Email Marketing Nerd. The Chase Dimond Story.

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Welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert.

And this is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. Thank you for tuning in today for a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories.

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Live. I'm here with Chase Dimond and welcome to a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories. Chase, hello.

How are you today?

We're great. Finishing the day. You're just kicking it right now. So we're in this episode with Chase. I must tell you a few things about you, Chase. I must tell you that you are one of my favorite persons that I look for when I'm looking to understand the email marketing game. You are in this world for a few years now and you've been on such a roller coaster to understand what's going on with the email. So thanks a lot for being today with us.

Yeah, man, I really appreciate the kind words and I'm excited to be here.

Excellent. So the first question is, as we're always asking our our guests in, in the show, how you've got into this e commerce game. At the very beginning. Tell us your story. What's the backstory?

Cool. So really long winded. I'll make this quick. At 13 years old, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. It's basically inflammation of your digestive tract. At the time, doctors didn't know what it was, I didn't know what it was. So I was sick for an entire year. So from 13 to 14 years old, I was sick for an entire year due to lack of awareness. So at 14, finally started feeling better. And from 14 to 16 years old, I dedicated myself to raising awareness and fundraising for this disease. So we raised tens of thousands of dollars. We were doing guerrilla marketing. Of course, at the time I didn't know what any of these things were. I was taking ads out on the paper, I was phone calling friends, I was doing restaurant fundraisers, I was recruiting people to come to these walks. I was asking them to tell their friends, right? So referral, marketing and word of mouth. And from 16 to 22, I served a six year board term on this charity. They did about $50 million a year in fundraising. So it was a really great experience. In college, my parents could not afford for me to go to university, so I had to work 6, 8, 10 jobs and internships to be able to pay for my college. I also played college soccer, as you guys say, college football. Right. I was in a fraternity, I was in business clubs, I was coming up with ideas. And then when I graduated, I went to work for an education technology company where I built a product that connected students on college campuses to others in their classroom, scaled it to hundreds of thousands of college students, and then built an email travel series, scaled that to 500,000 college students and users in 10 months. And then about three and a half or four years ago, one of my buddies said, hey, look like this e commerce thing is really cool. No one's really doing a great job with email and e commerce. Why don't you take your skill set of building communities and, and all the things that you've done with email and bring it into e commerce. So I took a course like four years ago. I charged like $100 a month for clients. Right? It's charging pennies on the dollar, basically is paying them to let me learn. And now I run an agency where we have about 35 to 40 full time employees on our email team and we work with about 60, 65e commerce brands that do anywhere from seven to nine figures in annual revenue. So long winded, that's kind of my background of how I got into marketing and now what I'm up to.

Excellent. Quite a ride. So it's impressive how our beginnings are being affected by our context, let's say. And it's an impressive story about how you've done so well at that moment. How old were you when you've, let's say, started your first fundraising campaigns?

So I must have been 14, 14 and a half years old. So obviously a lot of credit to my parents for helping me, but I just was hungry and I didn't know what I was doing. And I think that was part of it because I didn't know. I didn't know what was possible and I didn't know what could go wrong and I didn't know what could go right. So I just kind of dove in headfirst and things figure themselves out. Right. I didn't, I wasn't intending to make money myself. I didn't make a single cent from any of that. I really was passionate and genuine and authentic about wanting to help myself and others with this kind of disease. This is something that I have and other people will have for the rest of their lives. So really being like an ambassador and proponent for this was really cool.

That's excellent. So Chase, looking at the current landscape, what do you think has changed in the email marketing game in the last year or so?

So I think there's two ways to look at this. I think since I first started in email marketing, let's say like five or six years ago till now, I'll give you two perspectives. One's going to be on executing email and the other is going to be on a service provider and why I think email is so important. So the first one, in terms of executing email, I think the biggest change that I've seen since when I started versus now is the need to segment your list and send to people that want to hear from you. When I first started, you could batch and blast your whole list and get away with it. Google and Yahoo and some of the other ISPs used to be okay with bulk volume senders that you weren't really penalized. Where today it's all about the quality of the person receiving the mail. Are these people opening your emails, are these people clicking your emails? Are they making purchases from you? Right, right. And all the things that you guys preach about the recency, frequency, right, the value, those are I think, the biggest shifts and the biggest changes. And I think that's why with OmniConvert, you guys are doing such a great job, because that is the now and that is the future. So that's on the email execution side. On the email service provider side, it's been the easiest it's ever been to sell email marketing as a service today. And the reason for that is I was 14. The cookies going away. Brands are kind of having unpredictability and inconsistency on top of the funnel, right? So your Facebook ads and your Instagram ads are harder. You have less data, there's a lot more competition, it's a lot more expensive. And because of that, brands have to diversify their marketing mix, they have to do email marketing, they have to add sms, they have to own their own audience. So that way they can have predictability and revenue that they can control. So I think those are the two. Right. So making sure that you're sending to people that want to hear from you is on the actual email execution. And if you're a freelancer, if you're an agency, if you're thinking about where to enter, I think email marketing and or SMS on the retention side are great places because brands are going to need to do this because you cannot scale like you used to solely on Facebook and Instagram anymore.

Yeah, that's a great insight. And I think the current landscape, it's favoring the ones which are having this own, the own channel Chase. How do you foresee this acceptance criteria and the permissions of the users? Have you seen in the US happening like here in the EU? Because here we have brands with 2 million people in their list but only 600,000 of them are accepting personalized communication. Do you foresee this coming to the US because we have that act from California as well as. Well, how do you see this?

Yeah. And to clarify, are you talking about like in the terms of like a double opt in or actually people giving consent? Double opt in, double opt in.

And people giving consent to be addressed personally based on their historical behavior and their purchase with. With you as a, as an E commerce.

