Five Minute Friday: The Email Marketing Hot Take Boutique Owners Need to Hear

Hi, I'm Cassidy, owner and creative director behind Simply Lense Creative. We are a boutique branding Shopify and Klaviyo marketing studio for retailers. I grew up in my family's retail kitchen store and have a very diverse background in small business retail as a whole. So I'm excited to share a perspective with you today that I feel like we don't hear about often enough when it comes to how you approach your email marketing efforts. The approach that I'm going to share is actually an approach that we take with 80% of our clients as a smarter way to see success and see see results with your email strategy, but save the business owner thousands of dollars each year in actually executing the strategy that we help them to build out. So I wanna start by asking you a question. Do you currently outsource your email marketing or do you handle it yourself? So what we see is most retailers fall into one of two camps. They're either hiring an agency and outsourcing their email marketing entirely, or they're taking a DIY approach from day one, um, that maybe doesn't have the best foundational structure behind it. Both of these paths are very common, and in the long run, both of them are very expensive, expensive for different reasons, but they are expensive nonetheless. So my advice to most of our clients is that I strongly believe you should hire somebody out in the beginning to help you build the foundation for your email strategy right from the start. You know, we work primarily in Klaviyo, and when you get into Klaviyo, it is a beast of a platform. It can be very overwhelming. But once you understand how it works, how to make changes on it, how to read your data, it can actually become very streamlined, very easy to use. And when it's done right, it's easy for us to hand it back to you to take and run with it. Nobody cares about your business as much as you. And I think given the nature of the retail world that we're in now, where your inventory is changing quickly, maybe you want to run a promotion on the fly, or you've got a last-minute event, something happening in store. There's a lot of power in knowing how to go in, create a campaign, draft it all out. In-house without relying on an agency and oftentimes seeing like a time delay in actually, you know, getting the campaign put together, getting it from their team to review, getting it scheduled, getting it sent. So I think there's a lot of power in really knowing how to take those efforts in-house and create a strategy that allows you to kind of rinse and repeat your email strategy each week or biweekly, however often it is that you're sending out these campaigns without relying solely on an agency. So a majority of our clients will hire us to build out the foundational pieces of their email platform and their strategy and get everything up and running, help them to understand segments, which ones are most applicable to their business, why they need to use them. And then they let us turn around and train them or someone on their team of how to execute, what it means, everything that we've set up, how to understand segments and why you should use them and how you should use them. And a lot of the times, you know, at first it can feel overwhelming of like, well, I don't know what I'm doing, but I always remind them of like, there's a lot of power to having this knowledge and this experience to be able to bring this back in-house and let somebody on your team or yourself run with it to not only save you money each month on what you might spend on an agency to execute this for you, but also give some ownership to carry out goals and visions that you have for the business and connect it back to all of your other marketing channels that are ideally supporting your email marketing efforts as a whole. So when we talk about the foundations, you know, a lot of the times we're looking at things like your automated flows or your automated sequences sending in the background. This could look like a welcome series, an abandoned cart series, your post-purchase series, a win-back sequence. Um, all those emails that are triggering and sending without you manually going in and saying to do it. They're running in the background. They're nurturing your customers throughout their entire journey within your brand's ecosystem. We're also talking about your audience segments. And when we talk about audience segments, we're talking about hyper-specific groups of people. Um, and you know, really dialing in on who we're talking to and how we're talking to them. So sometimes this looks like very specific VIP segments of customers. So people who have spent, you know, X amount of dollars. In a set time period, um, customers who are local because maybe we have an event or something coming up in store and there's no need to market to everybody on your list, especially if they're not within a perimeter or radius of your brick-and-mortar location. The message becomes watered down and not applicable. So we have local customers, we have segments that differentiate between first-time customers and repeat customers. Some of my favorite segments to set up include like brand-specific segments. So if you carry, you know, more well-known or name brand jeans, for example, say you carry Mother or Pistola or one of those where people seek those brands out and you might have customers who are super loyal to that particular brand. Make a segment. Every time you get a new shipment in of that brand or whatever it is you've kind of segmented your audience out for there, send a campaign to that set group of people. You know that they have an interest in what it is that you're telling them about, and it makes that email experience even more personalized versus a campaign that, you know, has just been created and sent out to the masses. So segmentation is where a lot of very specific campaigns can come into play and it helps you to speak to that very specific group of people without feeling like everything is a marketing blast, without watering down your open rates, your click rates, and all those different analytical things that we wanna keep an eye on within your email platform as a whole. So this also looks like setting up universal content and templates that you can use in kind of a rinse and a repeat effort across your email flows and across your more one-off campaigns. The reason why I think this is so important is because we want to keep a clear and clean visual presence across any marketing message that they might be getting, whether that's coming from an automated flow or something that's more of a one-time campaign. So inside of Klaviyo, I think it's important that people use a healthy mix of blocks built into Klaviyo natively. So product blocks, button blocks, text blocks, link blocks, like what you can build out in the Klaviyo email builder. I always recommend like we maximize that to its fullest potential. Save those sections as you style them as universal content. So each time you go in and you create a campaign, you have this set style for what a