Email Deliverability Audit: What Every Brand Gets Wrong

There's a difference between good and great retention programs because you can have all the flows in the world, but if you're sending the same message to everyone, you're just literally leaving money on the table.

In the audit, essentially we're asking like, do you have behavioral segments beyond just openers? Are you messaging these different segments that you have in different ways? Do you have a VIP segment and are you actually treating them like VIPs? Are you excluding unengaged people from certain campaigns? If the answer to any of these happens to be no, Again, that's the focus area for you. Attention alone doesn't happen in the inbox. It happens in the actual experience.

All right, Chase, I've decided that I'm gonna go join the NFL because Phil Rivers did it.

Who's older, him or you?

I'm actually a year older, so I could actually like be like the oldest, oldest guy, except I don't have any skills there. Dude, do you think he's sore today?

Oh dude, he's gotta be. Yeah, he's gotta be sore. Gotta be hurting.

I could only imagine if I played a game of football, not even, Pro NFL football, a backyard football game would make me sore the next day, right? Like just thinking about it like that.

Oh yeah, that's crazy. More power to him. Just follow your dreams. You can do whatever you want to do.

All right. Anyways, let's shoot this pod. You ready?

Let's do it.

All right.

We're talking retention audits in 3, 2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send. Send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

All right, Chase, the title of today's pod that I wrote down is Retention Audit: How to Diagnose Any Brand in 60 Minutes. And the reason why I do this is because, well, Chase, I'm going to ask you a simple question. How many times do you get DMs from people like founders and marketers and operators and they say something very simple, like something is broken with our email program, but I can't figure out what, like how often do you get that?

Dude, all the time. Like probably every single week, if not more. Right. Yeah. And it typically tends to be like the same pattern, right? They're blaming kind of the symptoms or describing symptoms. They're not actually getting to like the root and the core of the problem.

Yeah, right, right. Like our open rate dropped or our SMS stopped working or our revenue is all over the place. Like real generic things like that, right?

Yeah. And unfortunately it's not very helpful, but you know, when we do dive in, um, we kind of find that the real issue is buried, kind of buried 3 layers deep. Let's have it. So it's not the open rate, right? It's that their abandoned cart flow hasn't fired correctly in the last 6 weeks because Their add to cart event might be broken. Yeah.

Or better yet, I always love this one. They're sending the 180-day non-openers and wondering why Gmail is putting them to spam.

Yeah. Or, or, or another one could be like their entire post-purchase flow is literally, thanks for buying, here's a coupon. And they're wondering why retention is poor, right?

Yep. So, okay. So today's pod, what we're doing is I wanna walk through like a 60-minute retention audit framework, basically, where the things that we do when brands come to us, it's like our diagnostic framework and we want to give it to everybody.

Yeah. And stick around. I mean, we say 60 minutes, we're gonna probably do this even quicker, but it's gonna be really value-oriented and packed. So, um, there are kind of 7 key areas that we check and we do it typically in order. And if you follow this, whether you're an internal brand folk or an agency or a freelancer, right? Um, I think you're gonna find the biggest revenue leaks faster than anyone else really could.

Yeah. And let's make sure we talk about how you benchmark against yourself, how, you know, top brands are using tools like inbooks.ai, our email research database so you know what good actually looks like.

Exactly. Because most brands have no idea if they're doing well or terrible. They're just guessing.

Yeah. Okay. So, all right, grab your notepads. Let's get into this episode so you can have a checklist and we'll recap all this thing at the end with it. But let's start from the top. List number 1 is step number 1 is the data infrastructure. This is like the least sexy part. It's the place that a lot of people don't Spend enough time, but it's basically your foundation.

Yeah, 100%. And if this data layer that you have is broken, unfortunately everything else that you do and you build upon it is just not going to work, right?

Yeah. You know, I was just talking to someone, he's an, I guess he's an 8-figure brand basically, but he didn't even have his DMARC set up correctly. So some of his emails were not delivering, or I mean, they were delivering, but they were also having weird issues behind it. So that's one of the things that I've seen is one of the funnier things that I've seen.

Yeah, that's rough. Or maybe like their Shopify to Omnisend sync broke 3 months ago and nobody noticed it because they don't check their event logs.