Okay, cool. So I'm basically understanding that in three ways. One is right double opt in versus single opt in. The other is you know, consent where at checkout, right. They accept marketing versus they don't accept marketing. Right. And then with some of the iOS and some of these other things like people actually re opting in, kind of giving permission and wanting to receive emails. So we haven't looked so much at that yet. A lot of our brands are US based and we haven't been too heavily impacted yet. That's to say like, that's not to say like we won't be heavily impacted. Right. Like California where I live has their own California privacy, you know, data acts. I know Canada is pretty strict, obviously the EU and everything outside of here is really strict with GDPR and whatnot. I do think that that is a potential future. I think we have to be prepared for if that is to come. But I think the great thing about email versus some of these other channels is like so for example on Facebook and whatnot, I think the way that people are using language around Apple and how they're Kind of scaring people into whether or not they want to consent to receiving ads. It's kind of scary where I think with email, I think people understand email, they like email, they prefer it. So I think, not that we're going to be completely safe, but I think we're in a lot safer space on the owned audience side than any of these other top of the funnels. I think it's pretty scary. If you're only a paid social company or if you're only a brand that leverages paid social. I think that we will have some impact to some degree here in the US although I haven't seen much of it, at least currently.

Yeah. So Chase, regarding the game plan that you're using, what's your secret sauce, how you are helping the E commerce companies cut through the noise with the email.

So for me, the way they've always looked at these things, right, there's no silver bullet, right. There's not one thing I'm going to say today that's going to change your business. It's the sum of a lot of things I'm going to say that will marginally increase your business. So whenever I look at a brand and even if I don't look at a brand, say for example, there's four different criteria of someone's doing 0 to 10% of the revenue from email, 10 to 20%, 20 to 30 or 30% or more just by either hearing where someone's at in their journey of how much revenue they're driving from email or not, or even basically just looking at an account, I could help probably tell you to some degree of certainty what you are, what you're not doing. So if you're at 0 to 10% of your revenue from email, you're probably missing a lot of the core flows. You know the core flows are things like the welcome series for non buyer, the abandoned checkout, the abandoned cartoon, you know, the browse abandonment. They're also missing probably basic post purchase things like the customer thank you, upsell cross sells and win back. Right. Someone that has a really small percentage of the revenue from that probably isn't doing a whole lot there. They're also probably not setting enough campaigns per week. And again, let me I guess clarify. A campaign in my terminology is a one time send to a group of contacts, think about a holiday promotion or like a product launch. Whereas an automation, a flow, those types of things that is basically an email that's triggered based off some kind of action or behavior. Someone signs up to a pop up on your list and receives some kind of discount or free shipping or content that will fire the welcome series for non buyers, someone's on your list, they add to cart, they don't start checkout, they don't buy, that will fire the abandoned cart. So now that we're kind of in line, right, the automation, the flow side, people do not have a lot set up. The campaign side, they're not setting enough campaigns per week. I think the problem is most of us are either marketers and or consumers, right? In your case, we're both marketers and consumers. On the consumer side, we're kind of annoyed, right? If a brand sends us three, four, five, six emails a week. So because we're annoyed personally, that biases goes into our business where we're not probably sending enough campaigns per week. Although that's probably not the right thing. By leveraging segmentation, you can get away sending 3, 4, 5, 6 times a week and not necessarily hit person, you know, all that many times. So I think sending enough campaigns per week is really important. And the way that I think about it is send one campaign per week, look at the positive engagements. That's things like the open rate, the click through rate, the conversion rate, those types of things, monitor the negative things, the mark to spam, the bounce, the unsubscribe if things are in line with the industry standard, right? So typically I'm aiming for a 20% or higher on the campaigns, right? There are certain metrics that you want to stay below. Like you can have 1 out of 1000 marks of spam, right? So go look at some of the metrics. But if your metrics look healthy, if they look good, send a second campaign per week, right? The second campaign looks good, send a third or maybe send that third and you're fine. But when you send that fourth, there's friction, right? The open rates decrease, the click through decrease, the conversion decreases, the market spam increases, the unsubscribe increases. So at that fourth email, you realize that you probably should only be setting three per week, right? Three per week is probably that equilibrium where you're maximizing revenue and you're missing, you're kind of minimizing churn. Also, keep an eye on customer support tickets, right? If you start sending a daily email and you never told people when they opted in that you're going to send a daily email, there's going to be a mismatch. But a lot of people are going to complain. A lot of people are unsubscribe. So that's the Automation, that's the campaigns. And the last major one or two things is basically making sure that you have a signup form, whether that's a pop up, a fly out, some kind of embedded form that's collecting at least 5 to 10% of cold traffic into emails. So for every 100 people on your list you should be collect or sorry, every 100 people on your website you should be collecting at least five or ten of those people into email subscribers and or SMS subscribers. Right. The way that you do that is you promote content that they could access. Some kind of free shipping, some kind of offer some kind of entry into some kind of giveaway. Right. Enter into our monthly giveaway to see if you want. So that's kind of how I think about like those things and those are all the areas along with segmentation. Obviously segmentation feeds into the campaigns and then we have certain triggers set up that are based off an action or segment on the automation side. So those are the things that we're really focused on that do help move the needle.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense Chase. However, for the untrained, let's say ones, how would you rate a good open rate? How would you rate a good unsubscribe rate? Where are those, let's say safe levels from where onwards you, you could blast another campaign or trigger, I don't know, the fourth campaign per week.