product block should look like when you drop it in. What the formatting of a text block looks like when you drop it in. But I also think having a set of Canva templates that can act as like intros or headers into the main call to action or like the main blocks that you're going to build out within Klaviyo can be very important too. So by using universal content blocks and having a system of Canva templates that you can rinse and repeat and use consistently will help to cut your campaign creation time in half. Using those universal content blocks in Klaviyo where you have pre, pre-set up and pre-saved your brand style, the way a text block should flow in, the way a button block should look, using as many of those native elements within the email builder paired with some more design-friendly looks with those Klaviyo or with the Canva templates is really the sweet spot for creating content in a way that is efficient, in a way that is repeatable, and in a way that becomes memorable to your customers. So they come to learn like what the flow of each campaign typically looks like for you and what they can expect within each email. So there's power in that consistency and that content creation piece of it does become a lot easier when you have the groundwork and you've spent the time to build out these universal content blocks, to build out a selection of Canva templates that you can use as intros, as footers, as breaking up of sections within an email that makes your email marketing efforts that much more impactful. Back to, you know, your ongoing campaign strategy and really learning how to execute that on your own. That's back to that education piece of, you know, we'll build a lot of this out for our clients, but then we turn around and train them or somebody on their team to really take the strategy that we build out for them and teach them how to execute it in-house. So they're not relying on us as an agency to send out their campaigns each week or each month or whatever that frequency looks like. And it gives some ownership and some confidence to somebody on their team or the owner to really take their email marketing efforts and own them and understand how it works and to really, you know, flex that creative muscle with the marketing aspect of email and how it ties into all of the other avenues of marketing you might be exploring, whether that's just social media, whether it's live selling, whether that's ads. It helps you to take this email piece of it and integrate it into everything else that you're already doing. So again, I come back to a lot of our clients and, you know, really explain to them that, hey, when this is set up and this is built right from the start, it's actually a lot easier for you to take and implement yourself than you might realize. It might seem scary. It might take a couple of campaigns to really get your feet wet and understand how things function and what the overall strategy of something is. But once you have that down and you understand the core principles and the basic framework of the strategy that we've built out for you, it's really easy to bring that in-house and actually execute on your own. It saves you a ton of money. The time that you're spending, you know, doing all these efforts starts to become less and less as you get into a rhythm. And overall, it just gives you more ownership over what you're doing and more understanding over your numbers, over the data, and over the process as a whole for email when your, uh, your campaign strategy aligns, you know, with what we've created for you. I'm very much a, um, a less is more kind of person and keeping things very simple until you reach a certain point when you're like ready to grow. But I think a lot of times you see. Boutique owners think that they need to jump into this like massive big strategy around it when really they need to like nail the basics and nail the framework for the more simple efforts before they grow into those things. And that's the sweet spot with our clients where, where we do really encourage like, hey, let us set it up, let us build this out and let us teach you how to run with it because that's where you're going to see the most impact and the most success with, you know, any of these email efforts that you might be taking. Okay. So if you're listening and thinking like, all right, Cassidy, where do I actually start? A couple of ways you can start. We have an entire free guide that walks you through how to set up your flows, how to set up your segments, what this all looks like. It's totally free. It's linked in the show notes for you to grab, use as a resource, and help you to take a DIY approach to that. We also have a Klaviyo Kickstart workshop that walks you through the process that we use internally with our clients step by step of how we build this out for you. And you can do that on a DIY level. We also do a Klaviyo Foundations project. So you hire us to help you build out this foundational piece of it and then turn around and train you on how to actually execute it so you can bring your email marketing efforts in-house. But if you're somebody who feel like you already have a really strong foundation and you just need help with that more rinse and repeat kind of content creation piece to it, you definitely want to check out our Canva email templates. It is a collection of long and short form different sections that you can mix and match to combine whatever campaign it is that you're trying to send out. We are here to meet you where you're at with your email efforts. You know, it's— it can be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. And so I think meeting you where you're at, taking an approach that works for you and your business is where success often starts to come from instead of trying to fit you into a cookie cutter solution for anything. So whatever you choose to do, just remember you need the foundation built right. The strategy in place and the confidence to actually run with it yourself. And that's exactly what we're here to help you do. We love being a part of the Boutique Hub community. It is such a great resource. There's so many awesome retailers in here that we're so lucky to work with. So if you have questions, like I said, shoot me a DM on Instagram. I would love to help you do that. My call to action for you today is to go out and take messy action. Jump in, get your feet wet, figure out what you can, and know that the expert help is there for you when you need it.

Hey guys, thanks so much for listening to 5 Minute Friday. I love getting to hang out with you here on the podcast. As always, if you love this episode, send me a message, Ashley Alderson on Instagram or @theboutiquehub, and I would love to chat with you, hear your feedback, and hear what you're doing while you're listening to the episode. If it was impactful to you, please share it with a friend or subscribe and leave a rating and review wherever it is you're listening to podcasts. You guys, I appreciate you being here. Thanks for showing up. Have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you next week on 5 Minute Friday.