A few weeks ago, I attended Klaviyo’s first ever email marketing conference and it was an amazing event. In this episode I go over some of my key takeaways from day 1 along with Toni Anderson and Austin Brawner of Ecommerce Influence.
What You’ll Learn
- How to create optin forms to attract higher LTV customers
- Is giving away coupon codes for an email a good idea any more?
- Some overall statistics for email optin rates
- Creative ways to gather email addresses
- How to improve open rates and click through rates
- How to improve email conversion rates
- Do text based emails outperform html emails?
Other Resources And Books
Klaviyo.com – Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store. Created specifically for ecommerce, it is the best email marketing provider that I’ve used to date. Click here and try Klaviyo for FREE.
Privy.com – Privy is my tool of choice when it comes to gathering email subscribers for my ecommerce store. They offer easy to use email capture, exit intent, and website targeting tools that turn more visitors into email subscribers and buyers. With both free and paid versions, Privy fits into any budget. Click here and get 15% OFF towards your account.
Pickfu.com – Pickfu is a service that I use to get instant feedback on my Amazon listings. By running a quick poll on your images, titles and bullet points, you can quickly optimize your Amazon listings for maximum conversions. Click here and get 50% OFF towards your first poll.
SellersSummit.com – The ultimate ecommerce learning conference! Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, the Sellers Summit is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an ecommerce business. Click here and get your ticket now before it sells out.
Intro: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not in business. Now last week I attended Klaviyo’s first ever email marketing conference in Boston with my partner, Toni Anderson. And there, we actually met up with Austin Brawner of the Ecommerce Influence podcast and decided to record a couple of sessions together. Now in today’s episode, we do a breakdown of day one of the conference including some key email marketing takeaways of the day.
But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. And I like Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 30% of my revenues. Now Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.
Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email. Klaviyo is easily the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you could try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.
I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. And actually at the Klaviyo conference, I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO Ben face to face as well. And Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. And what does Privy do? Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms. Now they’re a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms for you, but I like privy because they specialize in e-commerce.
Right now I’m using privy to display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prices in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form email signups increased by 131%. So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve. Now onto the show.
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.
Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. We are broadcasting from Klaviyo conference in Boston. And what was cool is I didn’t think that I was going to actually know anyone here, but it turns out my buddy Austin Brawner is here speaking and I brought my business partner Toni Anderson with me. And what we’re going to do today is we are going to do a recap of day one of the event and kind of go over some key takeaways because we attended quite a few sessions between the three of us. And we’re just going to talk about what we learned.
So I will start first. And one thing that surprised me was one of the things that – I can’t remember, one of the Klaviyo guys got up there and he said that the wheel of fortune is bad, right. And I was curious about it. And he showed some other good examples of opt in forms. And they were giving away coupon codes without any context either. So you have this wheel of fortune, which also gives out coupon codes, and then you have a good example of a coupon code. It just didn’t quite make sense to me because if you’re giving out a coupon code, no matter what, then shouldn’t those two things be equivalent. I don’t know, do you guys have an opinion on that?
Austin: So yeah, I totally agree. It’s an interesting point. And I think with the wheel of fortune, the wheel to type options, where I feel like people run into trouble is setting them and forgetting to clean your list, right? Like, it doesn’t really matter if you are bringing people in from a discount that’s static or a discount that’s spinning. The one that’s spinning is probably going to attract more emails. But if it does attract more emails, you need to clean your email list or you’re going to get in trouble. And you’re going to have a bunch of emails that bounce and junk and that sort of thing.
Steve: Right. It actually kind of goes back to the philosophy earlier of like single versus double opt in. I’d rather get the emails upfront, put them through a sequence, and then prune as opposed to potentially driving someone away in the beginning, or using something that’s less high converting and then letting it go. I don’t know. Do you have an opinion Toni?
Toni: Well, I thought it was interesting. As soon as I saw that slide, I wrote a note, ask Steve about wheel of fortune, because I know it’s something that you’ve talked about a lot.
Steve: Yeah, I had great results with it. So yeah.
Toni: And I haven’t used it. But I use a pop up with a discount. And that’s actually my highest converting flow in my all of my flows. So I actually I didn’t see there was much of a difference either. I find the wheel of fortune annoying personally as a shopper. And I think because you talked about it maybe and other people, it’s everywhere now.
