Email & SMS Evolution: Adapting Strategy as Your Brand Scales - 44

Scaling retention isn't just about doing more of what worked when you were smaller. It requires fundamental changes in approaches and systems that are built as you scale and continue scaling.

Personal touch and scrappy tactics that built your brand, launched your brand, need to evolve into systems and scalable processes that can deliver similar results at much larger scale. Transition from founder-led to system-driven retention. You need to evolve your segmentation from basic to advanced analytics and start thinking about customer lifecycle. You need to start looking at your technology stack and being proactive and, you know, making sure you the right integrations and automations that you need. You need to have a scalable content creation system that has this balance between efficiency, quality, and personalization. That becomes really important. You want to implement more measurement and optimization frameworks that help you have better insight into your business. And then of course, you got to plan, plan these transitions. Anything you're doing, you got to plan them, be proactive rather than reactive. And when you hit scaling bottlenecks, make sure you start looking at yourself first because that's probably where it starts. Yo, Chase, what's up, man?

Hey, dude, how are you?

I'm good. I'm drinking my protein shake on this pod. Get energized.

So interesting. I would have guessed it was like a— I don't know, more like a smoothie type drink. Like a—

Yeah, dude, this is this clear protein. This is like the new hype now. You know how protein has become such a big thing? And I got this clear stuff. It's called like Seek or something. So shout out to Seek. And I grabbed it because I was like, you know what, I'm tired of that like chocolate milk taste. Maybe I can get something else. And It's actually really good, man. Tastes like fruit punch.

Dude, amazing. Yeah, it looks good.

Yeah, it's delicious. But today we are talking about adapting email and SMS for your brand as it scales. So you ready to shoot this thing?

Yeah, let's run it.

All right, let's lock this 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 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 to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing in e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

All right, Chase, episode 44, adapting email and SMS as your brand scales. So today, we're tackling a challenge that every successful e-commerce brand faces. How to adapt your email and SMS strategies as your business grows and scales. And these, these are retention tactics. Oh wait, actually let me rephrase this. The best way I explain this is the retention tactics that got you from $0 to $1 million in revenue won't necessarily take you to $10 million, to $50 million, and so forth. And your email and SMS strategies need to evolve as your brand grows.

Exactly right. And we see brands hit kind of growth plateaus All the time because they're trying to scale tactics that worked when they were smaller rather than just adapting their approach to meet and kind of match their current reality.

Yeah, and whether it's dealing with large subscriber lists or more complex product catalogs or multiple customer segments or increased competition, growth brings new challenges that require different solutions. So today what I wanna talk about in this pod is we're gonna break down the 5 key areas of where your email and SMS strategies need to adapt and scale give you a specific framework for making these transitions successful. If you're growing a successful and growing brand and you're struggling to maintain your retention performance as you scale, well, this is the pod for you. And this is the one we're going to talk really about those growth challenges. So let's dive right into it and get right into it. So I'm going to start with the first one. And the first one is adaptations of transitioning from what I call the founder-led personal retention efforts to the system-driven scalable process. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

Yeah, dude, I'd say this is probably one of the harder transitions for growing brands because, you know, what made them successful early on was that real personal touch and that founder involvement. And that becomes near impossible to maintain at scale.

100%. And when you have 1,000 customers, the founder can personally respond to emails. They know their customers' names. But when you have 100,000 customers, that's when personal approach needs to be systemized without losing its effectiveness. And if you think about it, it really boils down to 3 separate things. Number one, it's documentation and process Standardization, talking about creating playbooks, documenting your brand voice, establishing workflows and quality control processes, and ultimately building templates and content frameworks for consistency. And then the number 2 thing that comes into place is really that team structure and that like role specialization. And I know we have a pod that we talk all about this, but you're transitioning from that generalist to a specialized team, which creates clear ownership and accountability, and it develops a training program and onboarding process for new team members. That is something that— Yeah. Most founders at the early days don't even think about, which ultimately leads to an establishment of communication and protocols and collaborations. And then the third thing that comes into place is technology. We all know and love our technology. Big shout out to our sponsors over at Omnisend, for example. But advanced email and SMS platforms with enterprise features or better features as your business is growing. So if you're using something like Mailchimp or something, this is when you start looking at making that switch to Omnisend or one of the other platforms. You have to integrate that customer data into more of a unified view. This is where building analytics and reporting becomes important. And of course, even automations and all those things. And what's crucial in all of this is to understand that systemization doesn't mean losing personalization. It just means making personalization scalable.