Yep. Yeah. So on the specifically for campaigns on the open rate side, we're aiming at 20%. Right. So we're trying to pick the segment that allows us to straddle the line. If we're at a 10 or 15% open rate, you know, we probably were too, you know, wide and who we are hitting. Right. We did not segment enough. If we're hitting like a 50% open rate, while that's great, we're also probably leaving a decent amount of people on the table that we could have otherwise hit. So we're trying to pick the segment that allows us to get that 20% right. Maybe start with a 30 day engaged and see where that nets you. The 30 day engage obviously is going to be the most engaged segment. So those people might open 20, 25, 30, 35. Right. So kind of increment up to get to that 20%, you might want to hit a 45 day engage to 60 day engage. We typically don't go ever past like 90. Maybe 120 is maybe the max that will ever hit. It also depends on how frequently you send. If you send a lot, the number of days that you want to segment, it will be smaller, right. If you're sending a daily email, you know, after 30 days, that's 30 chance of someone to open. Like, you don't want to go past that. Whereas if you're sending, let's say once a week, right. You're basically sending four emails a month. You probably want to give people about three, maybe four months to kind of have a chance to open. Someone maybe had a baby, right? Maybe they're not opening emails for a month. Maybe someone relocated and moved. Maybe someone had these things. So depending on how frequently you send will depend on the signaling that you'll hit. In terms of some of the other metrics, like, typically, we're hoping to have like half a percent unsubscribe or lower. We don't want to be above half a percent. It's kind of the metric that we're going after. The one I mentioned before is you're typically allowed one out of 1,000 marked as spam. Right. Anything over that is pretty alarming. Typically, you know, we're aiming for like 1% or lower. Bounced, right. Typically if you have a high bounce rate, that means you've purchased a list or you haven't cleaned your list. So those are some of the metrics. And then the click through really will vary depending on the segment that you hit, the content that you send. Right. If you're sending some kind of special offer or great deal that people have been primed to receive. So say for example, you're launching a new product at a discount and I sent you an email yesterday saying, hey, just to let you know, tomorrow I'm sending you a great offer on a new product, you've primed people, right. So that click through probably will be higher. Whereas if you're just sending some random email about something that's not that important, maybe the click through is lower. And if you do it right and you're sending content that's really interesting and engaging and intriguing, maybe there's a lot of click through to the blog. So the click through really depends on what the segment is and what the objective of the email is.

Yeah. So, Chase, is the copy more important than the design, let's say, of the, of the email? Where, where do you stand here?

Oh man, I know this is really like a polarizing thing. If we're talking about like, should you send plain text versus design? I think people often live on the ends of the spectrum. I'm somewhere, you know, in the middle, I think. I think you have to. Well, one, you have to test it. Right. I think that's the obvious is you have to test a designed email versus plain text email. 2. I think it also depends on the demo, right? Like I think the older the demo, the more they probably prefer plain text that's larger in font size. Right. So say you're hitting an audience that's like, you know, our parents or our grandparents. Right. That are 50, 60, 70, 80. Right. Maybe text will work, but make sure the text is like 16, 18, 20 point font. Don't have it like this 12 point font. Right. So I think designing with the audience in mind is really important. Or kind of creating emails for the audience in mind is really important. I also think certain emails inherently are better for different things. So like a customer thank you email after someone's purchase. I think that's a really great email. That should be a plain text email from the founder or the spokesperson or the community manager. Right. Feels really personal. Say for example, you're going to send two or three abandoned cart emails. Say you send three. Maybe the first two have some kind of designed elements or whatnot. Maybe the third email is just a follow up in plain text from the founder. Hey, you know Chase, I saw my team sent you a few emails over the past few days. Didn't look like you were able to successfully check out. Wanted to see if you had any questions, if I could help you. Right. So in my mind, like I think you have to test it. Every story work with will have a slightly different variance of how much design or how much plain text we end up pushing. In some stores, 60% of the emails might be designed and maybe 40% are plain text. And then there might be, you know, 70 that are plain text and 30 that are designed. So tested is one to think about the emails that like are inherently personal. The customer thank you. Maybe one of the last emails, you know, an abandoned car, you know, the breakup series, right. The sunset unengaged flow. Right. Like you want those to be plain text, you want those to inbox, you want those to feel personal, right. You're basically giving people like a last chance or two to stay on your list or to opt out. So to me, again, I hate to say the answer, but it really depends.

Now while we're here at this, let's say best practices regarding how to craft the email, how important is the creativity and how important is to just showing up, using the data and so on. Do you use for your customers, for instance, do you use separate people? I mean you have the one which is in charge with the out of the box ideas. And you have the data guy, which is looking at the metrics. How would you, let's say, address this and what would you suggest to our audience here how they should tackle the email game?

Yeah, so I'll give you the answer from the agency side and then I'll try to give you the answer from the brand side. So on the agency side, right now we work on a POD system. So every single client gets access to a team of five people. On that team, it's an email marketer, strategist. So to your point, they're the person that's coming up with the flows, the campaigns, they're looking at the data, they're running the AB test, right. They're really focused on moving the needle and trying to increase both the dollar amount coming from email and the percentage of revenue coming from you. So the email marketer is one. Next we have an account manager, right, because we have POD, because we work with, you know, 60, 70 clients. You know, the account manager is really there to take call notes, to work on the project management system to make sure the team is meeting deadlines, to make sure that the client's approving things on time, right. So that's the account manager. They're really making sure that we're getting done what we say we're going to, we're going to do. We have an email designer, right? So obviously for all things visual, they're creating the gifts, the signs, the assets, all these different types of things. Within the email we have a copywriter. So the fourth is the copywriter. All the written words, everything from the call to actions, the subject lines, the preview text, all the written word is the copywriter. And then lastly, we have email developers that are actually custom coding emails. So that way they render properly across devices. They look good, you know, they're pixel perfect. So those are the five that we have on our team. If you were to build an internal email team, I don't think you need the account manager, right? Because you're just one person. Like I think the email marketer could be self sufficient enough and maybe manage the project. So I don't think you need that. And then depending on the size of your business, right. I don't know that you need the email developer. I think the email developer is really nice to have. But if you're a small business, let's say you're doing zero to $50,000 a month on your E commerce store, you probably could go without it, right? You probably have other expenses. It's probably not that important to hire an email developer. But I think as you scale and as you build out your email team, having a developer at some point I think is really important, especially if we look forward into things like AMP for email and email annotation. These things are very technical and. Right. Maybe someone understands deliverability. So those are my thoughts. Right. So on the agency side, there's five people. Marketer, account manager, designer, copywriter and developer. And then internal team. I think you need the designer, marketer and copywriter.

