Catherine Langman:
Well hello there, it’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. And today on the show, we’re going to pivot a little bit away from Facebook advertising and I’m going to talk to you about how you can potentially increase your sales revenue up to or even more than 30%, and also to achieve up to 35% of that increase via automation, so automated methods. Does that sound good?
I don’t think anyone would turn their nose up at that sort of growth or those sort of results, I know I wouldn’t. And especially in a small business if you are really bootstrapping and trying to do most things in your business yourself as you grow and try to build to the point of building your own team and outsourcing and things like that. As much as you can systemize and automate, the better. That’s how you manage to take things off your own plate in your role in the business.
So really where this topic and this episode is coming from is a couple of places. And yes, it is a little bit motivated by this Apple iOS 14.5 update. I know it’s been the talk of the land in all online business circles at the moment for big reason. It is a big shake up in the way that we run our sales and marketing efforts in our businesses. So part of it is motivated by this shake up, and the other reason I’m really motivated to record this episode and share these strategies and insights is because I still see so many businesses these days not really understanding or realizing the impact of not owning your own customer data and database. It’s very easy I guess to start a business these days using things like a Facebook shop or just selling through Instagram or selling on the platforms like Etsy or Amazon. It’s super easy to get started in a business like that using those sorts of platforms and those sorts of methods.
But the really big problem that I see and the negative impact I think that unless you know about this stuff, of course you don’t know what you don’t know, but the downfall of using these platforms is that you actually don’t own your own customers. You don’t own that relationship, you don’t own that data and it can really impact your business in a negative way down the track. So I definitely see a lot of small businesses, a lot of small brands getting started really utilizing these days Instagram by and large, but social media generally as the marketing channel and the way that they communicate with their audience. And that’s fantastic of course, they’re very, very useful and powerful platforms. I obviously advocate for using them because we are big fans of running ad campaigns and having content on these platforms as a way to attract and engage an audience and to motivate them to take action to buy from your store. Obviously I’m a big fan of these platforms, but the problem lies in businesses that only use those platforms as that means for communicating with their audience and they’re not taking the next step of actually trying to get the audience into their own database.
So as a business owner, as a brand owner, it’s absolutely critical to your future success to start building your own database of subscribers and potential customers and existing customers so that you really have that ongoing permission to keep marketing to those subscribers and to those contacts. And this is shown to be even more critical right now because obviously we’re all going through this Apple iOS 14.5 update that has pretty much thrown the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of our digital marketing, so businesses that have purely relied on content or advertising on social platforms or on Google or any of these digital platforms. Without having built your own database, you really are at the mercy of those platforms. Whereas if you have taken the time to build your own email list, to build your own database of contacts including subscribers as well as customers, if you own your own data in that way you are in the driver’s seat. It means that it doesn’t necessarily matter so much if other platforms change the way they do things. Your audience hasn’t been taken away from you if you own your own database.
I’ll tell you, in my years of business I’ve definitely seen scenarios where, and perhaps you might have seen this over time as well, where brands started initially on Facebook and the same thing on Instagram as well, really building up amazing brands by putting content on these platforms and selling through these platforms and really building very big businesses. And then these platforms change, like they’ve all changed several times over the years. I know when Facebook first came out it was absolutely amazing in terms of the reach and the impact that you could have just for free putting content on your own business page. And then of course it became a pay to play scenario where that reach was reduced, that free reach was reduced and in order to get that traffic and sales action from the platform we all had to spend some money on Facebook advertising. And then the same thing has happened on Instagram as well. And people have lost their businesses as a result because they did not take that step to get that audience into their own database.
So if you’re in that scenario, don’t beat yourself up about it. I’m not here to try to make you feel like you’ve made a whopping big mistake. What I’m here to do today is to give you some steps to take to either start growing your own database and start building your own email list or to make more money from it and to amplify the results that you might be getting from your email list.
So I want to give you a few steps and I guess just to preempt here, I am going to be talking about and recommending the email platform Klaviyo and there’s a few reasons for that. So over my years in business, I’ve used so many different email marketing platforms. There’s been lots of new ones coming out recently. But when I first started in business back in the early 2000s there wasn’t really that much choice. So I’ve used a lot of different platforms and they become cleverer and cleverer as time goes by and there’s new technologies that are being invented and so on and so forth. But Klaviyo particularly has been created for eCommerce. And so this is why we use and love it.
