Everyone ignores this channel - Email
Experts and brands talk about Facebook, TikTok content and ads marketing. There are conversations about search engine marketing. Everyone misses one channel - Email. Let's talk about it today.
👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. This is Shan and I am building Xandro Lab, a longevity science brand. I test, learn, and share business and marketing insights in this weekly newsletter.
Here is a fact - more than 40% of our monthly DTC revenue is attributed to emails. It costs us <$120 each month. Brands spend thousands of dollars to acquire consumers and ignore the retention channels. I don’t understand why.
Today, if we stop sending emails, I would expect my Facebook and TikTok ads to perform at least 2x worse. Let me rephrase this - Emails help improve advertising ROI. That’s how powerful email marketing is.
Today, let’s talk about
What is email marketing?
Email basics - Pop-ups, flows and campaigns
How to improve your email performance?
Let’s get started. I am excited to talk about this today.
#1 What is email (retention) marketing?
Email is the major part of retention marketing, and works along with other channels - WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Groups, Instagram channels. In fact, even Facebook, TikTok and Google ads can transform into retention channels. More on that next time. Today let’s get email basics sorted.
What’s email marketing? Sending emails (to speak) to your existing consumers and subscribers (interested users) is email marketing. The messages (offers, information, thoughts, news) are delivered right into the inbox of the users. Email marketing is a form of retention marketing.
Aiyo, now what’s retention marketing? In literal sense, it means convincing your existing consumers to re-purchase. This is different from acquiring a completely new user. All channels serve as retention channels, but only a few are dedicated retention channels.
Email - Only retention (99% of the times)
WhatsApp - Retention only
Marketplace broadcast - Retention only
Facebook Ads - Acquisition + Retention
Google Ads - Acquisition + Retention
TikTok Ads - Acquisition + Retention
Social Media - TikTok is Sale Channel while Instagram is Engagement Channel. (sidenote - I would like to create more aware and warm users with social media platforms).
Among all these channels, email brings in the most amount of repeat revenue. At least that’s the case for us. WhatsApp is a powerful medium and can drive huge revenue. However, it cannot be used everyday for marketing broadcast. WhatsApp is better used for transaction and delivery updates.
Email can be sent everyday and it won’t be considered a spam. Modern inboxes (gmail, yahoo and others) organise emails by promotion and primary very well, so hitting the inboxes multiple times become necessary to grab attention.
Suggested frequency for the channels are
Email - Everyday is okay
WhatsApp - 2-3 weeks, more frequent if you segment your consumers into smaller targets segments.
Marketplace broadcast - 2-3 times a week, controlled by the marketplace.
Facebook Ads - Everyday or every 2-3 days. These are optimised to show when intent for purchase is highest.
Google Ads - Everyday or every 2-3 days. These are optimised to show when intent for purchase is highest.
TikTok Ads - Everyday or every 2-3 days. These are optimised to show when intent for purchase is highest.
Social Media - Everyday. These are optimised to show when intent for purchase is highest.
Let’s discuss some basic categories of email marketing.
#2 Email basics - Signups, flows and campaigns
First, what can be sent as emails? Almost everything. Here are some examples
Product info and updates - New product launch, updates in product, product development
Brand Updates - What’s happening with the brand, behind the scenes, company news, Price reduction or increase.
Reminders and order updates - Refill reminders, if you sell a product customer needs every month. Also, abandoned cart reminders.
News and education - Emails are a great way to educate consumers. You can send long blogs on email.
Offers - These incentivise purchases. Ideally every email should have an offer attached to ensure consumers can take an action after reading the email.
Now, let’s discuss how to handle these content types.
Step 1 - Build the email list with signups
A user is signed up into the email list via two ways
Place an order - We keep the marketing acknowledgment to “yes” by default. I would advise the same to any other brand.
Signs up to the newsletter (without making a purchase) - User visits the website to read a blog, or from a social media ad and decides to sign up to the newsletter for offers and news.
There is an unethical way of building a email list - Buy customer list from various organizations. I would advise against it.
Building the email list takes time but even a small list of 500 to 1000 people is extremely powerful. It would start generating a good share of your overall revenue.
Step 2 - Set up flows
These are automated emails that are sent when users perform a specific action on the website like abandon the cart, pending payment, sign up to newsletter, place an order or place x number of orders. There are multiple such events that can trigger these flows.
Here are some most powerful flows that bring in money.
Abandoned cart - Our strongest performing flow. Brings in the highest amount of cash. This acts as reminder for users who forgot to check out, and can also provide incentive to users who are unconvinced. Generally, this is 2-3 emails sent over 1-3 days. You can add more emails to this, not a problem.
Welcome email - Our second best performing flow. You can introduce the brand, share more details and provide a first time user coupon to make a purchase.
Browse abandonment - Users who browse but don’t buy can be reminded to make a purchase via this email. Works decent, however this has limitation and does not work very well.
Post delivery thank you note - This is a order completed update and a thank you note from the team. This can be more of “product guide” email. We don’t do this very well.
Product Replenishment - This is to remind users who are running out of their supply. Surprisingly, this has not performed. I need to dig more on this.
Step 3 - Send campaign emails
These are specific promotion or event specific emails sent every week. It could be 2-3 emails every week. During big sale periods like Black Friday or 11.11, we send 4-5 emails every single day.
Example of campaign emails are
CNY Sale - You can send multiple versions of this. Each promotion can be one email like “get B1G1 deal this CNY”, “Free shipping on all orders this CNY” and so on.
GST Hike - Notifying consumers of upcoming GST hike and then sending emails like “14 days to price hike”, “7 days to price hike”, “last day before price rise”.
New Year, New products - This would announce new products or revisions in existing product.
Campaign emails can also focus on single product and offers on them.
#3 How to improve email performance
Okay, its pretty late now, so I will keep this quick. Here are simple ways to improve email performance.
Personalize - Add their names wherever possible, build segments to identify the habits and current products purchased. An easy way is to add loyalty points to email (for example, “Rachel you have 565 loyalty points with us. Click here to redeem”)
Test - Always A/B test each email on subject, preview text and possibly content inside as well.
Send more - Do not shy away from emailing a lot. Each person receives hundreds of email everyday. The only real way to be in front of consumers is to show up more often.
Add offers - Don’t waste those email and add a special offer at the end of each email. Sometimes, you can just send here is a short email and your coupon code.
Add and strengthen footer - Each email must have a footer that improves and drives credibility of the brand. It could be recent PR mention or award or product certifications.
Share story (be less transactional) - Simple, real stories on email do very well. We have moved to putting team pictures to personalise and add character to the emails. Share real stories of consumers, founder and team.
Don’t design too much, keep it text and message focused. Do I need to explain this? Emails don’t need to pretty. They need to convey the message quickly. Don’t add images that take 2 seconds to load.
One brand that does email marketing very well is NativePath. I am confident that each of their email drives 8-10K USD of revenue, maybe much more. Have a look if you are curious.
That’s all for today. Please let me know if I missed anything important and you would like me to share details.
Thanks again for reading.
Today was extremely late. I was out for Brunch that almost became dinner. These are my close friends and I met them after a long time. Felt good to unwind and talk about life. I especially enjoy small group at-home cosy meetups. It is fuss free and you can spend more time talking and relaxing.
Angry Jisoo is cute ❣️
Thanks again and have a great week ahead! Cheers! 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