based, it can be a bit more like the memes and the videos and the like kind of stuff. 50% of the time you go a slightly broader audience than just the super engaged ones. You go people who are maybe a little bit less engaged, haven't made a purchase for a while, and you send them some more like relevant content, some more kind of content that's really unique to your brand. You send most of your promotions to this list because it's like, okay, I want people to buy it. I want the greatest chance of people buying, so I'm going to do that. And any sort of like traffic driving things, any kind of events you're doing, make sure that those go to them. And then 10% of the time you do that whole list mostly around the Christmas time. You're like, I just want the best chance of people seeing this. And that's when you do your largest promotions. Like, your Black Friday is going to be one of your biggest promotions, and whatever other things you do throughout the year that are like your really big things. Do you make a really big deal of Mother's Day? That's when you do that. You make a big deal of whatever kind of sale is really big launches, any big kind of event type things in your business.

So if you have a giveaway going on or some kind of freebie, that's also another great time to email that whole list and get them re-engaged potentially. Uh, you disagree?

Be careful of the, if people only ever come back for the free stuff and then they disengage again and then they come back and it doesn't get like, you end up with a, they're constantly moving up and down your list and hurting your deliverability. And I don't. I don't think there's a good enough way to get the data from PingSumo into Klaviyo to see if the people are only entering giveaways. Like, I don't think there's a good way to do it.

That's true. PingSumo and Klaviyo really don't play together that well.

But a lot of giveaway stuff is really expensive. Like the fancy ones are, are the software. Yeah. I'm sure there's more that have better integrations with Klaviyo, but like, I don't want to pay $200 a month to give away stuff for free.

Depends on who those people who are entering know that might become your next $1,000 client.

Next on the chart is reputation. Um, one of the most important things in your business and not one that people talk about enough. You need to make sure you have a good enough reputation to stay in customers' inboxes. So this is kind of how you're the different email softwares, all your Yahoo's, Google's, Apple's, whatever it is, how they see you as a sender. Do you look like a legitimate person or just some sort of spam stuff that should sit into spam? If your reputation is really good, you'll go into your customer's inbox, they'll see your emails, and you'll have a chance of opening them. If your reputation is kind of in the mid to low You might sometimes be in their inbox. Sometimes you end up in spam. And if your reputation really drops and Google's like, this is going to be a danger to Melissa if she clicks Andrew's link, that's when you don't end up at all. People don't even know that this is a possibility, but you just like, they just don't save your content. They just completely hide it from the person. And that's when you don't need to worry. So how do you maintain a good sender reputation? Email often enough, but not too often. Find the sweet spot.

Find the sweet spot.

So if Melissa has no email list, she runs a giveaway next week and gets 5,000 people to enter, and then she emails them every day. Her delivery belly is going to be awful because it looks really weird to have this massive growth and email really frequently. As much as people hate the slow growth thing. If your list gradually goes up over time, you start to send in really small batches and your list grows, that looks good. And if you go from send them once a week to twice a week to 3 times a week to however many you want to go, daily, that looks more legit and like you're gradually growing and that looks really good. Instead of the, I'm just gonna go out and send emails constantly from day one, it looks kind of spammy. So finding that good sweet spot there, making sure that you are keeping your list really clean. So that means that you get people who legitimately signed up for your stuff. The best way to do that is that they, like, they have the form, they tick some sort of box, you know, or buy a list. And, um, if you're collecting, uh, emails in other ways, you're slightly more risky. Like when people, if you're doing something like we'll have to write down, yeah, their email on like a piece of paper, people like those are much more prone to either people putting down fake emails or you like transcribing it wrong. Like it looks—

as someone who does that method and gets hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails through that method. If you're going to do the paper route, you need to use a service like Neverbounce. Not an affiliate right here. And make sure that list is checked, cuz sometimes that list comes back and there's only like 3 bad email addresses on it. And sometimes that list comes back and like 50% of them are bad. And you only wanna put good emails that A system can ping that inbox and know it's real and valid and there's no question about it.

Yeah, that's a good way to add that. If you're doing giveaways, it's good to do that for that because people put in fake emails to enter giveaways, even if you made it really clear that KingSumo sends you a confirmation email, so you can't enter with a fake email. So it won't work. Doing that, if you have to, like, KingSumo is good because it has the connection and the emails. Go in gradually. But if you do something where you have to upload a list, even if it's a legit list, that kind of rings alarm bells on whatever email software you're using. And a lot of them don't tell you this, but if it's over whatever their threshold is, they will block it. That they don't— for, I think to stop people like, so it's like, okay, if you upload more than 500, we're gonna do this. Like they will just, well, just upload batches of 499. I think they keep it a secret on purpose. On purpose. But I know Klaviyo definitely seems to do it because I've seen it with Moza, and I've seen it in— I think it's ConvertKit. I think it's— I think it's ConvertKit does it to everyone who imports a list over a certain size. They immediately block all sending from your account until you like email them and say, okay, this is how I'm going to prove that this is legit. So that's another risky tactic. But okay, you do lose your ability to send emails from a bot, but they are saving you from yourself a little bit cuz they are checking that you are doing things in a legit way.