I particularly love Klaviyo because of a couple reasons. Number one, you get all the functionality out of the box on any platform. It’s not like other email platforms where you only get the really cool functionality if you spend up on the biggest, most expensive plans, so I do like that fact. But I also love the way that Klaviyo has this built in, it’s almost like artificial intelligence, it learns as you go, it learns about your customer’s buying patterns as you keep putting more data and information into the system and pretty much that stuff happens on autopilot. All you really need to be doing is if it’s integrated properly into your website and you are getting traffic and sales and you are focusing on building that email list, the system learns on its own and gathers the most amazing data that can really drive future traffic and sales. It has these predictive capabilities that you can use in your automated campaigns as well as your broadcast campaigns to really continue to drive not just first time orders but repeat purchases as well. And as we all know, it’s those repeat purchases that are really going to make us the most profitable in business.
So some other really cool stats about Klaviyo specifically is that on average people end up with about 62 times return on investment on the Klaviyo fees. They do have a free version, so it’s not prohibitive to get started if you are a small business. But as you grow you’re definitely going to end up on a paid plan, and generally speaking the clients of ours and students of ours who are using this platform ultimately see this amazing return on investment. And we’re also seeing online stores and eCommerce brands that are generating over 30% of their sales revenue from email marketing. So whatever you do, do not just make the mistake of assuming that email is dead, it is definitely not dead. It is responsible for huge amounts of revenue generation. And about 35% of that email revenue is coming from automated campaigns. So obviously we’re not trying to replace all email marketing with automation because there’s always going to be cool new stuff that you need to talk about and launch and that sort of thing that goes out via broadcast style emails. But as much of that consistent traffic and sales that you can automate, the better, because that becomes pretty much the backbone of your business.
So hopefully that’s kind of convinced you of the importance of using email marketing in your business, both automated as well as broadcast style. Broadcast style means that you’re sending an email to your whole list. And then some further reasons that we are particularly keen to be focusing on building up a quality high performing Klaviyo database is also the way that it integrates with your advertising. So like I was saying in last week’s episode that with advertising obviously the limited availability of the performance metrics across platforms makes advertising harder than it used to be to build up those retargeting audience or to report on the performance of your ads. So the fact that your Klaviyo account can integrate directly with your Facebook ad’s account does mean that you are able to replace a lot of that lost data that Facebook no longer can report on. And so because you own your own Klaviyo database, you own all of the data in there, you’ve had permission from your subscribers and your customers to be able to continue communicating with them and marketing to them. It means that you can use those segments and those lists within your Klaviyo account to create your Facebook ad audiences as well. So that ability to segment your audience and use segments of your audience to re target with Facebook ads and Instagram ads really amplifies the messages that you’re already sending out via email.
So for instance, you might have a whole lot of people coming to your online store because they’re really interested in having a look at a particular product category, and perhaps it’s not an impulse buy. A lot of us don’t have impulse buy type products and it takes a little while for customers to actually make a purchase decision. In the past, of course, it was super easy to use the Facebook Pixel to target those viewers, those browsers with an ad that was showing products from that category and giving them information about why they should buy it and why they would love it and all of that good stuff. But of course now because the Facebook Pixel us so much less potent because we don’t have all that Pixel related data anymore, we still have data but it’s more general and less specific and accurate to the individual. So because we can now replace some of that with the data that we’re collecting in Klaviyo, we can have a Klaviyo segment in our database of people who browsed and looked at that product category and we can sync that segment of our database over to our Facebook ads to create an audience there.
So that means that we can have emails going out as well as showing ads. Maybe the ads might have testimonials or they might have a little video demo or something along those lines. And because people are then seeing similar or the same messages in both locations or they might be seeing it on email as well as on Facebook and Instagram because you’re showing some ads on those platforms, you’re going to be able to really excel with the results. So you can get there a lot faster, basically that whole philosophy that customers need to see things multiple times before they’re going to buy. So if they’re seeing the messages in different platforms and different locations, they’re going to get there a lot quicker. And equally, we do need to realize and recognize that we’re not going to have everyone on our list opening emails. We’re also not going to have everyone on our list who is on Facebook or Instagram. So by having the messaging going out and the communications going out on those different platforms you’re going to get people that are more active in reading their emails versus also people who are more active on social media platforms. So the combined results end up being a whole lot more powerful and lucrative at the end of the day.