Steve: That’s true. Yes, I have mentioned it on the podcast. And then all of a sudden, like, I see all these stores using it.
Toni: Well, and I wonder how much of it is maybe saturation.
Steve: Probably now. In the beginning, when it was a novelty item, it worked really well. Like, I think my email sales got boosted by like 130% or something like that when I first started using it.
Austin: Sure. I think it’s a great tool. But it comes down to like everything with email capture; it all comes down to what your offer is. And it doesn’t really matter the technology that you’re using. It’s like are you providing quality offer? Are you making sure that the emails you get are quality afterwards, are you checking them and just monitoring your open rate? Because you don’t want to have poor open rates that lead to down the road issues with deliver ability. But yeah, no, I think the biggest thing is just focus on your offer. That’s the most important when it comes to email capture.
Steve: Cool. And then one thing that I just jotted down here in case the audience is interested, the median opt in rate for an email form according to Klaviyo stats was 1.8%. And then the top 10% of opt in forms opt in at 6.5%. And the decay rate per month is somewhere on the order of 1.4% of people kind of drop off your list on a monthly basis. So, I thought those stats were surprising. I think my top email form is at like 3% or something like that. So I’m obviously not in the top 10%.
Austin: I get the privilege of taking a look at a lot of different email opt ins, and for different businesses I work with. So the best I’ve seen consistently is 12% opt in rate. And so, I’m going to talk a little bit about this in my presentation tomorrow. Generally, well I have seen above 10% a couple of times. And both of them were with quizzes that were highly relevant to what the outcome people wanted to get. So both of these were quizzes related to skincare. And they would rate people. You can get your skin — like your skin or reading and ask people — that’s something that’s very much important to people that they’re looking for skincare, they can get a better idea of what products they need. They go through a quiz, and then from there they can get directed to the correct product. So those are the things I’ve seen that are kind of the most effective.
Steve: I can see that working really well because you want to know what your skin type is so you can buy the product. So it’s actually providing some value in a way, right?
Austin: It’s providing value, and also delivers the product that is perfect for you at the end of the quiz. It’s like a perfect little fit in certain products that will actually work.
Steve: I know for me, this whole coupon pop up thing is already getting saturated. I feel like any store that I go on instantly has a coupon pop up these days. And so I’ve been mixing it up over the years. I actually had an EBook that I was delivering. So if someone’s looking at handkerchiefs, I had a crafts eBook, if someone was looking at napkins, I had a napkin folding eBook. And then when I did the wheel of fortune it jammed. And maybe it’s time to move back to the old school way now that the coupon thing is getting really saturated again, I don’t know. It shifts over time.
Toni: One of the things in that same session he talked about was the, I think they called it a welcome mat where it takes over the whole screen. And actually that for me as a shopper causes me to immediately not want to be on the site. He is trunk Club, which is a completely different user experience. But I’m wondering, Austin, in your experience, how do those work, because as a shopper I find them, I’ll click off the page almost immediately.
Austin: So I think it’s always dangerous to think about what you as a shopper do because I feel the same. I have not; I don’t really open that many emails. I’m not a big — I despise my email inbox even though I’m the person helping people send thousands of emails. And so, for me they’ve always worked very well like taking over the page and delivering. But again, it goes back to has to be quality offer. So you’re not going to go away from the page if it’s something that you really want. If it’s just an annoying bad offer, we’re going to give you 5% off for your next purchase; it’s going to be annoying.
If it’s something super relevant, a good example I’ve seen a client I worked with for a while this, they had a discount and they sell national park maps. They are really beautiful, custom designed. They had a discount offer for a while and then they actually switched that up to a giveaway for a park pass for the national parks. And it was way more aligned with what their customers were looking for. And it was one of those things where they could stick it right in front of people and deliver it in kind of an abrasive way, but people were like, okay, well, actually, I do want a national park’s annual pass. It sounds awesome. I’ll put my email in and also it didn’t cost anything for them except for one pass a month, which is way cheaper than giving 15% off.