Yeah. So, okay, Chase, let's start this thing off. Where are we checking in this section?

So I think the first question here is to ask yourself, you know, are your events syncing from your Shopify to your ESP? So are they syncing from like your Shopify to your Omnisend account?

Okay. So you're talking about things like placed order, added to cart, started checkout, viewed product, fulfilled orders, things like that.

Exactly right. Because if these aren't firing, then your flows won't be able to trigger and your segments are going to be wrong. So your analytics are therefore going to be completely useless and garbage.

So, okay. How does someone check this, Chase?

So, so I'd say the popular 2, right, are kind of Omnisend and Klaviyo. So if you're using those, go to like your event feed, you know, filter by, let's call it like the last 24 hours. You know, you should be able to see, and again, depending on the size of your store, you're gonna see more or less, but you should be able to see a steady stream of events. You know, if it's sparse or there are gaps, that means something is more than likely broken, right? And then you also wanna check kind of your revenue attribution settings. So making sure that the revenue is being properly attributed to your emails and your SMS messages, et cetera. You know, we've seen brands where attribution was turned off and they thought email was doing nothing. Turns out it was driving revenue, right? It was driving 20-30% of revenue. They just couldn't see it.

That's a good one. I like that. Alright. The next one that I think people need to check, and this is something I always check, is domain infrastructure. First of all, are you using a subdomain for email? Because a lot of times when you're setting up correctly, and if you were set up correctly, using a domain like hello@mail.yourbrand.com instead of hello@yourbrand.com and The question a lot of people ask me is, why does this matter? And I think this is super important. I used to talk to brands about this all the time at the ESP I started, because if your email reputation tanks, you don't want to take down your entire primary domain. This subdomain isolates your email sending. And that kind of leads up to the whole, did you set up your DKIM, SPF, DMARC? Because if you don't know where those are, then you probably haven't, and means a chunk of emails are probably not reaching the inbox. Like, this is super important. This is deliverability 101. But a lot of people skip this and they're leaving money on the table. And you know, the reality is you go to Omnisend or any of your different ESPs, they tell you exactly what to do. So it's not that hard. But unfortunately, a lot of people do that. What else you got, Chase? What else is another one?

Yeah, good point. I think another one that really just, I don't understand is inconsistent UTMs.

That, man, that is so common. Every campaign has a different UTM structure because 5 different people have built the campaign over the years, basically.

Yeah, exactly right. So for example, you might have something like UTM source equals Omnisend versus UTM source equals Omnisend versus UTM source equals email, right? And when the Omnisend example, one could be lowercase, one might be uppercase, or the UTMs are kind of capitalized or not capitalized, right? It's just all over the place. So, and beyond that, some campaigns have UTM_campaign and some don't at all. Dude. And then some use dashes, some use underscores, right? I'm just kind of rapid firing, but there's this, that, and the other.

Yeah.

When you pull a report, when you're working on your, if your data's completely fragmented, it's really hard to work on.

Exactly. So part of the audit is just standardize your UTMs, create a naming convention, and ensure that everyone that ever works in the account from this point forward sticks to it.

Yeah, no, that's a good one. I think that's a really good one. And you know, if your data and infrastructure layer is broken, Don't move to the next part of the audit. You need to stop and fix that first.

Exactly right. Fix the plumbing first and everything else becomes, you know, measurable and kind of optimizable from there. All right.

Let's move to the next one because I think we've beaten that one a little bit. The next part of the audit is the deliverability and list quality.

Yeah, I think this kind of can be summarized by like everyone always says like, hell, Gmail just happens to hate us for some reason. It's weird. I don't get it.

100% of the time, that's the line.

But it's frankly never Gmail's fault, right? You know, you have to take kind of responsibility. It's, it's your fault, unfortunately. You know, you're sending to people who frankly don't want your emails. And I don't say that to be mean.

Or you're sending too often to people who never open or your complaint rate's through the roof. There's so many things that are coming into place.

Yeah. So do you wanna kind of walk us through kind of like that first thing we should look at to diagnose whether we have a deliverability issue or not?