So some really, really amazing reasons why you really want to be focused really strongly on building that database yourself and then using it to really drive your marketing.
Now, I’m going to talk about some other strategies for growing that list and using it to your advantage, especially if you haven’t really focused on building a list or using it. I know that there’s probably many listeners to this show who have been in business for some time and created some amazing results and generating revenue et cetera, et cetera, but haven’t focused on building an email list, or have one but don’t really know what to do with it.
We were talking with a new client just recently who has a huge email list but never emails them because they just don’t know what to do with it which to me is like this massive missed opportunity, there’s so much money left on the table with that email list that’s not being actually used. So, let’s dive into that so you can get some inspiration and ideas here. And I do want to acknowledge, and this might be either frustrating or comforting, but everyone begins at the start line and so that definitely is the case with email. If you are a beginner with building your email list or if you are further down the track and you’ve got a bit of an email list growing but you haven’t really known what to do with it or haven’t generated successful results with it, it’s okay, we all start at the start line and we’re all at various stages of this race called business and that’s okay. So let’s not worry too much about that, let’s just focus now on how you can collect and build this database and then what you can do with it to start generating some results.
I guess in talking through this I’m going to be focusing a little bit on the automated side of things because I am such a fan of systemising and automating as much marketing as possible so that you’re not having to hustle hard every day.
So of course the first thing that you need to be focusing on is how are you actually going to collect these emails? How are you going to build this email list? And there are so many different ways that you can do it, I probably won’t be able to list all of them here and now but I’m going to list a few favourites. Definitely you want to be using an opt in form or a few opt in forms on your website that has some sort of a value statement or an incentive that’s going to encourage people to subscribe to your list.
Those of you who have learned from me over time will know that I’m not a fan of just offering a discount, and there’s a few reasons for this. Number one, a discount really assumes that the visitor or the subscriber has already made a decision to buy the kind of product that you sell and all they need is a financial incentive to get them over the line. Whereas in actual fact, most of you guys are going to have people coming to your website that are a little bit earlier on in their buyer journey. They’re probably at the research stage, they haven’t necessarily made a decision yet. And so if you’re literally only targeting people who are ready to buy with a discount, you’re going to miss a lot of potential there.
I love this anecdote that I heard not that long ago where you want to think about your potential customers as being on the sidewalk, in the slow lane or the fast lane of the traffic. So the people in the fast lane they’re your 5% of crazy drivers who they know where they’re going and they’re in a hurry and they’re just going to put their foot on the pedal and go for it. So they’re the people who are ready to buy right now, but it’s only a small percentage of your potential customers.
So then you’re going to have people in the slow lane, so they’re the ones who are, this will be the majority of the traffic. So they’re going to be the ones who are doing a little bit of research, they’re coming to your website before they’ve really made a decision and if you can have the right content and strategies in place to help educate and inform those people and give them whatever information the need to know, understand and believe before they’ll be ready to buy, then you’re going to win a much bigger portion of your audience over as customers than if you don’t.
And then you’re going to have people on the sidewalk, they’re just kind of meandering, they’re out for a bit of a stroll, they’re probably not even aware that they need something yet, so that’s a bit of a long shot trying to go for that audience. So we don’t worry about them too much.
So in terms of building your email list, I really, really like to have a combination of some kind of financial incentive as well as some sort of free value giveaway, and that can be things like a free course or it can be a quiz, some sort of quiz that gets people a result that they can use, some sort of beneficial result. It could be even like a PDF guide or a template. By template I mean, so let me give you an example here, we’ve had a few clients that gave away things like reward charts or planners, so you could download and print out a planner. We even had one kid’s toy company that we did it was like paper dolls, I don’t know if any of you are of an age like me where you had paper dolls as a kid. But you’d have the doll and then you’d have the little outfits that had the fold over bits of paper that you could color in the outfit and then fold the clip over the shoulder of the doll and away you go. Anyway, it made sense because it was a toy brand. But some sort of free download is the other option there.