Steve: Oh yeah, it’s a good idea. Yeah, one thing — there was one example in the presentation. I think it was — was it a shoe club or something? I was sitting next to you and I think what they do is they try to get you on a subscription. But they give you $20 towards a gift card first, and then you pay $20. But essentially they’re getting on the list and there are essentially making you pay money right up front for a subscription. This is only for shoe fanatics. And then at the same time, you’re attracting lifelong customers who are really into shoes that will buy over and over again. So I thought that was really clever.
One other key takeaway I had that was pretty clever, which is something that I’m actually not doing right now, there are a bunch of emails on my list that have not opened in a very long time. And the first thought is to send them a win back campaign. And I have, but still no one opens, right, because you haven’t opened in a long period of time. And so one takeaway that I got was that you can just create a custom audience, add those guys and run them on Facebook ads to try to get them back because clearly, they’re not opening your emails. So you might want to try a different channel. Any other takeaways from you guys?
Austin: I think my biggest takeaway from the sessions in day one is how important it is to focus on your product and make sure — so there was a presentation the second half of day one, which was about customer loyalty and about — put on by smile.iOS. And they were talking about the experience that people have with your product, and how if you’re competing, there’s a realm of confidence that Amazon has that you just should not be competing in. That’s price, convenience, and select in like selection. If you’re competing on any of those things, you’re going to lose; you’re just going to lose. They’re better at it than you, they’ve been doing it for longer, they’re going to continue, they’ve got more resources in you.
So, my biggest takeaway is just to take a look at whatever you’re selling, and look at the product and say, is this truly something that is unique, is it quality? Is it outside those three things that Amazon specializes in? And can we compete on experience versus price selection and convenience, because the long term even the short term really, you’re going to lose if you’re competing on those three things.
Steve: I agree. And in a way, that is why with my store at least, we’ve kind of doubled down on the personalization. And we emphasize fast turnaround times and will basically take care of the phone; you have a human that you can contact about the personalization to go back and forth with. And even though Amazon does have that, it’s less personal. And so it’s a pain in the butt to handle personalized orders. But the profit margins are very high. It’s just one of those things where if you put a little extra effort, it kind of differentiates your company, and that’s how you differentiate yourself from Amazon. And I think for us, actually, the other stuff that we sell to be quite honest, will probably become commodities except for that. So that’s why we double down on it.
Toni: I think we’ve all been in Mike Jackness talks about email marketing. And he in ColorIt emails people, I mean I think there’s like 90 some emails in his flow. When we were listening to — I can’t remember his name this afternoon, but he talked about same…
Austin: Mike Gracewicz from Taylor. It’s a really tough last name, but he’s from Taylor Stitch.
Toni: And he talked about looking at your customer buying cycle. So are they buying like at 30 days and 60 days? Then why are you emailing them for seven, eight months? And that was actually something interesting that I started thinking about, because I took Mike’s advice and I have a fairly long email sequence as well. But I might change it up now and work on some of that segmentation that he talked about in his session.
Austin: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. He also made another point about — somebody asked the question, what do your emails look like? And he responded, he was like, well, they’re generally just one image in a panel direct to that product. He’s like, for a long time, our designer continually wanted to make these beautiful long emails. But I kept looking at the click map and everyone was just clicking on the first thing. So he changed it up and he had the designer, he’s like, I’d rather you make five emails rather than one big long, beautiful one. And let’s send those five emails to spend way less time, and his results have been the same. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.
Also, the other thing that he mentioned around welcome series, which a lot of people, this happens to I think most businesses; most of the revenue is going to come from that initial email, right? Somebody ops in, most of the revenue, maybe 80% is going to come from that initial email. And sometimes people will invest too much energy in the fives, like the remaining five emails after the first email, when the one that’s moving the needle is that first one. Until you’re really, really large, doing like millions of dollars a month, a lot of your energy is best spent on higher leverage activities than tweaking emails.
Steve: Do you have an example of what you mean for that first email? Now, how do you focus on that first email? Like, what are some things that you can do?
Austin: Well, I think — so the examples that he gave today were focusing on making sure the subject line is super compelling. He focused on giving the best offer possible right away, like the best offer that they could give and remain profitable. That’s what they’re doing, because their idea, and right or wrong, this is something that can easily be debated is that they wanted to increase conversions for people who come to the website, and they wanted, if they could increase it by let’s say, 25%, by providing a better offer, then it’s worth it for them. Because until they get a customer to make their initial purchase, they don’t — like their marketing — your marketing can’t really kick in until they’ve even tried your product.