Yeah, dude, spot on. You kind of nailed that. And, you know, instead of founder personally, kind of at this point, Writing each email, you're going to want to create systems that deliver kind of more personalized experiences to thousands of customers at the same time.

Yeah. And you know, the studies have shown, and when we were going doing our research, pre-show research, we, you know, basically documented retention processes see 67% more consistent performance as they scale compared to those relying on that whole ad hoc approach. And really it comes down to like 2 simple things. The whole gradual handoff that maintains quality during transition, right? Like you've got to make sure that it's not just like a cut snap. You've got to shadow, you got to see what's happening, you got to gradually transition, you got to monitor that quality. And the founder involvement is still very important at the high level when delegating that execution. And that drives into this like scalable personalization technique. I'm talking about things like dynamic blocks, behavioral trigger systems, segmentation strategies that create that real personalization scale. And then of course, right now and more And more things like AI-powered content optimization and frameworks like a tool like Raelian, for example, comes into play out there. And one of the biggest mistakes we see with brands that are trying to maintain founder involvement in every detail to scale, it creates a bottleneck and ultimately inconsistency.

Dude, exactly. And the founder's role needs to evolve from being that kind of hands-on executor to kind of more strategic oversight and really focusing on kind of stewarding the brand forward.

Yeah, I always recommend that you create like a founder's voice guideline that captures the essence of that personal communication so it can be replicated by team members.

Yeah, I love that. And, and then also implementing an approval process for kind of this higher state communications, while giving the team at the same time autonomy for routine campaigns is, is super important.

Yep, that's right. And the goal is maintaining that personal feel and brand authenticity while building systems that can operate at a efficiently at scale ultimately. All right, let's jump into the second one because this is a really fun one and I'll let you break this one down. But we're talking about going from that basic segmentation, which is usually just like customers and prospects or whatever version of that it is, to a more advanced customer lifecycle management as your customer base becomes more diverse and complex. As a brand grows, there's typically— they typically acquire customers from more channels, serve more demographics, and develop more complex product lines, which means that simple segmentation strategies They just don't work anymore.

Yeah, that's right. You know, when you're small, you might segment by something like a purchase versus didn't purchase, but as you scale, you really do need kind of a sophisticated segmentation approach that does account for customer value, behavior patterns, things like lifecycle stages, and even product affinity. So in terms of like this more kind of advanced segmentation framework, there's a couple components. So the first one I wanna talk about is more of like this multidimensional customer categorization, where you're looking at things like demographics plus behaviors and transactional data for really comprehensive, rich segments. And then you wanna create kind of customer value tiers based on LTV and kind of purchase patterns. And through that, you kind of develop this lifecycle stage definition that kind of reflects your business model where you can kind of build product affinity and category preference segments. So essentially what we're saying is like, Instead of just bought or didn't buy, combine 2, 3, 4 of these different things that you know about each individual person to create these really cool segments that you otherwise wouldn't do. And then from there, you wanna have kind of dynamic lifecycle management. And what I mean is you wanna have automated lifecycle stage progression based on the behavior, right? So a customer isn't frozen in time every day, every week, every month. They're gonna move throughout the kind of buying cycle and you're gonna want to make sure that your marketing kind of stays up to date and tracks that. And then you wanna tie in kind of this predictive modeling to also identify people that are at risk of churning or ready to upgrade, right? People that are gonna fall off the wagon or people that you can actually get to buy more, right? And become a better customer. And when you kind of personalize this journey, you can orchestrate everything. And that's really adaptive and specific and customizable to each person. These individual customer paths become really beneficial for you as a brand or marketer and then the subscriber on the other end. And when you can coordinate this across multiple channels, think about SMS, push, et cetera, alongside email, it creates this really rich unified experience for the customer. And then the last part here is this behavioral and predictive segmentation. So Again, still tying in things like their engagement to reflect kind of how they interact or maybe how they don't interact, running kind of like purchase prediction models that are gonna identify who are your best customers. And then also too, right, I mentioned this before, but who are the folks that are potentially good customers today that might churn in the future? And what makes all of this type of stuff, this more advanced segmentation really powerful is that it allows you to deliver more relevant experiences while reducing the complexity of this campaign management. It actually seems complicated, but it's gonna make it way, way easier as you scale. So instead of creating like these, you know, dozens upon dozens of one-off campaigns, you're gonna create more of a systematic approach that automatically delivers the right message to the right person at the right time. You know, and the research backs all this up, right? It shows that when brands are using this more Advanced kind of lifecycle segmentation, they're seeing a 58% higher customer lifetime value and 41% better retention rates compared to just basic stuff. And I know I'm talking a lot, I'm talking fast, so really kind of hone this in and, and kind of drive this home. So a couple examples. So the customer value-based segmentation. So this would be something like a VIP customer who receives exclusive access and a premium service messaging. This might be kind of like one tier down, someone in the mid-tier, they get targeted upsells and kind of loyalty program promotions. A new customer might get something like extended onboarding and education. Someone that's at risk might get something like specialized retention and win-backs, right? Hopefully that's clear.