And what you choose, it depends entirely on who your ideal customer is and really what their buyer journey looks like. So if we can find that sweet spot there to really target that ideal customer with whatever information is going to help them make a purchase decision, that’s what you really want to be able to do. And then in terms of financial incentives, I personally prefer to try and avoid discounts where possible. Now, I’ll acknowledge here that there are definitely some businesses where the discount is the thing that works, and obviously you’re only going to know if that’s the case if you try and test a few different options. But the reason I try to avoid a discount if possible is because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, it does tend to cheapen the brand a little bit and I prefer to try and build up a quality, not necessarily a luxury brand, I have worked on many luxury brands over my career, but I’m not necessarily insinuating that here, I guess people who are prepared to pay for quality are going to make you a lot more money than people who just wanted the cheapest possible option on the market.
And I think most of my audience, certainly the ones that I’ve spoken to the most over the years, are generally trying to create and sell quality products. But there’s a bit of a hiccup that many make where they want to sell something that’s high quality but low price. And unfortunately, the way consumer brains work is that it’s not something that goes hand in hand for most consumers. Most consumers will see a low price and assume that it’s going to be crap quality or just not great quality. So that’s the way our brains work, so if you have a quality product don’t sell it at a cheap price and try not to discount it too much because you’re only going to attract people that don’t really care that much about quality and just want what’s cheap. That being said, occasionally a small discount is the thing that will work, but if you can avoid try using things like free shipping or a free gift with purchase or a value pack where it is a discounted bundle but the way that you can communicate that is as a value ad as opposed to a percent off. That’s a little bit of a rant, hopefully you get my gist here.
So, email opt ins, so pop up forms or forms that are embedded on your website. I really love quizzes as methods of growing your list. So I kind of mentioned that before. An example would be on our client as student, morganannie.com.au, so she has a skin care and a makeup brand and she has a couple of quizzes there to help you select the right skin care for your skin type or the right foundation color for your skin. And so that’s an example there and that’s a great way to grow your email list.
Other ways of course would include things like giveaways and competitions or doing a collaboration with another brand. Or even going to expos as well, so exhibitions or markets, you can absolutely grow your list there. So that’s a handful there, but bottom line is really you just need to have something going all the time that’s going to help you build your email list. And then the next step on, so I’m sure many of you have subscribed to a pop up on an online store and maybe got one email back, “Here’s your coupon code.” Or if you’re lucky you might get a reminder email, “Don’t forget to use your coupon code.” And there’s not a whole lot that’s particularly motivating there. There’s nothing really engaging about that kind of email content, so you really want to send several emails, and this is where the automation comes in. You want to send several emails here to these new subscribers so that you are, and again this does rely on you understanding who your customer is and what they need to know, understand and believe in order to want to buy from you. So, that means you do need to understand what that buyer journey looks like. And then that can inform the content that goes into this series of emails that is designed to try and get people to make a first purchase with you.
And of course with a system like Klaviyo, it is very easy to set this up so that if somebody buys after the first email or the second email, they’re not going to continue to receive any subsequent emails in that sequence. So you won’t be coming across as some annoying spammer or anything like that. So it’s about having the right information at the right time to help nurture that subscriber to the point where they can make a purchase decision. So information but then also making them an offer that they can’t refuse to buy. And again, this doesn’t mean necessarily a discount incentive, there’s absolutely ways to speak to the end result that your customers are desperately looking for. If somebody’s out looking for a mattress, you’ve probably seen me and heard me talk about this quote, but if you’re looking for a mattress, you’re not out to buy a mattress, you’re out to buy a good night’s sleep. That’s what you’re really, really looking for. So however you can communicate that product value to these potential customers, that’s going to be the way that you really make them that offer that is too good to refuse.