That totally makes sense. So, Chase, tell us about your preferred customer or one of the most impactful campaigns or clients that you've worked with.

So I guess in terms of like, you know, like who we work with, right? Like typically the makeup of our brand, they do at least a million dollars a year. They're using Klaviyo. Again, I like Klaviyo. There's other great platforms, right? Omnisend, you know, Drip, whoever else, Right. There's a lot of great ones. If you're on a platform that you like, don't switch to Klaviyo just because I said it. It's really about making sure that you're comfortable with the platform. For us, we typically only work with brands that have at least 10 to 15,000 subscribers. So that's how we work with them. Right. A lot of times brands coming in do anywhere from like 0 to 15% of their revenue from email. And typically within three to six months, we're trying to get them to 20, 25, 30% of their revenue from email. So, you know, there's. There's a lot of case studies and a lot of examples of where we've taken brands from $50,000 a month to $500,000 a month with email. And again, like, we follow in a lot of cases the exact same playbook of segmentation, of setting enough campaigns, of setting up the right flows, those types of things, optimizing the signup forms, really looking at the data to run a B test around the subject line, the preview text, the from name. Really interesting. Like, I never realized until the past, like year, we've been really obsessed with testing the from name, how much that can actually move the needle. So what we've been testing, and this is something that's been working really, really well for us, is so for example, I have a weekly newsletter I sent from Chase diamond, right. My name, what I've been testing, sending, is from my email. So instead of saying Chase diamond, it will show chasease diamond.com and I've run an AB test multiple times on Chase diamond versus Chase at Chase diamond and the Chase at Chase diamond outperforms. Right. It feels more personal. Again, I don't know how long this is going to last, but this is something that we've been testing pretty regular with our bulk our clients. If you're on one of our list, if you look at, you know the from name and it's from an email, it's probably one of our brands. So that's kind of something that's, that's working. So I think those are the things that like we look at doing. Those are some of the types of brands that we work with. I think, you know, almost all brands should be leveraging email marketing and I think depending on the size will dictate where you start. For me, if I had to start with three core automations or three core flows, if you haven't had anything, I would start with the welcome series for non buyers. Right. You have some pop up people entering your list. You have to greet them, you have to educate them, you have to nurture them. It's a really great way to build that trust and set that relationship. I would build the abandoned checkout which is different than the abandoned cartoon. So if you're using for example Klaviyo and Shopify, if you're in Klaviyo by default they call it the abandoned cart. But if you look at the trigger, it's actually checkout started or started checkout which is an abandoned checkout. You have to add a custom snippet of code to your product Liquid theme for the browse abandonment and the abandoned cart. So I would set up the abandoned checkout which does come by default. Again, these are the people that are so far down your funnel they just need to end up paying, right? You know what they care about. They've added things to their cart, they added things to their checkout. They've added their name, their address, their phone number. You just need to kind of subtly and gently remind them about like who you guys are and whatnot. And then the last one I would do is kind of some basic post purchase. Thank you so much for your order. It really means a lot to us. I would segment differently based off first time buyer versus repeat buyer. You know, if you're selling like a supplement or hair care or CBD or something that requires education, I would send an email after the customer. Thank you. Hey, while you wait, here's how you use for example our calming blanket. We work with a company that sells weighted blankets and we noticed a lot of customers were asking, hey, how do I use this? I don't know how to use this. And customer support kept getting tons and tons of tickets. So all we did was turn it into a simple email. Here are the three top ways that our customers use our products and customer support tickets got cut in by half. Hey, use it like a hug. Use it to kind of ground you, you know, use it to, you know, as a blanket, right? Like just by giving people the information that they need, right? When they buy, they're going to remember they're going to have access to it. They won't have to hit up your support. That's going to reduce the buyer's remorse. That's going to reduce people having to return it because they don't think it works because they don't know how to use it properly. That's just like in supplements, for example. You want to teach people to use your multivitamin, your product daily because you want to train the consumption. The more frequently they use it, you know, the more frequently they're going to have to purchase and the more that they use it, the more hopefully that is going to benefit them, right? It kind of builds this habit. That's why every single time on the bottle of like a multivitamin it says take one a day, right? It's for obviously you to get the maximum value, but it's also so that way you keep buying the product. So there are certain kind of things that you can build into your sequences that make your product sticky.

So would you suggest to these multivitamin brands to don't care about the rule of sending free four emails a week, but sending like a short email, hey, have you take your multivitamins today? Yeah.

So you're gonna have two groups of people, right? You're gonna have the people that are already. Right. So I guess you might have three people. One is people that have never purchased your multivitamin, another that have purchased them on a one off. And then you probably have a group of people that have purchased it on subscriptions, right? So the people that are the subscribers, they actually pay for a monthly subscription. You're probably just gonna want to set them yet. Education, content, reminders, things like that, right? You know, value that other people are getting. For the people that have purchased but haven't paid for your subscription, they're just bought once or twice and they're doing it manually. You're going to want to push them towards like the benefits of owning a subscription. Never run out again. Make sure that you always have the maximum Value. Here are some testimonials and some customer reviews from our people that, you know, finally subscribed. Right. And then you're going to have a group of people that have never purchased and you're going to want to send them discounts, content reviews, social proof. Right. All these different types of things. So I think depending on the group and the segment that people are in within this multivitamin company will dictate the content that they're going to receive.