Yeah. You know, one of the first things that I do is I pull in what I call the engagement curves. These are like open rates over time. Basically, I pulled a 7-day engagement, a 30-day, a 60-day, a 90-day engagement rate essentially. And if your 90-day engagement rate is below 10%, meaning like over 90 days, the initial opt-in to 90 days is 10% or below on those bucket of people, you generally have like a list quality problem ultimately.

Yeah. And if there's a massive drop-off, like if a 30-day is 25% opens, but 90 days, 8%, You're just not doing a good job, unfortunately, keeping people engaged over time.

Yeah.

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And the next question I generally ask behind that is, are you sending to people who haven't opened in 6 months? Have you seen that one?

Yeah. And if you are doing that, uh, please stop right, right now for that matter. Um, you're gonna be tanking your sender reputation when you do it this way.

Yeah. Gmail and Yahoo both see this as your emails are going to people who never open, and that kind of drives the whole spammer thing out.

Yeah, exactly. And then they start filtering all of your emails even to the engaged subscribers, unfortunately.

Yeah. Okay. So the next thing that I think about from when I do go into it is to create a segment, has not or clicked in 90 days, 180 days, 120 days, and excluded from the campaigns. Like I start there just to see where this kind of drives. Right. And you can run this like quarterly win back to this group, but you don't want to send them regular campaigns because if they haven't engaged in your first 90 days, which will be probably at least 30 to 40 emails probably over that time, they're probably not going to engage on your 41st email ultimately, which ultimately is a good way to look at. And the second part to look at is the complaint rate, right? I think a complaint rate is something that we don't think about enough, which it's very simple. If they mark you as spam instead of unsubscribing, they've gotten so annoyed with you that they never want to receive your emails. So they're hitting junk or spam. What rate should we be under here? Yeah.

I'd say like the safest thing and the best practice is to be under 0.1%. If it's higher, that means people are annoyed and you're going to run into issues.

Why would, why would a complaint rate be so high, Chase?

Yeah, I think you kind of alluded to it, but, you know, maybe you're emailing too often. Another one could be lack of relevance, right? Like whatever you're sending just isn't relevant or timely. And people maybe not, don't remember like opting into you. You might have bought a list or use sketchy kind of opt-in tactics and people just don't recall who you are, don't know who you are.

Yeah.

And bounce rates. I think that's another thing that people don't look at enough. It's when your email can't be delivered because the address is invalid, ultimately.

Yeah. And you should have this kind of hard bounce rate. There's kind of hard bounces and soft bounces, but the hard bounce rate should be sub-2%. If it's higher, you really do need to focus on cleaning your list ASAP.

Well, Chase, how often are you emailing?

Um, you know, it, it depends, right? That's a, it depends like, um, you know, and kind of, I guess the follow-up would be like specifically how often are you emailing your least engaged segments, right? It's like kind of the, the other question to look at, right?

Yeah. No, if you're sending like 5 emails per week to someone who hasn't opened in 4 months, I think you're just generally asking for trouble.

Yeah, exactly. And in that case, right, like you wanna reduce frequency for the unengaged people. And probably just increase the frequency for those that do engage, right? Yeah.

And you know, this kind of brings up something. This is where benchmarking helps ultimately, right? If you go to like inbox.ai, for example, and you search your brands, your competitors, whoever it might be, you can almost see how often they're emailing and it can kind of give you a sense of the cadence.

Exactly. So say you're sending a daily email, right? 7 emails a week and your competitors are sending 3. That could explain why people are tuning you out.

Or the opposite. Everyone's sending daily and you're the one sending once a week. You're almost losing mind.

Yeah, exactly right. And also don't forget SMS, right? Like carrier filtering is getting aggressive. So if you're having issues there, that could be part of what's happening.

Yeah, I think this is an interesting one because people don't know because oftentimes it's not like email where they have a ton of seed inboxes. So the thing about SMS messaging getting flagged for spam by like AT&T, Verizon is generally because A, you got too many links. You shouldn't be sending more than one link anyways. Your message might be too long. Might be spammy in content. You're triggering through content words. There's always frequency because of that. And then there's the last one, which is always the hardest one to really see, which is complaint rates are high.