If you're listening to all this and you're concerned, like, shit, am I on a good list? Am I on a bad list? Am I in danger? Am I killing it? Because I know, I know our clients and their immediate reaction would be like, I'm not gonna send anything. Because I might be on a bad list, so I'm not going to send anything, or it might put me on a bad list. So to find out where you are, or at least a benchmark, a great thing to do is to sign up for Google Postmaster. It's completely free and it will tell you how you're doing as long as you've been sending emails. If you haven't been sending emails, they have no data to tell you how you're doing. But if you have, they can tell you where you sit.

I stay with, with our clients. One of them, you have to send at least 1,000 emails in a month to get this. And that's the number of messages. Like if you have 500 people on your list, you send 2 emails, that's 1,000 emails. You don't have to send 1,000 individual messages. And one person had it and the other one didn't because they didn't email their list. I know they have around 400 people, so they only send 3 emails a month. That's less than one a week. And they didn't hit it. So, obviously it's going to hurt you if you're doing that. One of the reasons why email software checking to see if people are uploading legit lists is because you don't have your own individual IP that these send from. You're in a little kind of pool of other similar businesses. And if one of them does something bad, it brings down the deliverability of someone else. That is a little bit complicated. I don't want to go into too much detail, but it does, it also, it's not good to lose your email. Ability to email, but there's good parts in there. Yeah, maintain good reputation, email often enough, but don't too much, and grow slowly. Like, all the horrible things that seem really boring and slow are good when it comes to reputation. And make sure you have your— you're sending from a professional domain, so not @gmail, not @yahoo, not @aol. @yourbusinessname.com. Set up DKIM, SPF, all that stuff that you probably, if you know what it is, you know what I mean. And if you don't, ask in the group.

Whoever sends your emails will give you directions.

If they're good. Some of them would. No, and I'm also like, I don't know if they'll continue to, but ConvertKit, or Kit as they are now, are like the only, I think maybe MailerLite does, there's like only a couple. That will still let you send from like a Gmail address, which is going to—

that's because they're masking, they're putting you under a, a subdomain of them.

Yeah. Which again, you don't like, set dedicated sending domain and not from a personal address because it still shows up in Google Ads from your email address.

I want to say that Beehive and Substack might do that too, or have that as an offering. Because until they know, I know with Beehive, until they know what you're doing, which is not Really related. Now we're getting on email tech and just having a conversation. Uh, Beehive will slowly switch you over to your own servers once they know that you're doing well and people are actually responding to your email positively.

I don't know. I'm looking at one, Substack. I think they do it in their own kind of way. Like, I think they, like, Oh, I should just see who it is. If you're, if you want to do PR for your business, Hype Yourself by Lucy Warner is a really good Substack newsletter to go. And like, it's called Hype Yourself and the email that comes from is hypeyourself@substack.com. So you seem to get a Substack email, but it's like the, I'm looking at the stuff and it's like mg1.substack, but it's probably Mailgun. This must be what they use to send. So I think they're setting up all that stuff. But I think they do, like, I think they are doing it right, but they're just kind of doing it for you on the backend to give you a game. Mm-hmm. That is a really unique, I don't know anyone else that does that.

Uh, there are a couple of you.

Yeah. If you're e-com, you're probably not on Substack, so don't worry about that.

I do have one person that I drool over, a stained glass person who's on Substack. She does fantasy-themed stained glass and her work is gorgeous.

Mm-hmm. It depends how you email us. If you're more like, I'm the creator and I'm talking about my story and how I do all this stuff, maybe the newsletter Substacky style works. If you're like, I just want to talk about sales and stuff, it's going to be much easier if you can actually embed products and stuff in Blockgram and Klaviyo. For the most of us, we're probably not worrying about that. Okay. I'm trying to keep us on focus because we're running out of time. Do you want to say anything else? What can I say?

I feel like we got real echoey. We probably lost everyone in the past 10 minutes.

Yeah. Okay. So those are the basics I want you to think about for 2025 is making sure that you are sending campaigns often enough. You're thinking about getting some automation set up and you are really focused on deliverability. If you have any questions about that, please ask me on Facebook group, because I'm not sure we explained it in the most concise and simple to follow way without going on 10-minute tangents in the middle. But we'd love to help you make sure that you're doing all this completely Correct. And we do have some, an exciting offer coming up sometime soon. I don't know when. In fact, we'll cover all of this and more, and that'll be our best way to get us talking.

And as we're wrapping this up here, if you're like, shoot, you mentioned that I need to get those emails in, those 12 emails, Andrew, and you mentioned flash sales, but I'm not sure how to do that, or it must take a long time to set up a flash sale. We're here to let you know that no, it does not. And we even have a surprise gift for you to get yourself a flash sale going By this weekend, easy peasy lemon squeezy, you're going to go to theproductgrowthlab.kit.com/flash. theproductgrowthlab.kit.com/flash. Kept you awake, didn't it?

I'll have a catchier link very soon once I go in and fix—

at least the not that kit part. So thanks for tuning into the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating. This is the Product Growth Lab signing off.