Yeah.

And then the last piece here is this like product kind of affinity lifecycle management. And this is where like you wanna create category-specific education. and cross-selling sequences, tying in kind of like seasonal and occasion-based product recommendations, and then having things like styles and preferences that evolve for something like a lifestyle and kind of fashion type brand. So the key with all of this is building segmentation that actually drives different strategies and tactics, not just strictly different subjects. Hey there, it's Chase, and I hope you're enjoying the pod so far. I wanna quickly talk to you about one of our sponsors. And yes, sales tax. I know no one wants to hear this. However, if you are selling online, you're probably spending way too much time, money, and stress on something that needs to be automated. Enter Kintsugi. They're named after the Japanese art of turning raw pottery into something beautiful and resilient, and that's exactly what they do for your tax chaos. Their AI monitors, files, and optimizes your sales tax automatically across all states and jurisdictions. We're talking about saving you some serious time. Their average customer saves 9 hours every single month. That's over 100 hours a year that you're going to get back to focus on actually growing your business. And here's where it gets really good. No longer will you have to have expensive tax professionals that eat into your profits. Kintsugi's AI handles compliance with a 98.3% reduction in errors. That's practically bulletproof accuracy. And they have many one-click integrations with your existing systems. That means the setup is painless, and their white glove support team has your back every step of the way. Sales tax headaches? Consider them eliminated forever. And it's for e-commerce, SaaS, and even agencies. Really, anyone that pays a sales tax needs this, and they need Kamsui. And we have a very, very special offer for you. So if you mention myself and Jimmy, You'll get 3 months completely free. That's 3 months of automated tax filing, perfect compliance, and getting your life back. Visit trykintsugi.com and mention Jimmy and myself for your 3-month head start.

Dude, you nailed it. That's literally everything I would've said. Just whatever you said, I said that too. So, well, look, each segment should have distinctive goals, uh, messaging approaches, and successful metrics. And that's definitely something that more and more people are starting to learn as they scale.

Yeah, I'd say that what some— something that Jimmy and I agree on is, you know, you'd probably start with like 5 to 7 core segments and gradually add complexity as you gather kind of more data and refine, you know, ultimately the understanding.

But you know, one thing I'll add to that is it's crucial to regularly audit and update your segmentation as customer behavior and business priorities evolve too.

Yeah, and advanced segmentation requires more upfront investment, but it's going to pay huge, huge, huge dividends as you scale. Because it's gonna make all of your other retention efforts as well, you know, way more effective.

Well, I think you put the nail in the door, whatever you wanna say, whatever, and the hammer in the— what do you say? Nail in the door?

Nail in the coffin or something like that.

No, nail in the coffin. That's it. I'm terrible with those kind of sayings, but perfect way of explaining it. So let's just move right into our third. Our third area covers your technology stack, the tech stack from simple email and SMS tools to this deep integrated platform that can handle enterprise-level complexity and scale.

Yeah, and this is where we often see kind of growing brands hit their first major scaling bottleneck is their tech can't keep up with their needs for personalization, automation, data management. The list goes on.