Yep, exactly. So check your SMS platform's deliverability reports. You know, if a chunk of your messages are getting filtered, you just need to adjust your content. So the deliverability audit comes down to a couple things. Clean your list. Segment your sends, reduce the frequency to unengaged folks, and really making sure that you're checking out your technical setup, right? Those are kind of some of the DNS records that Jimmy had alluded to before. And remember, deliverability isn't just solely this technical stuff, it's also behavioral. So Gmail and the other ISPs, they watch how people engage and respond to your emails.

Yeah.

If someone deletes it without opening it, you're probably gonna be toast.

100%. No, I love that. All right, so let's move on to the next section to keep this thing going. So the next section of where I'm auditing is the lifecycle automation because that's where really the biggest revenue gaps are.

Yeah. And every single time, you know, because most brands think they have flows, but we check, you know, they have like 2 or 3 flows and they call it a day. Let me guess what it is.

Welcome series, abandoned cart, and post-purchase flow. Here's a coupon basically.

Yeah, bingo. That's beginner level retention.

Yeah.

While like real brands, the ones that are performing at the best levels have almost like 40 to 60 automation touchpoints. So messages across like an entire customer lifecycle.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And again, like the platform that we built is incredible for this. At the time of recording, it's at 1.5 million real e-commerce emails and growing. So the Inboox, right? Inboox.ai. This is like insane research because you can search things like post-purchase, welcome series, replenishment, VIP surprise and delight, win-back, browse abandonment, and so many more categories.

Yeah. And you know, I'll add one thing. You can see how they handle every stage of the customer journey and you can see like how they're messaging, their founder message, their design, and how those things change when they're in flow versus where they're doing those fancy campaigns that you might be used to seeing on the outside. All right. Let's go through the essential flows every brand needs because I think it's pretty easy and I think you and I can go through this. I'll start and I'll go back and we'll go back and forth here today. Okay. So flow number 1 is simple. It's the welcome series. It's the thing that happens when someone opts into your newsletter or your pop-up example, right? Generally 3 to 5 emails introducing your brand, setting expectations, and maybe offering your first discount depending on how They came in the funnel. What you got?

Amazing. So the next one let's talk about is the abandoned cart. You know, 3 to 4 emails over 24 to 72 hours. And the goal right here is to recover, you know, potential lost sales. Yep.

Alright. So flow number 3 for me is gonna be the abandoned browse, like 2, 3 emails where people are looking at things. Don't be creepy. But if they've looked at products but never added to cart and they're a customer of yours or a prospect, You want those messages to go out.

Love it. The 4th one is post-purchase. So, you know, having the ballpark of like 5 to 7 emails over like a 30 to 60 day period that educates, cross-sells, and ultimately builds loyalty.

Okay. Number 5, this is a good one. Omnisend team told me about this one, which is good replenishment. If your product is a consumable, you need to flow that triggers based on usage cycles, not based on time.

Love it. And then kind of the last one for me that I want to kind of talk about is just the win back. So for customers who haven't purchased in the last 60 to 90 days, really try to get them to repurchase, reengage, rebuy.

Okay. So hold on. You know, I think those are great for the basics, but great brands go absolutely deeper. Wouldn't you say?

Dude, 100%. So when we kind of took an analysis of the top brands on kind of Inbooks AI, and we're really focused on like, The 10,000 plus, you know, largest Shopify e-commerce stores. So when we look at those, what we found is a couple things. Number one is they have category-specific education flows. So let's say if you bought skincare, you might get like a 10-day email series teaching you about routines, ingredients, and how to layer and leverage different products within the arsenal. They also write a lot of these top 10,000 kind of e-commerce brands using Shopify. They have VIP flows, right? If someone hits a certain spend threshold, they enter a VIP track that has exclusive content and maybe even some great exclusive offers. They also have seasonal flows, right? Summer care tips, holiday gift guides for, you know, kind of the time that we're in right now when you're watching or listening to this, product launches timed to the seasons, et cetera. Another one that I think is very, very kind of Underrated is feedback flows. So asking for reviews, gathering data on customer satisfaction, sharing ways in which to use the product, requesting feedback on how to improve the product, all those types of things.

Yeah. And you know, it's crazy part, I'm not trying to continue plugging this, but it makes so much sense. You can see all of this in Inbooks, which is really cool. And you can literally study how a brand like Lumi does replenishment, how Patagonia handles post-purchase education, or Skims structures their VIP messaging, which is really cool because It's like having a playbook of every brand in your niche or your competitors or whatever it might be. So that one's good. But let, let's go talk about replenishment specifically because I think this is where brands really screw up really ultimately. What are your thoughts around this?