All right, next tip that I want to talk about is actually about subject lines. So I think it goes without saying that getting people to open an email is generally the hardest part of the gig when it comes to email marketing. The second hardest part of course is getting them to click on that email and go over to your website to buy. So when it comes to getting people to open the email, obviously the more people that open the email the more that will end up buying from you. And this often comes down to the subject lines. It’s not entirely down to the subject line, if you have an email that has both subject line and content that is coming across like some [inaudible 00:28:40] ad or some spammy kind of catalog or something like that, then your subscribers won’t even see the email, it’ll be in their spam folder. So you do want to be a little bit cautious about not being too heavily promotional in the language and the content that you put in your emails.
But when it comes to your subject line, it is really important. If the subject line is really boring and uninspiring, you’re not going to get people opening it. And so realistically, the biggest focus here is creating subject lines that will make your recipient click it and open it to find out more so that they can hopefully see the brilliant content that is in the email and then be enticed to click over to your store and purchase. I love to use, there’s a free email subject line tester tool that is run by the business coschedule.com, I think it is. So just head to the footer of their website, you can see this free email subject tester tool. But essentially, you want to find subject lines that are pretty short, you want to capitalize every single word, first letter of every word rather. You don’t want to put all capitals. You want to use an emoji if you can because that will definitely help you to stand out in the inbox. And I guess really I want to encourage you to try and use language that is very enticing but without being click baity, you don’t want to trick people into opening the email because that’s not going to help your cause at all. So yeah, check out that email subject line tester, I’ll put the link to it in the podcast show notes to make it easy for you.
The next thing that you absolutely want to do is make sure that you have automated your abandoned cart emails. I think most eCommerce businesses are aware of this sort of email these days. I like to follow up a couple of times after someone has abandoned their cart. And at the end of the day, you don’t want to think about these people who’ve abandoned their cart as just being ugh, they didn’t like me, they didn’t like my stuff, why did they abandon their cart? Surely it’s amazing stuff and they want to buy it. You don’t want to think in negative terms about these cart abandoners, what you want to do is consider them as your hottest leads. These are the people that were so close to buying, so they are definitely your hottest leads and you want to just help them to come back and you can do that with having some content in an email. And of course Klaviyo helps to make this really easy, it will literally allow you to show the products that they added to their shopping cart in the email that you send.
And so just know that some people might have been distracted or there might have been a reason why they suddenly left, like maybe postage costs or it could be something else. So you want to ask if they need any help, offer some good customer service there, and try and use some language that is part of your brand tone of voice or your brand personality. So a recent client of ours or a student in our program, she has a dog accessory business and all of their emails were written from the voice of her dogs and they were great fun and the fun language that she could use in there definitely made the emails a lot more entertaining. And you don’t want to use entertainment value just for the sake of it, but certainly if it’s part of the way your brand typically communicates it’s going to make your emails more powerful and convert better.
So then the next thing that you can automate with your Klaviyo emails is getting a second order. And so I was talking about this on a recent podcast, I think I had a whole episode dedicated to getting the second order because the minute that you have a second repeat purchase, the more profitable you become as a business. It’s not enough to just get one purchase from a customer, you really need to have some marketing in place that is designed to try and licit some repeat purchases. And that’s going to look a little bit different depending on what you sell. So for instance, we work with some skin care brands and we’ve worked with several over the years. And so it makes sense for a skin care brand to try and sell a trial pack first time around. So it’s a difficult product for customers to choose online because it is historically we’ve always wanted to test things or try things out before we commit. So it makes sense to try and sell that first. And then so obviously you can automate a post-purchase email sequence that’s going to try and first of all make sure that they’re happy with it and offer some customer service there. And then secondly, have some sort of a method or means of enticing a second purchase, so getting them up to the full sized products.
And it might make sense to offer a discount bundle there or a free shipping code or whatever the case may be, hopefully you know your customers well enough and what makes them tick and motivates them to make a purchase decision or incentivizes them to do so anyway. But post purchase sequence, if you can automate as much of that second time ordering as possible, then you are in a really good place. You can absolutely keep automating replenishment style campaigns if you do have products that people use up and need to rebuy time and time again, then hopefully you’ve got some idea of what that usage time frame is so that you can have campaigns going out at the right time to really motivate those ongoing repeat purchases. And at the end of the day, just really understanding that customer loyalty does really equal profit. So once they’ve received your product and all is going well, then you can of course start nurturing them into their next and ongoing repeat purchase and really be able to build a much more profitable business.