Steve: Yeah, totally Austin. Just kind of along this whole topic, I just think to myself, a lot of times, you’ll hire like a web designer, and they’ll make a site that looks beautiful, but it might not convert as well as just a very simple design that has a simple call to action above the fold. And one thing that I found interesting in one of the talks was that the consensus seems to be from all the different Klaviyo folks that text based email seems to outperform HTML emails. And I know that from my blog, at least, I haven’t done it with my store, because we wanted a little bit of branding on it.
But from my blog, text based blew away anything with graphics in it. And I don’t know why I didn’t do that, why I’m not doing that with my store. But for some reason, maybe there’s just a mental block that I have. But I feel like the store needs to have a logo on it, and then a picture of my product. So, maybe I’m going to go back and experiment with that.
Austin: I think it’s a great idea and something so easy to test. You can just send split test between text and panel image, not very hard to set up and see which one performs better.
Steve: Yeah, in your experience, what have you seen with your clients? Because I know you’ve had a lot of clients.
Austin: Yeah, I mean, text email generally performs equal to or better than spending all the time with imagery and branded emails. The only thing is, I feel like, it’s not necessarily sustainable, right? Like you want — if you have a brand, a beautiful — if you’re selling beautiful cowboy boots, then you want to, you might be able to juice sales with a text email here and there. But overall, like your messaging, you want to deliver those beautiful images so that people see your product, and then here in their mix in some text based emails, maybe around promotions.
That’s something you could do for Black Friday, right? Try a couple of branded promotional image based emails, and then have one direct from the CEO saying, hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this, you’re a loyal customer. Why don’t you — here’s the link to the sale for the next couple of days. Also works really well like for VIP customers just a direct personalized email.
Steve: Just to be clear, though, a text based email; does that mean it’s completely text, meaning you don’t even have like an image of your company? That’s one thing that wasn’t quite clear to me.
Austin: I don’t know what they were specifically talking about.
Steve: Okay, but the ones that you were just talking about, is there even like a logo at the top, like even a small one, or is it just flat out playing text, no HTML at all?
Austin: Flat out plain text.
Austin: Even like just text based with a little bit of HTML I would say performs equal to or better than image based, but you could also strip entirely out and just send a text based email.
Toni: So it’s interesting because the second email in my welcome flow is a totally text email that actually makes it seem like I’m talking directly to them. And there’s not even a link to the store. And that is my most opened, that’s got my highest open rate. And people reply to me in that email. So I mean, I think it does work, but you definitely can’t do it all the time. Because I’m like, I’ve had people email me and say, hey, I want to shop at your store. What’s the link? I’m like, you managed to email email@example.com address but…
Steve: What is that? Can you give us an idea of what’s in that email?
Toni: Yeah, so I just say hey, here I’m the owner of the company; I want to tell you my story of why I started it. And then I — it’s like three paragraphs; it’s not even very long. I mean it’s probably 13 sentences total, and then my last thing is like PS, hey, I want to hear your story, how did you get into this?
Austin: There’s another one, another store that does something similar to that called Kindred Bravely, they sell maternity like nursing wear. One of the things they do I think it’s brilliant, after you make a purchase, a few days later you get a text based only kind of inspirational message from the founder that says at the bottom sent from my iPhone. So it looks like it was just composed on the fly, sent directly to you. And it’s like because their entire market is mothers, and so they basically talk about motherhood and how, keep being strong as a mother sent from my iPhone. I thought that was brilliant, it’s like that’s a really good…
Steve: That’s so deceptive. So one thing they did talk about also today were all the various automated sequences that you can run. And one thing that I found interesting is that they actually published the revenue per subscriber, the average for some of these sequences. So for example, a browse abandonment. This is if someone’s already on your list and they look at a product but they don’t check out, the average on Klaviyo is on the order of 50 cents per email per visitor, an abandoned cart was $2 and 75 cents per visitor, and the welcome series was like 25 cents per visitor so on average. And I know you work with a lot of clients Austin, is that in the realm of what you see or?
Austin: So when one thing about this statistics it’s so…
Steve: Yeah, I know yeah it’s out there.