Sure. Yeah, let's talk about it. So let's say like your product has like a 30-day usage cycle. You know, I think a good thing to think about is like a multivitamin, right? Or maybe like a protein powder or something that you use Daily for a month. Coffee is another one, right? You're sending replenishment reminders, you know, at day 60, you've already lost the customer, right? So if I'm drinking coffee daily, which I do, right? A glass of coffee, a cup of coffee a day, and you're not sending me it for 2 months. Like, what do you think I did after that 30 days from day 30 to day 60, right? I've either bought from a competitor. Maybe if you're lucky, I bought from you 'cause I had a great, great experience, which is rare.

Yeah.

Or most likely I probably have forgotten about you. Right. So part of this audit is what's your average repeat purchase window for each product and are your flows timed properly and correctly to capture that repeat purchase?

Yeah. And just again, to add this, because the plug seems so perfect, is if you want to benchmark it, look, look at similar brands and inbooks and see what they send for replenishment emails. It's going to be helpful there. Hey, it's Jimmy, and I've got 30 seconds to tell you something that will change how you get inspired on your very next marketing campaign. You know when you're screenshotting those emails in your inbox and Slack and pasting them here? You saw it on Twitter, trying to remember what brand did that killer Black Friday sequence. Guess what? Inbox.ai just solved that. It's an AI-powered database with over a million real emails from the best DTC brands. Ridge, Fenty Skin, Casper, they're all in there. You can search by promotional type, journey stages, whatever you need. Get AI breakdowns of what worked and why, track your competitors, and even request brands that are not in there. No more hunting through screenshots or saved folders. Inbox.ai turns your inspiration into revenue. Check it out at inbox.ai, link in the show description.

Yeah, 100%. So, you know, in, in this example, like if everyone else is sending a replenishment at day 25, and again, you're waiting till day 50 or 60, you're 2x too late, right?

Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So let me recap. Here's what we're checking. Do you have 6 core flows? Are your flows correctly timed based on your customer behavior? Are you educating your post-purchase or are you just straight pitching? That's a real good question to ask yourself. Do you have replenishment flows if you're consumable for your consumable? And last really is, are you segmenting flows by product category or purchase behavior? Would that be it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you don't have like these or you're missing some of these, I think like the biggest opportunity is to start with the ones in which you don't have an answer to the question that you just asked.

Yeah, that makes total sense. All right. Next part of this thing, right? Let's talk about segmentation. There's a difference between good and great retention programs because you can have all the flows in the world, but if you're sending the same message to everyone, you're just literally leaving money on the table.

Yeah. And you know, when brands say like, you know, we do segmentation, it usually means they have openers, non-openers, and potentially like VIPs, I guess.

Yeah, that's like the checkbox segmentation. That's not really segmentation.

Yeah, real segmentation is quite simply just about customers' behaviors and their propensity.

Dude, it's so easy. If we're looking for segments, I'm thinking about like category loyalists, like people who buy skincare or buy apparel only. I'm looking at discount-only buyers. I'm looking at high AOV buyers. Be first-time buyers. These are gold. They spent a lot on their first purchase ultimately. I look at repeat buyers by product line. I look at kind of like the predicted-to-buy segments, basically people likely to buy in the next 30 days through just how their behaviors and habits are. I also look at those churn-risk buyers because it's really important to see why haven't people purchased in the last 60 days. And last but not least, now that we just got through the season, definitely look at those seasonal-only customers, only buy during holiday or summer. Those are ones that you've gotta look at too.

Yeah. And what's kind of cool and unique about what we built with inside kind of inbox.ai is you can see how brands message each of these groups differently. Like you literally have a lens into how they're speaking to specific kind of customer archetypes, you know? So VIPs, for example, might get one tone. They might get the exclusive early access, kind of the more premium Really helpful handholding language, whereas replenishment customers might get more kind of functional messages. So things like, you're running low, time to reorder now. Maybe a holiday-only shopper gets the seasonal angles. Your favorite holiday products are back. Discount hunters get deal-focused messaging, and the list kind of goes on.