Yeah. Chase. Regarding the email process, some voices say that email is a revenue generator and that's it. Some voices, on the contrary, say that it's just supporting actor and revenue might happen or not. But the idea is to keep your audience connected by using the email. Where do you stand on this?

I think email is a great channel to drive first purchase and also a great channel to drive repeat purchase. So I think it's a great channel for conversion and I think it's a great channel for retention for our clients. We're doing about five to $10 million a month at this point via email. At the start of COVID and the Pandemic, the way that a lot of our brands are able to stay afloat is they leverage their email list. Right. They cut spend and they leverage their email list. Or a lot of these people had a really big email list. They came to us because they hadn't leveraged it properly. So I'm very bullish on email. I've been doing it for a long time. I see day in and day out, like how much money these campaigns and these flows are generating. So I think it's huge for driving revenue. Sure, you already paid to acquire these people, but just because you paid to acquire them doesn't mean that they've actually converted. Email is a great channel for building trust with these consumers. Depending on the price of the product, you might need two, you might need six, you might need 20 touch points with them. Email allows you to get those extra touch points. So I think email is really crucial. I don't think. Right. Obviously we need top of the funnel, we need people on the list to do our job. But I think they work really symbiotic and hand in hand to drive to each other. So, sure, people might say, well, this was a sale that was going to happen already from paid social. It's like, sure, you could argue that, but is our revenue increasing and we got the sale, that's all that matters. Right? So I know attribution is a weird thing, but I think email at the end of the Day is a massive revenue driver and it's one of the most profitable, if not the most profitable channel because you basically pay X number of dollars to your ESP every single month. And that's really it. Outside the person that you pay to do your marketing. With Facebook, every time you want to reach something, you have to pay, Right? With Google, every time you want to reach someone, you have to pay. You don't have to do that with email.

Yeah. Every time you want to reach something, someone again and again and again. I mean, that's also important. Chase, we have a question from Jonathan. Do you invest more time in email or sms which provides higher ROI for you?

Yes. So we are first and foremost an email shop. We have recently started SMS just because our clients want it. And we see SMS as a great channel. I think they're complementary. The way that we're viewing SMS is basically for the folks on our list that want that extra communications for like our VIPs. Right. So basically the way that we're approaching it and positioning it is we're doing like text only clubs where you get exclusive deals, you get first access. So it's for the people that want to be like those super fans, right? They want the text from the founder, they want to be alerted in real time. So I think they both are really successful. I think they both really do have their place in terms of like email collection and SMS collection. What we've noticed is the actual order in which you collect phone numbers versus emails matters. When we collected email first, phone number second. That's actually more successful than asking for phone number first, email second. So I would basically position it as a VIP club. Give people first access, early deals, early looks at products, those types of things. We're still trying to figure out the right cadence because obviously your phone is a little bit intimate and we don't want to abuse kind of having access. So right now we're sending about three to four times a month, right? So once every week, give or take. And every single time before we press send on a text, we're being ultra clear. Is this something that warrants a text? If it is, we press send and if it isn't, we'll maybe either go send an email or we'll just scrap it and we'll wait until we have like that right time. So that's typically how we're looking at sms.

Is relevancy more important than the offer itself? I mean, what I'm asking is many companies are going down this spiral of motivating the customers by Giving them an extra incentive like 5%, 10%, $10 vouchers and so on. Or is it more important to be relevant because at this moment you have a lot of data. For instance, we are obsessed with data. You can put a lot of attributes on a customer. You can define things like, is the customer satisfied? Is the customer at the first order, has he bought from this category or from that category, is a lapsed customer. So you know, the RFM segment. So you have all these data. So what I'm asking is, would you go to be more relevant or would you go to simply, let's say, make the offer as appealing as possible?

Yeah, if I had to err on one, I would focus on the relevance. But again, it's one of the situations where it, like, it depends. So our brands fall into three categories. Always giving discounts, sometimes giving discounts, and never giving discounts. So the strategy, depending on those really, you know, depends. Like for the people that never give discounts, the only leverage points that we have is like psychology and, and relevancy, Right. You know, fomo, the fear of missing out, limited quantity, limited edition, selling fast. Right. Based off their purchase behavior, based off their engagement behavior. Right. So with something that is, you know, never giving discounts, you really do have to focus on, you know, pulling levers that, like, around psychology, making sure that people understand that this is important, this is luxury, whatever that connotation is. Right. So the relevancy RFM is, you know, a plus. They're pretty much the only poll that we have on the other side. Right. For brands that are always giving discounts. And when we come in, they're typically doing a million, 5 million, $10 million a year. So most of their existing customers have already been trained that like, there's going to be discounts. Discounts are always happening. Right. A lot of the emails have discounts. So with those people, I think pulling in relevancy definitely does help. But they've kind of like branded themselves as like a discount shop. Right? And that's great for some people. Like, I know that those people got a lot of slack for a lot of these brands. They're crushing it. They've built into their margins giving out discounts, right? So it's pretty genius. Like, these guys are very smart and they do a lot of money and they're able to get a lot of people in through the funnel because they have 10, 20, 30, 40, even sometimes 50% off. Right. So I don't think that's right or wrong. We have to kind of follow suit of how our brands do it. But I think really where the sweet spot is is the brands that are sometimes giving discounts, right? The other, the other two are extremes, right? Like it's impossible to always give discounts and it's impossible to never give discounts. In reality, I think brands should be able to have discounts at their disposal when it makes sense and for the right segments. So for, for example, if you've hit someone 10 times with your company's products and they haven't purchased, maybe slip them a discount, right? See if you can get them over the edge through a 10% off or free shipping or even a free product with purchase, right? Like, I think you have to get creative with the segments. You know, for VIPs, maybe they want discounts, but more importantly, they want recognition, they want status, they want early access, right? So I think depending on the segment for those brands in the middle will depend on like what the discounting, what the free offer or what the free shipping, what the content, you know, what the status really dictates. So that's why, like with all of our brands, when they come in, we do onboarding to get their sense of like, do you do discounts? How often do you discounts and what are the discounts and what are your margins? Right? Like, understanding their margins is really important too. Like their margins are really slim, like 20, 30%. We can't, we can't really do discounts. Even if we want to do discounts and they want us to, it's like we're going to lose money. Like it doesn't make sense.