Austin: It really depends on average order value, right? So all those statistics are totally skewed by average order value and larger businesses that sell products…
Steve: Oh, no. I’m so sorry. The presentation was segmented by average order value. What I quoted was the one that falls in for me, which is 50 dollars to $100.
Austin: 50 to $100.
Austin: Okay, yeah. So I have to like [overlapping 00:21:04]
Steve: …top of your head. No, I was thinking you were going to say, well, since they were my clients and I was working with them, my numbers would be a lot higher.
Austin: No, I think that it’s good to have benchmarks like that when you’re trying to get a better understanding of whether or not your sequences are compelling or working. But one of the things I always tell people is like generally I’ve seen browse abandonment do about 50% of the revenue that you do through abandoned carts probably do through browse abandonment. That’s generally what I see someone who’s doing a good job. If you’re not doing that, there’s probably some opportunity there. But it’s tough. It’s tough just off of the metrics.
Steve: Sorry, I put you on the spot there. So, one thing that came up over and over and over again today was this thing about attribution. So, someone might open an email, see your ad but then two days later click on a retargeting ad and then the retargeting ad gets credit and Klaviyo takes credit for as well. Right, because in analytics, it’s last click attribution and in Klaviyo, I don’t know what the default is. But it’s on the order. Do you have it off top your head?
Austin: So the default is whether or not somebody opened up an email.
Steve: Okay, but within how many days?
Austin: Oh, I think the default is somewhere between three — I think it’s five but then you can adjust it and like generally you should be adjusting it from five to a much lower time window if you’re sending more than one email a month.
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Right, so which kind of brings me into my point like no matter what you do whether you’re running Facebook ads, Google ads or email marketing, each tool is always going to set the attribution window to their benefit so that it seems like they are driving more of the conversions. So you really got to dig deep, I think Facebook has a view through conversion by default that you should turn off right? If someone just happens to be scrolling by and they look at your ad, they’re going to take credit for it if they end up buying. Someone with Klaviyo if it’s set at five days, a lot can happen in five days, right? It could ultimately be multiple retargeting ads, Google AdWords, anything comes into play, and if everyone takes credit for all that, it can really screw your metrics.
So for example, your metrics might say that you made 100% increase in a month but then when you check the actual numbers, it’s much, much less. So I’m curious, Austin, what do you set your attribution windows out? And how do you deal with attribution?
Austin: Well, in Klaviyo specifically, it really depends on like I was mentioning earlier, how many emails you’re sending per month. If you’re sending one a week, then maybe I’ll put the attribution window down to like two days like that, if you’re sending multiple per week, then definitely down to like one day and adjust kind of based on this to a certain extent gut feeling. If you feel like there’s a lot of more attribution than is actually happening, then you should definitely shrink it down. Because like Steve said, you don’t want a seven day window and then you’re emailing three times during that week. Everything is attributed email at that point. So I just would adjust it based on that.
But I think that’s a really — that’s something that everybody struggles with; there’s no clear answer to how you attribute sales. There’s models that are built, but that’s a really difficult question. And again, it did come up multiple times because everybody is asking that, how do we attribute; because everyone is trying to take credit and everyone is trying to earn more of your marketing spend by taking credit. So, I think it comes back to just having a little bit more of a holistic approach and recognizing that you want business growth over the long, long haul, and being performance driven is good, but sometimes it doesn’t — sometimes it can limit your long term growth if you just have to focus on getting ROI on every single channel at all times.
Steve: So anyways, I had this problem with Facebook ads where I really wanted my top of funnel to convert at like 3x and it was just very frustrating when it didn’t happen. And it was only after I just took all of my funnels holistically could I sleep at night, just because I’m a very metrics focused person, right. So one thing I did want to talk about to kind of end this was what are some creative opt in forms that you’ve seen? We talked about [inaudible 00:27:11] and we talked about giving out coupon codes. For both you guys, what are some ones that might work for you, or what have you seen that has been really especially creative?
Austin: So I mentioned it briefly earlier, but I can go into a little bit more deeply. I’m very into looking into like the quiz type funnels, not necessarily like the ask method quiz funnels, but more — so we’re hitting the point now where we can, it’s very easy to assign properties to people based on selections and answers they’ve given us. So if you’re using Klaviyo or Drip or whatever email service provider you’re using, you can ask people questions and then have their answers sent passed over as properties on to their record, and then learn what they’re interested in, what they’re not interested in, how often they purchase from you, and use that down the road. You wouldn’t have to know exactly what you’re going to use that information for, but you’ll have that to be able to create segments in the future.