And look, it's not about upgrading to bigger platforms. It's about building more of an integrated system that works together to create this like seamless customer experience. This is where you think about this in 3 little phases, right? I like to break it down. So the first thing you got to look at is like the platform capability assessment. You got to evaluate the current current platform, its limitations. You got to also look at the integration requirements, right? That's huge and more important than ever with a unified customer data process. Checking out your automations, your personalization capabilities, and making sure you have good plan migration to avoid minimizing disruptions as you continue to grow. Like, that's number one. Like, make sure you can scale with it. Then you have to start thinking about the integration architecture, right? This is what I'm talking about is like, how much of that 360 view of the customer can you see? Can you do cross- channel orchestration are using, you know, Omnisend with your SMS provider and your direct mail provider and they all working together. And then of course the analytics, you know, one of the things that starts becoming more and more relevant is that all these channels do end up working together and we talk about it quite often, but do you have the right reporting to bring that first and bring that in? And that's when like APIs start coming in and being able to start building custom dev, right? And that leads me to the last thing. And this becomes more of this like scaled thing. You've got to get to some level before you really matters and this really puts any kind of effort in, but talk about advanced automation and personalization, right? I'm talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, real-time personalization, advanced triggers on complex decisions. Like all this stuff starts to become relevant. And I know a lot of people may or may not have access to these tools, which is kind of insane, the amount of tools that a lot of people have these days. But the reality is a lot of that stuff is shiny objects that are great when you're an enterprise or scale, but A lot of those aren't necessary at the small things. And what's important to understand in technology is that upgrades need to happen proactively. You don't want to hit the limitations of your current stack and then be reactive. And what happens with reactive decisions is they're rushed and they're suboptimal for implementation, which often hurts often, right? And, you know, the studies with that show something very similar, right? A properly integrated stack sees about 45% higher market efficiency and 33% faster campaign deployment times, which means that It is more efficient to have the right tech stack. And I think everyone who's listening to this knows this. I just want you to keep that in mind. And it is possible to be in the wrong tech stack too early too. So you want to make sure that you're there when it's right and you're being proactive around it. And when you think about a transition, right, let's talk about it. If you were going from Mailchimp to Omnisend, for example, or Shopify email to Omnisend, first things first, you want to have a phased migration strategy that is minimizing risk. Start with data integrations, customer synchronizations, then migrate your campaigns and your autoresponders. And then maintain almost a parallel system during the transition period and make sure you're doing a lot of testing and validation before you decide to cut that switch over. And then that leads to making sure your team knows. I think this is somewhere that people forget, but you've got to have good team training behind it. Platform training. A lot of providers like Omnisend will give you great training. They've got videos and documentation. You should definitely take advantage of that. You should process that and make sure you have internal documentation of what you're doing ultimately, and good change management to make sure that everyone knows what's going on. And of course, staying relevant to what's going on in the platform as it continues to expand. New products are coming out every day, new features are coming out every day, and that's something very important. Now, I'll end this with one common mistake, is that assuming that better technology automatically improves results. That's not true. It's strategy execution that drives performance.

Yeah, that's right. Technology should enable better strategy execution. Not replace strategic thinking.

And you know, I'll add one more thing. We recommend focus— focusing on those platforms that can grow with you rather than require another migration in 12 to 18 months. So you got to think bigger and ahead always.

Yeah. And pri— and kind of prioritizing integration capabilities over individual kind of feature sets. You know, the best platform is one that works well with your entire marketing kind of ecosystem.

Yeah, that's perfect. All right, let's keep moving, man. I think, I feel like we're on a good rhythm and roll here. Let's move to the 4th area that we see as a challenge. It's creating personalized, high-quality content at scale without losing brand consistency and overwhelming your team. Look, content creation is often the biggest bottleneck for growing brands because of volume and a variety of content needed to increase with the business growth. Chase, you know content, so I'm going to let you handle this one.