Very clear. All right, so how do you build these in your ESP? I know that's this question that if you're listening to this right now, you're probably thinking about. The reality is it's really simple. Most CSPs like Omnisend have segment builders where you can combine conditions like placed order at least 2 times and has an email in the last 30 days or opened an email in the last 30 days and total spend greater than $200. That might be your VIP segment there.

Love it. Or maybe something like it could be placed an order 0 times in the last 90 days, but has opened emails in the last 30 days, right? That could be like your engaged non-buyers list. So it's a great opportunity to send those folks a special offer incentive, etc.

Got it. Alright, so look, once you've got these segments, you can send different campaigns to different groups. Like the example here is you're launching a new product and you send early access to the VIPs 24 hours before everyone else, a discount offer to engage non-buyers. And here's what's new to recent buyers. And nothing to the unengaged. And this way every message feels a bit more relevant, which usually results in like a higher open rate, higher click rate, higher conversion rate, and all that fun stuff.

100%. So in the audit, you know, essentially we're asking like, do you have behavioral segments beyond just openers? You know, are you messaging these different segments that you have in different ways? Do you have a VIP segment and are you actually treating them like VIPs? You know, are you excluding unengaged people from certain campaigns? You know, if the answer to any of these happens to be no, again, that's the focus area for you.

Yeah. Perfect. All right. Let's move on to the next part. And I think this one will resonate with a lot of people listening right now, which is creative and messaging. This is where everyone thinks their problem is. Our messages or our emails aren't pretty enough, but the creative is rarely the number one problem. However, there's always a major opportunity and that's what we're going to talk about right now. So here's what we're checking. First question, are your emails optimized for mobile? What are your thoughts, Chase?

Yeah, I mean, look, 60, 70-something percent of email opens are happening today on mobile. So frankly, you know, if your emails don't look good on mobile, you're probably screwed.

Yeah. And it's not that it's mobile formatted. I think this is really important. This is what you check. Are— is your text big enough to read on like a 6-inch screen? That's really important. Do I have to zoom in or out? Are your buttons easy to tap with a thumb? Like, are they easy to hit or are they like really hard to click on? Are your images loading correctly? This is a challenge of all image-only emails with bad internet, for example. Are they loading quickly enough? And then is there potentially just too much content requiring this endless scroll that's occurring where someone loses interest? What are your tips, Chase, for great mobile emails?

Yeah, I'd say quite simply, like the best mobile emails are simple. Like it's one hero image, one clear message. One clear call to action. Like that's it. Don't do too much more.

CTA. That's where I was going to go next. How are they clear, Chase? Tell us what makes a CTA super clear.

So CTA, for anyone confused, your call to action, right? So your call to action should be A, above the fold, right? Which means it's visible without having to scroll. B, it should be in a contrasting color so it pops and stands out. And C, it should be focused on leveraging kind of action-oriented text. So, you know, shop now, get 20% off right now, not learn more. And you should have one primary call to action, maybe one secondary, but don't have like 10 different links, right? Because if you give 10 people choices to people, they often make zero, right? Can someone understand your offer in 3 seconds? It's really kind of the litmus kind of squint test that you're looking at. Open your emails, kind of squint your eyes. What stands out? Yeah. You know, if the answer isn't value prop and kind of CTA, your design is too cluttered. And this is where Inbooks AI is a cheat code. You can search any category and see what brands are doing. The design is focused on getting you to, to click.

Got it. Okay. So I was looking at the skincare brand last week because I'm into skincare right now. Their emails are insanely simple. One hero product, two, one, two benefit bullets ultimately, and a big button. That's it.

Dude. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, meanwhile, like brands are sending emails with 11 different product images, 3 different offers and no clear hierarchy. Yeah.

I'm like, my guy, look, this isn't a magazine. People scroll for like 3 seconds tops and then roll out.

Yeah, that's, that, that should be the messaging, right? So, you know, the next part of this is like trying to understand like, is your copy scannable?

You're talking about like the way like short sentences, short paragraphs, bullets, subheads, Exactly.

