Ecommerce Ugly Talk NYC - The Old Email Playbook Batch and Blast Doesn’t Work Today

So Maya, I know you deal with a lot of email, right? Email is probably considered the lifeblood of E commerce, right? Not a single E commerce website that I've visited that doesn't send me more emails than I want ever. So tell us a little bit about what's changed because email has changed dramatically as well.

A lot has changed recently. Some of you may be on Yotpo email and SMS and are having to make that migration right now because they just stopped and so you're choosing between attentive klaviyo. There's a lot of options omnisend the thing to also consider. I just looked at a few accounts recently that their deliverability horrible. But they came to me and they were like oh, I'm seeing 35% Oprah rates, 30% open rates, that's fine, right? Actually no. If you're sending to list and you're not doing exclusions and you're not like actually thinking about Apple privacy which auto inflates. So those numbers, that open rate, that's not real, that's Apple privacy, Google and Hotmail inflating that. So your open rate is actually probably going to be more like 10 and you're not and people will think like oh, I'm going to send mass emails. Incorrect. You should be tightening it down thinking about it like truly engaging with people that want to hear from you so that they engage with your emails so that you become warmer to the Googles, the hotmails and you build a better reputation with them. Otherwise you're actually getting into less inboxes by sending bigger sends. You need to be really strategic about it. Go into your deliverability tabs, look at where you're standing. Build exclusion segments. Not every segment is the same, not every campaign is the same. And that's a common mistake. People will just say oh, oh, I'm just gonna send to this one every single Monday. Why it's not working. I'm gonna send to like this list, I'm gonna include this giveaway list for 2022. Why they're not engaging with you, they're not purchasing and that attribution rate that you're seeing, that's inflated. They may have purchased five days ago but if it's in their inbox and it's an auto open, they maybe didn't even see it. So you really actually have to think about it. It's not just set and forget. You have to really massage it and look at it every day.

That's great. I mean what I heard was you cannot email marketing Used to be, you know, you have your campaign and all you were doing is changing. Swapping out the product the same 20% to everyone every Monday at 9am that's not going to work. In fact, it's going to radically take a nosedive. Your deliverability. And London, I know you're doing something very different and that things that don't scale, there's a whole terminology in the startup world do things that don't scale. And you told me when we were chatting earlier about how you're engaging with your community and your customers in a way that most people would not even think. They'll be like, hey, I'm just going to spray my 10,000 people every Monday with 20% discount with a different product. Tell us about your approach.

Yes, I mean I agree with what everyone said. One thing I would add like kind of, I guess in lieu of what you're saying is like, you know, just, just give value to the customer. Right? Like this is like big picture, broad. But I mean, you know, most of our emails are text blast, they're not promotional. I mean we're, we're a music audio company so we'll send out like weekly playlists of our favorite music. Like we actually really, really go hard on building a cult like community around what we're doing. You know, getting a customer has just become harder and harder getting a new customer. So when a customer is in the door, we treat that person like God. Like that's, you know, so, so everything from, you know, any marketing channel we do use, like we really try focusing on actually driving value and giving value. And then on top of that, I mean we do stuff like we do physical mail, which is, which sounds crazy but it's like, you know, it has a 90% plus open rate like physical mail and you know how much it costs to sen like a letter to a customer? Less than a dollar. So. Or I guess a dollar. Yeah.

Or are you doing it like manually?

Manual mail? Yeah.

Oh, so you're not doing like a direct mail tool like post pilot?

Oh, well, yeah, sorry. Yes, yes, yes.

The price of the stamp keeps going up every, every quarter, more or less.

But the thing is however, about to just add on to that because I've been part of this history, so in the past, I would say about two years, Direct mail is cheaper for you to send a postcard to your customer in the United States, including the postage, including the increased postage. It's cheaper to send that than for you to get cost per click from meta ads or Google Ads for the first time it has shifted over. And here's the greater part of that. A response rate conversion rate from a postcard campaign is between 14 and 20%.

Exactly. Yeah. It's so impactful. I mean, cause it's meaningful. Like when you get a physical piece of mail that a brand doesn't need to send you but chooses to send you and it's actually thoughtful and on brand and like why you're into this brand from the get go. I think it's really meaningful and we see, I mean it's hard to know the exact conversion rate but we see amazing second time buyers through this.

But with that note, it's being thoughtful about it. It's not just taking a QR code and a discount and being like, here's the product. It's doing it to your community.

With our top like couple hundred customers every quarter. I mean I'll even go in and like physically write cards sometimes. I mean this stuff, like this stuff. I think small things go a long way, especially in difficult environments.

So do things that don't scale. The size of your list is immaterial if the deliverability sucks. If you're not tweaking your campaign and optimizing, you're just fooling yourself.