Yeah, for sure. I appreciate that. And it's not just about creating more content. You need more types of content for different segments. Channels and lifecycle stages while really maintaining quality and brand consistency. A lot of people try to scale content and it's pretty obvious cuz the quality of the content greatly diminishes, unfortunately. So in terms of like a scalable content framework that works, so you're gonna wanna have a content system kind of architecture and planning. So that includes things like developing content calendars and really modular kind of frameworks for efficiency. Right? So modular email templates, et cetera, that makes it really easy to kind of plug and play. And you're gonna wanna create in advance content calendars and production workflows at scale. A lot of people wait till the last minute or don't have a content calendar at all. And you wanna make sure that your brand guidelines and quality standards are really crystal clear. That way you kind of have consistent output. And with this, you wanna make sure that you have this content kind of governance process and approval workflow. Just to ensure that nothing gets out the door that otherwise shouldn't, right? Everything kind of gets double-checked by someone new to make sure it really is polished. And then the last part or kind of to this is like this kind of combination of dynamic personalization automation as well as kind of cross-channel content optimization. So starting with the dynamic one, using AI-powered kind of tools and platforms that allow you to generate content and optimize it. That's a no-brainer. Allowing yourself to kind of create within dynamic content blocks so you can really adapt those on a per-customer basis. You wanna automate your content testing and performance and then having a personality and kind of, you know, a unique voice and also a personalization engine that allows kind of individual customization at scale. And then with that, you wanna just apply that to the kind of cross-channel side. So Making sure that the content looks good and is similar across email, SMS, and other channels. It shouldn't sound like 4 different copywriters or 4 different designers. And then you wanna make sure that you kind of leverage this cross-channel performance tracking and really have that integrated into your content planning and resource allocation so that way everything is aligned. And what makes this kind of scalable content creation particularly challenging is balancing kind of that efficiency with personalization and quality. You know, it's kind of like there's a lever where if you kind of turn up the notch on one, the other one kind of drops a little bit. And it's just finding that system that works for you where you can create this high-quality personalized content quickly and consistently without having to get individual attention for every single piece. So brands that are kind of at the forefront of doing this, they're seeing kind of about 52% faster campaign deployment and about 38% higher engagement rates. Compared to those that are just kind of firing from the hip and doing ad hoc type content stuff. So a couple kind of content scaling tactics. I mentioned this before, but just to double back on this, you wanna make sure that you have a template and framework developed. So you wanna have kind of email template systems with dynamic content blocks that are built out. You know, make 3 or 5 of those, 7 of those, that way they don't look the exact same, but they're similar enough and they have all the kind of core pieces. And then also too, for SMS, just having a framework that makes them really easily adaptable for different segments and occasions, because that's more of a text thing. Sure, you might have an image or a GIF or something, but mostly text. And then making sure that like subject line and preview text formulas are really consistent and that your call to actions are optimized for different campaign goals and contexts. And how do you do all this? Right? So AI and automation integration. is key to this. So allowing yourself to leverage AI for subject line generation, allowing yourself to really build out kind of this content personalization engine that's gonna automatically adapt messaging and making sure that you're A/B testing all of this so you can continually be improving. So the key is to creating systems that enhance kind of your human creativity rather than replacing it entirely.

Hey, it's Jimmy. Quick 15 seconds of your time 'cause I have something fun to share. Did you know between the two of us, Chase and I, we have over 20 years of experience email marketing. Recently, we put our minds together to create a certification program that takes all of our knowledge and share it to the world. It's called Ecom Email Certified. It's an end-to-end course certification program that's designed to take anyone, regardless if you're a newbie or an experienced marketer, founder, executive, agency marketer, or any marketing professional, to teach them everything we know about email marketing SMS, from deliverability to AI to copywriting to design. To strategy, we cover it all. It's loaded with 175 modules and 25 hours of education combined with quizzes, community, all designed to educate, test, certify you to become a full-fledged email marketer for e-commerce. And so since you're listening to this pod, we want to reward you with loyalty by giving you a coupon for $200 off this certification. Just jump over to ecomemailcertified.com, check the show notes. Now back That's perfect. That's spot on. And I knew you got this, so, you know, that makes sense. But I'll add one thing. AI and automation should handle routine optimization and personalization while humans are focusing on strategy and brand telling. That's really where it really kind of melds the marketer and the systems together.

Yeah, and we recommend building content libraries and kind of ad asset databases so that team members can leverage these rather than starting from scratch each time. Yeah.

And I'll add one last thing. When you're establishing clear content performance metrics so you can identify what content works best for different segments and situations, that's definitely something I recommend.

Yeah, no, for sure. And then one tactical tip here is like, just create content and themes and series rather than just individual one-off pieces. It's gonna be way more efficient and it's gonna be way easier and better to create these customer experiences that land if you do it this way. Cool.