Because people don't typically read emails, at least not initially. They most often start with scanning and your tone should match your brand. You know, if you're a fun kind of irreverent brand, your email should sound like that. You know, if you're premium and minimal, match that energy. You know, the worst thing that you could do is sound like every single other brand, dude. Boring, corporate, generic.

Yeah. Okay. Just to talk about it, even though we're talking about email here, but SMS, The rules are absolutely different so that everyone's clear. SMS should be short, like under 160 characters because you don't want to spend more than 1 credit. They should be personal, use you, your, you know, ways to make it almost feel like it's a one-on-one. It's important to have urgency. The only reason people click on text is because there's a reason to act now. And of course, a very clear CTA with a nice pretty link on the end of it. eClickTrack, if you were thinking about that, because SMS is not a place for essays, it's a nudge. Not a newsletter. So here's what we're checking, okay? We just talked about mobile-first design, very important. Clear, prominent CTA, single CTA, scannable copy with short sentences, a value prop that you can understand in under 3 seconds. The tone, you want to make sure you understand the tone of the brand's voice. And of course, SMS is concise and urgent. Pretty clear. All right. Next section. The next thing that we think about when we go to this audit is offers and customer experience, because I think that's super important.

Yeah, and look, retention alone doesn't happen in the inbox. You know, it happens in the actual experience.

Yeah, and you know, we're going to tap into this because it's really important that people don't talk about this enough, but a great email can't save a bad unboxing, a confusing return process, or a product that doesn't deliver. You can't out-market bad experiences.

Yeah, that's right. So in this part of the audit, you know, we're looking beyond just email and SMS alone.

Okay, so the first question I always is, ask is, do you have a strategy to drive a second purchase ultimately? Chase, thoughts? Hey, quick 60-second break to shout out our title sponsor Omnisend. If you don't know them, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce. They've trusted by over 155,000 merchants with a 4.8 rating star on Shopify's marketplace with over 2,800+ reviews. People love using them. Their support is incredible, responsive team, great help docs, and they actually show up when you need them. 3, look, everyone loves saving a buck. They've got great features and great pricing. Listen, I've heard this inside the community that someone actually dropped their bill by almost 50% and then included their SMS costs, which is absolutely wild. Another agency that we talked to shifted all his clients over when he discovered that he can save them 30 to 60%. Off of their actual monthly bill. And they're taking that money now reinvesting into ads. And that real money is going to come back into your pocket too, because you're helping them out or whatever it might be. With all this, I literally just helped Chase migrate his personal list to Omnisend not too long ago. It was super easy. They got team, they have an automated solution. It's really great. So if you're looking to scale your email and SMS game, check out omnisend.com/sendit. Tell them Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now back to your pod.

Yeah, dude. The reality is unfortunately most brands don't. And again, I don't try to be mean when I say that, you know, they're just kind of hoping and praying that it happens. But the reality is like the best brands actually do it intentionally. Like they engineer it. And what do they do to do that? Right. So they have cross-sell offers and post-purchase flows. They have replenishment reminders that are timed perfectly based around usage, you know, when someone needs to rebuy, et cetera. You know, they have loyalty programs that reward repeat purchases. And again, study these in Inbooks. You know, we're going to keep kind of mentioning it because it's really that helpful. Search post-purchase and see how brands structure their cross-selling messaging.

Yeah. And actually you mentioned something, loyalty. Let's talk about that real quick. Is it actually valuable ultimately? A lot of loyalty programs are like earn $1 per point and redeem 100 points for a dollar off. I feel like that's trash ultimately. Nobody cares about earning $5 over 6 months ultimately. Chase, what have you seen that actually works in loyalty programs?

Yeah, the best loyalty programs kind of offer a few things. Number 1 is early access to sales. Number 2 would be like exclusive products. Number 3 is free shipping. Number 4 is birthday rewards. And number 5 would be like a VIP customer service, right? I think points are fine, but kind of more like experiential type of rewards really do drive a lot more loyalty. Unboxing too, I think it sounds like basic and whatever, but I think it matters more than people actually give it credit for. And if your product shows up right, like in a brown box with no personality, I think that's just a really lazy kind of missed opportunity. It's pretty easy to add things like a thank you card, care instructions, you know, discount code for their next purchase, a QR code to follow you on social. It doesn't need to be anything crazy.

Makes sense. These little touches are almost like building emotional connections ultimately, right?