So the things that I see that are quite unique and that are interesting are quizzes that you can ask people that are providing value to people that are giving them interesting answers. I know a beard brand that runs an interesting quiz, it tells you what type of beard’s man you are, it gives you products based on the type of beards you have which is kind of cool. I’ve seen…
Steve: I always ask [inaudible 00:28:39] if he’s going to start an Asian line, it always makes them laugh. I got to shave like once every three months. Sorry, go on, I interrupted you.
Austin: No, that’s I mean, that’s the thing he’s going to come up with a product, the thing first, you got over the product. So those are interesting right now. I think we’re seeing a lot of kind of chat bots capturing emails, which is interesting using Facebook Messenger for that, and then passing that along to Klaviyo, that’s a tool you can use. Those are the things I’m probably most interested in that are unique. All the same stuff continues to work. All it matters is if you have a good offer and if you can display that offer in front of people. If you don’t have a good offer, nothing you do no matter how crazy the wheel is spinning or how in your face it is, it’s not going to convert.
Steve: All right, here’s a hard one for you, Messenger or email? What’s your priority and getting first?
Austin: So for me, it’s still email at this point. I think depends a little bit on the product that you have. And it also doesn’t — it doesn’t need to be either or, right. You can capture an email through…
Steve: It’s not either or but I have my answer to this. I’m just curious what you’re going to say, but you do have to decide which one you want to try to get first, right?
Austin: Sure. Yeah. So for me, it’s still email right now. That could be changing over the next the next year. I think that there’s still some work that needs to be done with some of the platforms that are delivering, so there’s a lot of infrastructure behind email at this point, right. We’re at Klaviyo conference; they’ve invested millions of dollars into building a system that delivers emails reliably, predictably. And Messenger is still new, right? There’s not as much infrastructure around delivering those things. The reliability is not there as much, not in the sense of deliverability, but incentive the product delivering the message. So for me, it’s still email but that is subject to change Steve.
Steve: Interesting, you left that open. You kind of played both sides of the fence there. So for me, I have a similar sentiment as you do. I always try to go for the email first, mainly because Messenger is controlled by Facebook and they’ve already changed the rule as a couple of times. And who knows what’s going to happen, like you’re putting all your eggs in something that someone else controls, whereas email you always control for yourself. So what I usually do is I go for the email first. And then almost immediately, I go for the Messenger while they’re still hot with a separate offer. And I also find that that Messenger to email is a little bit clunky, because sometimes you have to use like a glue tool to get that to work.
Austin: I like the visual of this person who just typed in their email. And now they’re hot. Steve is going in for the Messenger. They’re sitting there, they’re all hot. No, I totally agree with you around the terms and conditions with Facebook. The writing’s on the wall, when you start thinking about Messenger marketing down the road, they’re running out of supply and advertising. So everywhere, you’re able to deliver toll free messages, toll free ads. They’re no longer going to be toll free in the future, you can be paying for every message you spend.
Email is something that you can deliver. The reason why email is so powerful is because you’re not paying a toll per message that you send, you’re paying email service provider, you’re not paying a toll to Google or anybody. So yeah, the writing’s on the wall with Messenger. They’re going to be charging for it.
Steve: It’s already actually in their docs actually, it’s in beta.
Austin: It’s in beta, so get it while the getting is good, where it’s cheap. But if you build your entire list around that, realize that you can be paying to reach that audience, just like you’re paying to reach your fans in the past if you’ve gone through this, but we’ve gotten to this before so many times, Instagram [overlapping 00:32:48], so shiny.
Steve: So were there any other key takeaways that I didn’t touch upon, because we kind of went down my notes, but you guys probably had your own separate notes.
Austin: The only thing I’ll mention, it was brought up a couple times in one of the presentations that someone was talking about — so the premise of one of the talks was to move away from having discounts and move towards other ways of bringing in customers, maybe and a lot of…
Steve: True fans.