Well, let's go to our 5th and final area of focus, which is involving your measurement and optimization approach from that simple metrics to comprehensive performance management systems. I'm talking about looking at open rates only as something that you look at or revenue, but actually looking at how these different data points start to change. And I'm talking about how these sophisticated analytics to understand what's driving performance and where to focus your optimization efforts. And if you're managing more campaigns, more segments, and more team members, means you need systems that provide insights to both detailed and a strategic level. So there's 3 different places that I'm spending my time if I'm thinking about this. Number one, the comprehensive like analytics and attribution modeling, right? We all have our favorite tools out in the market, the Triple Whales, Northbeams. There's a bunch of other tools out there, but having multi-touch attribution across email, SMS, and all those channels, very important. Customer lifetime value starts becoming more and more important. And so is cohort analysis. If you don't know what cohort analysis is, it's very simple. When did they come in? What's the long tail of that person? And watching, you know, if I bought a bunch of traffic from Facebook in month 1, how long does it take to convert? All that good stuff, right? You got campaign performance measurements. And then of course, how cross-channels are working together. So that's number 1. Then you've got like the scalable testing and optimization processes that start coming into place. I'm talking about like, Creating a systematic A/B testing program, that's really important. This is where like things called multivariate testing comes in, which means you're testing multiple pieces of content or multiple pieces of an email. You want more automated testing to happen along the way, and you want to have strategic testing roadmaps like aligned with your business goals. I got a launch coming up. I'm going to take a small micro segment, do a little test, do incremental tests. This is where that all comes in. And it all rolls into the most important thing. You got to have a good executive reporting dashboard. I'm talking about dashboards developed for different stakeholders, right? The founder is going to want to look at different things than your marketing person, than your operations person, than your, you know, your customer service people. So you want to have those different dashboards developed and you want to create trend analysis and forecasting so people know what's coming behind it. And then even benchmarking. This is where it's important to show other people how you're doing and how well you're doing. And ultimately, man, ROI tracking, that's really important. And what's crucial about when you're starting to scale is shifting that from that reactive reporting where you're gaining reports at the end of the week because you were supposed to, to proactive insights. So you're looking forward 3 months, 6 months, 9 months in the future. And instead of just knowing what happened, you need to understand why it happened and what to do with it.

Yeah.

Companies with enterprise-level measurement systems, they say see like a 60%, 60% plus better resource allocation efficiency, and 44% better identification of optimization. And that really comes down to 2 things that they're doing in the market. They're being better about predictive analytics and forecasting. So they're seeing better lifetime values, churn risk, forecasting, campaign management. They all see that. And then they also have better automated stuff, right? You do it once and you should automate it the more you can. That's the whole world today. And so you want more real-time performance, more automated insights and generations. You want that reporting to be given to your your fellow stakeholders, the people who are important there. And you want to be able to also have something that identifies performance anomalies, right? Something's wrong. Something's weird. I need to be able to alert somebody. Like, these are things that you got to start thinking about as you start scaling. One of the biggest challenges at scale is avoiding analysis paralysis. I think that's my last thing I'll end with it because it's really hard to look at the data and make data-driven decisions While also feeling like you're comfortable making those decisions.

Yeah, exactly. You know, you need these systems that highlight kind of the most important insights and recommend actions rather than overwhelming teams with just endless amounts of data.

Yeah. And I'll add to that one more thing. I always recommend focusing on a core set of metrics that directly ties with like the business goals and objectives while having deeper analytics really just are there for like investigation. Don't get too deep into the data.

Yeah. And with this, make sure that you establish regular review cycles and optimization sprints rather than just trying to optimize everything all the dang time.

Yeah. And the goal is creating measurement system that informs and accelerates decision-making rather than slowing it down with complexity. That's a really important key. All right, Chase, we went through a lot really fast, I feel like, but there's, there's a lot of good information here and I hope people are learning from it. But let's go ahead and wrap this thing up and summarize the key areas where your email and SMS strategies are needed to adapt to your e-commerce brand, What do you think the number one takeaway you have, Chase, is? Hey, okay, I'm disrupting the pod for just a quick 60-second break and a quick little shout out to our title sponsors of the podcast, Omnisend. Okay, for those that don't know, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing automation platform specifically designed for e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage with customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personal experiences for your customers. We're always talking about. Here's 3 things I love about Omnisend. First and foremost, they're trusted by over 125,000 ecommerce merchants worldwide that absolutely love them. With a 4.8 rating star with over 6,000 reviews on the Shopify App Store, it's an obvious choice for your email, SMS, and push needs. Secondly, I love great customer support, and Omnisend, they're absolutely nailing it. They're responsive, their help docs are great, and their team is absolutely fantastic. And third, they have great features and better pricing. Pricing matters just as much as features, and Omnisend, you're gonna get both of those. And they have all the features you need for your store, and their pricing is absolutely fantastic. In fact, recently I just heard a story about 2 community members that made the switch. One reduced his price from $8,500 to $3,500, which is huge, but even bigger, that $3,500 included SMS, which is absolutely wild. Then another agency I just recently talked to, they just switched their entire client base over and he's been saving his clients anywhere from 30 to 60% off their bill, which is allowing them to take that money and reinvest it on the top of the funnel so they can make more ads and make more money. Omnisend nails these 3 things that I care most about: great support, great features, and fair pricing. Plus, I just helped Chase make the move to Omnisend with his own personal email list and their migration The integration was super easy. They even have a team to help you, support you, and they have a great automated tool to bring your contacts right over. So if you're looking to take your email marketing to the next level, I highly recommend checking out Omnisend. They got the tools, the automation, the expertise to help your brands grow and thrive. Head over to omnisend.com/sendit to learn more and start scaling your customer engagement today. Now let them know Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now let's get back to the pod.