Then of course, you want to be using your email for things like product launches. And this is again something that I absolutely would be tying in with Facebook ads and using that data and those segments of your database from Klaviyo and tying them over to Facebook ads and creating your custom audiences and your look alike audiences over there. But yes, definitely sending multiple emails when you are launching a new product and a new promotion. And I have a whole training bundle all about that, so if you’re ever interested in how do you get really good results with product launches and promotions using email, then you can absolutely grab that from us. But yeah, just don’t make the mistake that it’s okay to just send one email or that you’re just going to be promoting this stuff on social media. You really want to be sending out multiple emails through a product launch and a promotion. And again, the more you use a platform like Klaviyo, the more data you’re going to have on the subscribers and the customers and you can pull out segments that are going to be more likely to respond to an offer or a new product.
And whether you send it to your whole list or you send it to a segment, a couple of suggestions here. There’s a few universal buyer types that are always going to be on your email list. So pretty much all of us are going to have people that are spontaneous buyers, so they’re going to be the ones that want what’s new because it’s new. And so they’re going to be the ones that will respond to whatever it is, a new product or a new collection or a new brand in your range or whatever the case may be, a new design. So for me in my last business being a modern cloth nappy brand, people didn’t necessarily need more nappies once they had a whole selection, but they would love to get the new prints and the new colors and designs. So, that was really targeting that particular segment of our audience.
Then a lot of us will have a portion of our audience that are high price buyers. And I typically am like this when I go clothing shopping, I don’t really like going shopping. If you ever see me in my videos, you’ll probably just see me wearing the same things over and over again because I really don’t love going clothes shopping. So literally I will just go a couple of times a year and I’ll just get everything for myself and for my whole family and it’s like ripping of a bandaid, I’m just getting it over and done with. So I’m definitely the sort of person who is right for things like value packs or volume discounts or things like that. So you’ll have people on your list that are that sort of a segment.
We’re all going to have people on our list who are discount shoppers, and that goes without saying. Sometimes it’s okay to run discounts and incentives to get that sort of a portion of your list to buy. Like I said earlier, I don’t like to build a list entirely full of discount shoppers, but we will all have people on our list who are motivated by discounts. And then you’re all going to have some people on your list who are lapsed customers. And they might be people who bought some time ago and they might be reengaged by a really good offer or a really good new product or something that’s going to entice them back.
So I used to definitely have a lot of lapsed customers on my list because it was a reusable product people might buy and then not buy for quite a long period of time. And I was generally able to reengage those lapsed customers by bringing in something that might be consumed and used up. So things like laundry detergent and maybe a few other sorts of accessories that were consumables. It was all eco-friendly and sustainable of course, but they’d need to replenish those things, so that was one way. And then the other way that I reengaged those lapsed customers was creating products that were suitable for pretty much the next stage in their customer lifecycle. So obviously with nappies they were targeting babies of nappy wearing age bracket, and beyond that a lot of them were wanting toilet training undies. So, that was a logical next product to offer to reengage those lapsed customers.
So, those are some suggestions and ideas there for how you can use email marketing for product launches, special promotions and then just ongoing newsletter content as well. Really keeping those different sorts of customers and buyer types in your mind’s eye as you create that email content that goes out over and over again.
So this ended up quite a long episode. I hope you found that really, really useful. I guess the main point that I really wanted to emphasize is that it’s so, so, so critically important to the success of an eCommerce brand to really focus hard on owning all of your own customer data and subscriber data, and for that you need a quality platform like Klaviyo. And obviously you can get fabulous results using Klaviyo for email marketing, but it helps you to end up getting much, much, much better results with your pay traffic as well.
So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Hope you’ve enjoyed that. Of course if you’re needing some help with your own email marketing, if you want to get set up in Klaviyo or really get a lot of this automation built out, give us a yell, we’re definitely happy to help. Otherwise, jump on into our Rockstar Productpreneur Facebook group and participate in the free community there. There’s actually a free little mini course to get started with email marketing in there, so you can jump into the unit section in there if you’re just getting started with this.
That’s it for me today, and I look forward to being with you on the podcast again next week. Bye for now.