Austin: True fans, customer loyalty, that sort of thing. I think it’s, you have to ask yourself truly what your business is and what your product is. So, one of the things he mentioned was around referral programs and the power of referral programs. So referral programs can be incredibly powerful. But your product has to lend itself to being talked about. I can’t imagine, I don’t know, do you have a referral program Steve?
Steve: We do not.
Austin: And I think I do, I can’t imagine it being an incredibly profitable driver of sales for you guys.
Steve: But that’s correct. It probably would not be. But one thing I got an idea was from today; they had this like, one year sequence for anniversaries, which I’m actually not doing. And the average divorce rate is about seven years, so maybe we’re going to have a seven year sequence.
Austin: That’s true.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. That’s another takeaway, which I just recalled right now.
Austin: So I think it just comes down to knowing what your product is, what your business is. Is it something that people would ever talk about with their friends? And if they do talk about it, then yeah, referral program might work. So it’s really being strategic about the things you initiate in building your business. Not everything is good for every business; it just happens that some things are good for certain businesses. Like that skin quiz I was talking about, that like is very, very good for that type of product. Other businesses, if you’re selling microfiber towels, probably not as good, maybe, but probably not.
Steve: I was just thinking about how I would do a wedding quiz, but I don’t think it would work.
Toni: Actually going back to the customer loyalty, I like that sneaker example where you joined the VIP, you actually paid to join. And it was kind of tricky because it was like 1999 to join, but you got the $20 gift card. So right there there’s a little psychological game for you.
Steve: As you can tell, Toni is a prime customer for this.
Toni: I am.
Steve: She has a ton of shoes.
Toni: I do. I would totally pay to join a shoe club. But I actually think that’s an interesting one because they aren’t giving you a discount. And they’re actually forcing you get your credit card before you’ve even really shopped with them, which I think is really — like I’d be interested to see, they didn’t give us stats on that one and I would really want to know how well. I don’t know, have you worked with any company that does that?
Austin: So I work with a company that does something similar to that. And they have kind of their own Prime membership on the back end. After somebody makes a purchase, you can immediately upsell into paying $20, and you will get back your initial shipping cost. So, it makes the offer really, really sweet where I think if you purchase two times, you’re going to come out ahead with this deal. And you recoup your shipping costs, which I think is around eight or $9 right away with this yearly membership. So that’s been successful for them. And it’s been successful not selling it in the front — it’s [inaudible 00:36:24] selling on the front end like getting people to get a gift card before they buy. But that’s another way to do it be maybe right at the back end. And that’s been successful for them.
Steve: Yeah, I’d be curious to see more stats. Maybe I’ll have to have that company on the podcast.
Austin: Yeah, see what’s actually going down.
Austin: To the Steve Chou case study.
Steve: So I can do a hanky of the Month Club.
Steve: Make them commit to five hankies.
Austin: That’s actually not a bad idea, or just one.
Steve: Cool, well thanks a lot for coming on both of you and we’ll probably end up doing a wrap up tomorrow. This conference is two days and this is just day one.
Austin: Steve, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for putting this on. And it’s been funny, I don’t know if you guys — so you can never know where we’re at. We’re in a conference room here. And it’s funny because as we’ve been recording, five people have been coming in and out, so it’s been a lot of fun recording.
Steve: And I just want to add that Austin is sporting a beard which I haven’t seen on him yet. So that’s why he’s been mentioning beard brand. I suppose you’ve been on that site.
Austin: Well, that’s the beauty of having a podcast. Nobody actually knows what you look like.
Steve: Although there were a couple people that did approach you
Steve: Fan blowing over Austin. Oh my god. It’s Austin.
Austin: I think this Klaviyo conference is where a lot of my people are. People love Klaviyo brands, on Klaviyo, so it’s actually fun.
Steve: So tomorrow we will — Austin is speaking tomorrow. So I’ll give like the skinny on his talk tomorrow and I’ll be sitting on the front row heckling as well. And thank you Toni for being the co host as usual.
Toni: Thanks for having me again.
Steve: Of course.
Hope you enjoyed that episode. I actually ended up learning a ton from the event and I got a chance to meet up with the CEOs of many of the popular email marketing tools out there. Stay tuned for my next recap of day two of the event where I interview some of Klaviyo’s engineers regarding email deliverability. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode227.
And once again, I want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So, head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.
I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.
Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.
Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.Mywifequitherjob.com.