So what can you do to, let's say you have a brand that trained their customers to always expect some discounts, but they realize that the competition is fierce and they can't afford like they used to. What do you suggest to such a brand with them?

We're trying to push bundles, right? So bundles will increase the average order value. The aova, it will kind of, in theory apply a discount, but instead of giving like a welcome 10 or a welcome 20 that could be used across the board, we're basically doing a specific discount on a specific bundle. Maybe it's our products that haven't sold or maybe it's our best sellers, right? So we're trying to push people to spend more money with us. And by spending more money, we're willing to give them the same cost savings, right? So if before we gave 10% off, maybe instead of giving the same 10% off code that was only spent on a $30 product, we're maybe pushing people to buy a package of $75 and we'll give them 10% off. Right. So I think we're looking in that way where it's like these people have been too trained, we're getting away rid of discounts entirely. Probably isn't going to work for the model. So how do we get more strategic around those things or even to like I mentioned this before, like the free product with purchase. When you buy this hero product you're going to get this other product that we have great margins on that we're only kind of doing for the free product with purchasing I think being really strategic like with your SKU count with the SKUs that you launch and the things that you can offer in. So for example like we have one company that has decent to okay margins with the hero product and they purposely have brought in another product that like they list on their website is more money than it actually is and they're just giving it away for free because they have like 80% margins on it. Right. I think being really crafty and creative and again I don't want to say be deceitful like that's not the point. Obviously you still have to be genuine authenticity but you have to be strategic with how you structure your business. It's so important for the longevity. Like if you're just trying to be like a get rich quick, you know, don't listen to any of this but if you're trying to build a brand that has like brand equity and wants to get acquired or wants the last 3, 5, 10 plus years be really thoughtful and strategic with like how you structure your SKUs, how often you launch new products and how you just approach the entire customer journey.

Excellent. So Chase, we have a question for for our partner and sponsor Vitex which is an E commerce platform are asking you what do you think is going to be happening in the future with the E commerce platforms? Do you think the headless E commerce is going to win this game or do you think the custom development is going to be here for the next chapter?

Yeah, that's a good question. Truthfully I'm not as involved in the website build so this is more just my thoughts as in I want to clarify that I think there's going to be two groups of people right? There's going to be like the small person that just wants to get started, the mom and pop shop that probably just wants to use something that's headless or just really easy to start. There's low barriers to entry Right. Whereas I think maybe some of the legacy players or some of the big companies, they're going to want something more custom. So I think, for example, and these are just random numbers, I think maybe the people that are like 0 to 5 million are probably going to want, you know, the sponsor or headless, just really things that are easy to get off the ground. And as they scale maybe past like $5 million, I think at that point they're going to want to do maybe custom things, but who knows, maybe they're happy, maybe they're okay with what they've built and it's too hard to change. So I think there's two classes of people. I think there's a legacy brands, I think some of these older retailers, some of these people that have it already and for them it's just going to be too hard, too expensive to change. But I think a lot of like the players that are entering now that haven't started or about to start, I think going like the headless route, that's really easy, low friction, it's affordable, I think will cover a lot of the market share.

What's the most frustrating thing that it happens right now in E commerce from your perspective, what's pissing you off? What would you change if you would have the magic wand of shifting the E commerce your way?

I mean, I like this, but I also don't like this. I like when people say email is dead because it just basically means that us and our clients and people like you get to take more of the gravy, right? Like when people say email marketing is dead, like, let's let them think that, like it is more alive than ever. It is so important. I mean, when people say that, I just laugh and like, yeah, sure, whatever, it's dead. So I think that is really great and really terrible. But in all seriousness, like, I think if anyone is watching this, like, if you are a freelancer, I think learning email marketing or some form of email marketing is super important. Whether that's copywriter, whether it's design, whether it's understanding strategy, whether it's deliverability. Right? Like, I think deliverability is a really interesting one that a lot of people don't specialize in, a lot of people don't focus on, but it's like literally the longevity of your email business depends on deliverability. For those that don't understand deliverability, the really basic way of saying what it means is like your ability to hit the inbox, the promotions and hopefully not the spam. Right? Like where you're being placed? Are you being delivered? So if you're a freelancer, I would really consider getting into email marketing. I think there's a lot of brands that are doing email not at all or really poorly. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I think for an agency that's doing email double down, keep going, potentially look into adding sms, but don't do too many things right. Specialize for an agency that's not doing email retention at all. I think it's going to be so important for the success of your agency to offer retention on top of paid, paid traffic, because paid traffic right now, as mentioned before, is all over the place. We don't know what's going to happen with iOS 14. We don't know what's going to happen with cookies. Like, we can only guess that it's not going to be good. So, you know, add some layer of consistency. And then for brands, again, I know email can be overwhelming. Just break it down. You know, if you're doing, let's say, zero to $10,000 a month, focus on the welcome series and just do a one or two emails. Focus on the abandoned checkout, just do one or two emails. Focus on the customer. Thank you. Just do one or two emails. Even just send one or two campaigns a week as you scale, add more emails to those flows, add more campaigns. So really kind of piecemeal this. I understand that email is not the only thing that you have going on. You have paid social, you've got employees, you've got influencers, you've got SEO, you've got all these things. But give email at least a little bit of attention. I think you'll be really surprised. I think that's like my final words on, like, what people should do, like with email Chase.