Yeah. And then from there, right? Like how easy is your returns process, especially around the holidays when people are buying gifts for others? You know, if returns are a nightmare, you know, people aren't gonna buy again. It's just that simple. So you wanna make these returns really easy, fast, and clear. And, you know, consider offering store credit instead of refunds to keep money in the ecosystem.

Yeah. And you know, another thing I'll add there is, are you educating your customers after they buy? Because this is huge. If you sell skincare, send them how to use the product, how to result, how do you, what result to expect, how to layer with other products, and even common mistakes to avoid because a customer who gets the results fast becomes repeat customer. And if you can see how top brands do this in inbooks, they're heavily relying on post-purchase education before they pitch again. So that's where we learn from all of this when it comes to that experience. Okay. Let's get to the final part of this audit, the analytical and lifetime value. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I'd say this is where like kind of everything comes together and gels is because you can't, you know, because you can do everything right, but if you're not measuring, you won't know. So a couple key metrics to track, and kind of here's what we're focused on checking. Number one is like the repeat purchase rate. Essentially, it's like what percentage of customers buy more than once? The next part, right, is like the average repurchase window. So how long between orders 1 and 2 is there, right? How long does it take? Number 3 would be like revenue per sub. So how much does each email subscriber generate for your brand? The next one would be customer lifetime value. What's the average customer worth over, let's call it 12 months, right? Over the kind of a year. And then what are the conversion rates from your flows? Which flows are actually driving revenue? And then benchmarking these is actually really, really, really critical because if your repeat purchase rate is 15, you think that's good, but the industry average is 30, then it's pretty clear that you have a problem, right? Yeah.

Let me add, you have to also look at the drop-off points because why are people abandoning after seeing the product page? Are they abandoning at checkout or are they buying once and never coming back? Or are they engaging with emails but never clicking through? Every drop-off point almost teaches you where to focus because this is where, you know, things like Inbooks becomes gold again, right? You can start studying the timing of patterns of top brands, how long you wait before sending that next replenishment email. When do they send win-back campaigns? How often or how much time do they have in their post-purchase touchpoints? You can literally see the cadence and reverse engineer it for your brand. So in this audit, basically what you've said so far is, are you tracking your repeat rate and LTV? Do you know your average repurchase rate window? Are you benchmarking across like the industry standards or your competitors ultimately? Have you identified your biggest drop-off point? I just talked about that. And are you using that data to inform your flow timing? Because the reality is, is if you're not measuring these, you're probably looking at this blind because of all that stuff. So that's where it comes to. All right, Chase, that's the 60-minute retention audit in maybe— how many minutes are we at right now? About 35 minutes. So not bad. We've done it in about half time. Maybe we talked really fast, but let's go through this again real quick. There was 7 sections we talked about in this thing, right? And it should take you 60 minutes automatic to do this. Delivery data infrastructure, deliverability and list quality we talked about, life cycles and automations, pretty straightforward, segmentation, creative messaging and audience. 6 is offers and customer experience. And last but not least is analytics and LTV. Anything else to think about?

I just say like, just run this audit quarterly, right? And you know, always know exactly where your biggest opportunities are. And again, if you want to shortcut your audit and see what top brands are doing, jump into inbox.ai, I-N-B-O-O-X.ai, search any brand, any category, study their flows, their campaigns, their timing. It's literally retention school, you know, over 1.5 million emails and counting to learn from.

Yeah. And so with that, Plug. That's a wrap here today of the 60-minute retention audit.

So the last kind of request would be send this to a founder or marketer who needs a cleanup. You know, tag us if you run the audit and find something interesting.

No, very cool, man. All right, Chase. Well, that was a great pod. Hopefully somebody got some good value out of this today. Just being able to run this audit. Obviously we shamelessly plugged Inbooks, but this is literally why we built something like this. So hopefully everyone knows that. I'm not going to plug anything. Please like, follow, share if you enjoyed it. Leave us a comment below if you found value in this pod and how do you audit your brand. Otherwise, we'll see you on the next episode. See you later.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far or do we have to extend it?

If you want results, you know you got to send it.

Yeah. You know you gotta send it, yeah. You know you gotta send it, yeah. You know you gotta send it.