I think the most important takeaway here is that scaling retention isn't just about doing more of what worked when you were smaller. It requires fundamental changes in approaches and systems that are built as you scale and continue scaling.

Yeah, that's a great, like, summarization of everything we said. The personal touch and scrappy tactics that built your brand and launched your brand need to evolve into systems and scalable processes that can deliver similar results at much larger scale. And I know that sounds a little corporate, but the reality is That's the way you have to think about it. And here, here's kind of the key takeaways to all of this. Transition from founder-led to system-driven retention. That was number one we talked about. You need to evolve your segmentation from basic to advanced analytics and start thinking about customer lifecycle. You need to start looking at your technology stack and being proactive and, you know, making sure you have the right integrations and automations that you need. You need to have a scalable content creation system. That has this balance between efficiency, quality, and personalization. That becomes really important. You want to implement more measurement and optimization frameworks that help you have better insight into your business. And then of course, you got to plan. Plan these transitions. Anything you're doing, you got to plan them. You got to be proactive rather than reactive. And when you hit scaling bottlenecks, make sure you start looking at yourself first because that's probably where it starts.

Well said. And remember that scaling is iterative. You don't need to implement enterprise-level systems today or tomorrow, right? But you should be preparing for the next stage of growth while you can.

Yeah. And the key is recognizing when your current approaches are reaching their limits and planning transitions before performance starts to decrease. I think, again, going back to that reactive thing, we see too many brands like look in the rearview mirror and like, oh man, something's wrong. But that means it's too late ultimately.

Yes. And for those listening still, if you're experiencing scaling challenges, I highly recommend starting with the area that's creating the biggest bottleneck first. Often that's either a technology limitation or maybe even a team issue.

And I'll put a warning out there as we kind of end this pod. Don't underestimate the importance of change management. Scaling retention requires to get your team comfortable with new processes, technology, and potentially even people.

Yeah. And the brands that scale successfully are those that embrace evolution and continuously adapt their retention strategies to match their kind of existing and kind of future, you know, business growth. Yeah.

Then you nailed it. All right, dude. Well, with that, I'm gonna end this pod because I think we gave them a ton of information here today. If you enjoyed this pod, first of all, if you got a lot of information and you need to go back through it, I highly recommend listening to this pod again. There's a lot of great information, but that is episode 44, Adapting Your Email and SMS as Your Brand and grow. We gave you lots of tips there. If you enjoyed today's pod, make sure you like, subscribe, follow, leave us a rating on your favorite podcast listening platform. I always recommend YouTube, but you can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, IG, TikTok, etc. And there's a few ways to connect with us. Number one, we got a newsletter, ecomemailmarketer.com. We drop a daily marketing newsletter all about retention. We talk about breakdowns and tips and tricks. A lot of great things there. Secondly, we've got a great certification program. If you are looking to get certified, 25 hours of training, you learn from myself and Chase. We literally break down everything A to Z of our 20+ years of experience together. And last but not least, on social media, you can follow us. Chase, where can they find you?

Most platforms, Chase, no A in Diamond.

Yep. And you can find me on LinkedIn and X today. All right. Well, with that being said, next week we're going to talk about— I'm going to pull it up right now. We are going to talk about— I'm thinking we're thinking about low-budget, high-impact retention marketing hacks. That's what I have on the agenda sheet here as our next show.

Sounds great.

I want to talk about things that you can do to really just be able to do and create more dollars in revenue without spending more dollars. It's more just things and tweaks that you can do today. So we'll see how that one goes. But with that being said, thanks Chase for being here as always. Thank you for listening to Send It and we'll see you. Next week.

Cheers.

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