Are you clustering the emails differently according to their email provider? Let's say Yahoo or Gmail and so on. And if you do this, what's your insights on addressing them differently?

Yeah, we typically don't unless we have an issue. Like what we'll basically do is with Enclaviyo or whatever Dora tool we're looking at, we'll look at like a Yahoo, Gmail, AOL Hotmail Outlook. And if we have issues, then we'll kind of pull one out and really focus on like, how do we get off the blacklist for this provider? How do we make sure that we're routing our emails properly for, you know, so and so. So, you know, in most cases we're not looking at that because in most cases by following best practices, we're not shooting ourselves in the foot. Right. It is so much easier to stay out of spam than get yourself. So once you're in spam, it's hard to get out, but it's so easy to prevent it. The biggest thing that people make is not segmenting their list at all. They're just batching and blasting. They have really poor emails. And once you get into the spam, it's not impossible to get out, but it's harder to get out, whereas it's easy to prevent getting in.

Prevention is better than cure, right?

Yes.

So Chase, what about the promotion stuff? Is there anything that a brand can do to get away from that?

So yes and no. Right. All the things I'm going to mention are not fail safes. It's not going to work 10 out of 10 times. But like these are best practices to take, right. So typically, right. Like if you're a newsletter, most people in the newsletter will ask people to reply. They'll ask them to drag them to the inbox. They'll ask them to hit, hit a link. Right. I think getting people to engage or to whitelist you or to move you right away is really important. Getting people to reply is important. I think those things are important. Sending to people that are engaged. Right. Will help with all those types of things. But again like in some cases like you're just going to be in promotions. That's just the bottom line. Right. Try obviously that the goal is to be in the inbox because if people have notifications on their phone, you know, having hitting the inbox will have the notification on their phone hit if they have notifications on. Thankfully a lot of cases like on my phone at least promotions and inbox are looped in together for my on my app. Although some people have it separate. So promotions is not the end of the world. Although I have noticed some difference. Obviously when we're in the inbox versus the promo, there are free tools out there that you can use to figure out like where you are landing and maybe it's a subject line. Right? Yeah. So I would, I would send test and previews before you send your whole list to these free tools. So that way you can hopefully change the subject line or change the copy before you hit send to everyone.

Got it. Chase, regarding the. The let's say most impactful campaign that you've ever ran or assisted at what stick to you? What was that campaign that stick to your mind?

Oh man, I would almost like even love to. I didn't Know that you're answering that. I'm just going to see. Is there a way to screen share in here or no?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

You can do it, man. Let me find this. This was actually really cool. Hopefully this is okay to share, but I'm gonna share it anyways.

Let's do that.

Yeah, yeah. It's better to ask for permission. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right? Let's see. Do I just go to. Oh, you go on your.

On the, on the screen where you are and then you have great, an icon there.

Okay, can you see my screen?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. So this was a product launch sequence. This is going to be for a single brand. I think we sent three or four emails. And by the way, this is some old data, so apologies on the dates, but this was sent in July 31st of 2020. And we sent this email to buyers and engaged subscribers. And this was basically a heads up email, right? So this company Nugs, they sell a chicken nugget alternative. They just had one flavor of just regular chicken nuggets. As you probably confer, right. They're going to launch something hot and spicy. So this was just the email that we sent.

So for the podcast listeners, the email is just. The first email was something hot is about to go down, right?

And it has like a really funny space type image. Check back soon. Right? And by the way, I forgot that people are going to be listening to this as well. So I'll try to explain this better. So this is kind of how the results of this email went. So I had a 28% open rate, had a 1.6% click through it had 56 people buy for a total of $2,300. And again, like there was nothing really for sale on this email. So the fact that it drove some revenue is great. The next email. Oh shoot. Next email was a plain text email that was sent about two to three weeks after that first email. And again this went to the same segment and we're calling this email the hype email, the plain text email and says spicy lugs. Sorry, Spicy Nugs limited Release tomorrow. Only 1000 boxes available. Follow us on Instagram. Turn on your post notifications to be notified. Right, so plain text email, right? Again, to the point we mentioned earlier, like mixing in the designed email. Right? That first designed email I think really got people's attention. And now this plain text email we're inboxing. Really, really simple. One call to action to follow us on Instagram, et cetera. So here, right, 38 8% open rate, 6% click through. This email actually drove 821 orders, which $32,000 in revenue. And mind you, this is only a $37 product. Right. So that's a lot of revenue for a really small aov.

Yeah.

Anything to add for the listeners? Should I keep going?

Yeah, yeah, keep going.

Yeah. So let's see. The email was before this Too was on the 16th of August. This next email is going out on the 17th and it's kind of a hybrid of like a plain text plus like branded email. There's no images, it's just like a kind of like a graphic or like a background of red text. Red background with white text overlaid. Call to action. Hey, Chase. And by the way, this email went to their vip, so people pay on a subscription for this. This went to them first. So this is going to be to a smaller list. Chase, your beta test, your perk. You might have heard we're doing spicy nugs. Normal folks have to fight for their chance at one in 1,000 boxes. But because your nug subscription is active, this is your fast pass to the front of the line. We'll give you 24 hours to purchase this first. Right. Get the spicy nugs. Right. This email, 37% open rate, 5.7%. Click through 173 orders, which is 1.5% of the people ordering $6,000 in sales. Right. And this only went to like 11,000 people. So that's pretty good.

Yeah.

And then. Oh, sorry. Anything to add?

No, it's a, it's a fantastic operator and results for such a simple, simple approach, yet very effective.

Exactly. And I think a lot of people over engineer, like everything that we do is like to your point, being relevant, hitting the right segment, hyping things up, having good enough products. We have a formula that is very repeatable and replicable and that's why we're able to be at 60, 70 clients. And that's why people listening to this and even the course that we did with you, that we did in partnership, which if you want to talk about after, we can. The things that we teach in there, the things that other people teach in there, it's just rinse and repeat. Once you understand the fundamentals, it's so important. We can talk about that in a minute if you want. But round this out. This email went to the full list, right? Spicy nugs are here. The best of nugs. And this is by the way, has some really cool image. Has like a picture of like the box. Go shop the Nugs shop spicy nugs, whatever it might be. This email, 50% open rate, guys. So it went to 27,000 people at a 50% open rate, an 8.8% click through, had almost 800 orders, which was just about 3% of the people that actually received it place an order for a total of $32,000 in revenue. So if we go through, right, let's say 32,000, let's say 6,000, that's 38,000 plus that, right? 40, that's like 70,000. So this sequence, about this one product Launch did like 70 to $75,000 over about a month period of time and obviously we sent other emails, we had automations going in place. So that is probably off the top of my head one of the more effective ones. How do I get out of this? Yeah, that's one of the more effective ones that come to mind that I have examples for. There's others that have come to mind where like we sent an email, I kid you not, to 5,000 people and it did $250,000 in revenue. What we basically did is one of our brands launched this really special coin. It's something that a lot of people follow. It's for like the VIPs of the world. I think the coin was like $500 and I think we had like an insane conversion. So like some of the revenue that we drove from campaigns have been nuts. I think the largest that we've done from a campaign is probably like half a million dollars from a single email. But most cases again like 2k, 10k, 20k, 30k, 50k, like it's really incremental and depending on the size of the list, depending on how often you send, like as you can see, then it gets really Easy to drive 10,000, 50,000, $100,000 a month from email as you build things up and you build the trust.

That totally makes sense and fantastic, fantastic approach. It's great and refreshing to see how simplicity and relevance outperform the huge discounts and so on. Chase, we have a question coming from Jonathan. Do you always add your platform's info to your DNS records in order to increase the deliverability for your brands and clients?

Yeah. So in most cases, like we're following best practices of doing all the records to the DNS, the spf, the dmarc, things like that. Depending on the client, sometimes we'll do like a dedicated IP or a dedicated domain, other times we won't. For brands that are starting out, I think leveraging shared IP and shared domains are probably better because most people don't know what they're doing. And it's really easy if you're on your own domain by yourself to get in trouble. Whereas sometimes like when you have the shared pool, you kind of have this layer of protection. Again, if you're on the shared pool with a bunch of other beginners that don't know what they're doing, you might be shooting yourself in the foot and you maybe can change pools. For me personally, on my weekly newsletter, I'm on a dedicated ip, dedicated domain. I have all the records set up because I know what I'm doing and I'd rather have more control over my inboxing than other people. My weekly newsletter hits 40, 50% open rates and I'm hitting like a 90 to a 120 day engage. Right. So it really just depends on your level of comfortability, whether you go share versus dedicated, but making sure that you have bear metrics, the dmarc, the spf, the dkim, those records set up I think are very important.

Excellent. So Chase, I've been, let's say, preaching a lot about customer lifetime value, customer retention, focus on your list, be relevant, whatever. We teamed up for DCVO Academy. What can people find in the course that you're part of?

Yeah, by the way, great course. Thank you guys for having me. It's honored to be a part of such people like yourselves and some of the others. For me, like it was really kind of a couple of things. It was a lot of like the core automations and core flows and then I also included a couple like advanced tactics and kind of some interesting tactics. So a lot of things we talk about today on getting like the automated side of the workplace set up, the welcome series, the back in stock, the four abandons, the post purchase. Like there's a lot of really good stuff. The way that I personally film my content was almost as like if you're in the office behind me or if you're listening, you're in my office, you're overlooking my shoulders. Right? Like you're basically walking through it. I'm running through, I'm doing screen share. I show examples of what these emails should look like. I show the triggers. So I think my sections alone are probably worth the price. I think your sections alone are probably worth the price. So for the 8, 10, 12 instructors and all the content, really cool stuff. I'm actually going through it myself and I'm having my team go through it and there's a lot of great nuggets in there. So yeah, great job putting that together.

Excellent. So Chase, is there any question that I haven't been so inspired inspired enough to ask you today? What do you want to share with us?

No, I mean I'm excited to be here. I think everyone that's listening is already taking the right steps and making sure that they're focused on retention, ltv, this, that and the other. So no, I'm really excited about this. Actually someone just did ask for the link, so I don't know if you can put that in the chat or the the show notes of the episode, but I'm excited for feedback on, on the content on my modules in there and no, I think we went through it and if anyone has any questions after email me, hit me up on social. Happy to answer any questions.

So where are you? Where, where can people find you? Where are you most mostly active?

Yeah. Twitter is the best place. My handle is Ecom Chase Diamond. There's no way in diamond, so it's just Ecom, Ecom Chase and then Diamond D I M O N. Daily I'm posting marketing agency tips. I'm posting a lot of email nuggets and gold. A lot of tips and tricks. So think about Twitter is probably the best place.

Excellent. So Chase, thanks a lot for being part of E commerce growth stories today. And for you out there, may you have outstanding results in your email marketing and follow Jace if you want to level up your email game.

Awesome. Thank you guys so much. Thank you for having me and thank you guys all for listening. I really appreciate it.

This podcast was brought to you by Vitex. Vitex is the first and only fully integrated E commerce marketplace and OMS solution that offers fastest time to revenue and no upgrades ever. So go ahead, check them out. Vtex.com.

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