Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Thursday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder Managing Director here at BWG. Connect a giant networking knowledge sharing group, I spend the majority of my time either moderating events like this or talking with brands around digital Strategy. And it's everybody from startup, the fortune 100 and up every vertical and just, I'm trying to understand from the Hey, what are the biggest pain points you're trying to solve for? What are you most interested and curious about. And that's how we get the topics for these calls. But also, hey, who's helping you solve the most difficult problems out there, who are the service providers who are the partners that you lean heavily on and you like, these guys are awesome, we'd love to use them. And that's how we get resident experts. To help us out on these educational informational networking sessions we do. couple housekeeping items, we get started. And we're now we're kicking this, you know, four to five minutes after, you know, 130 Eastern Time is planned for an hour, but we're going to try to wrap up in about 15 minutes or so just to give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is we do want it to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have questions, drop them to the q&a, drop them into the chat or you can always email me Aaron@bwgconnect.com. And we will get those questions answered, hopefully real time. And with that I was go ahead and kind of kick it off. You know, today, it's around email marketing. So five strategies to increase email marketing revenue. And this is just something that's been coming up over and over again, as everybody is looking for ways to optimize what they're currently doing. It's not as much hey, I want to go out and add eight more things to my tech stack. It is how can I optimize what I have and obviously email marketing is top of mind for a ton of people and so we have some great friends partners supporters, the network over at Flowium, you've probably seen people from them before we get introduced to them from multiple brands and actually other partners as well. I think coli is one that you know, we did actually webinar together with Amara. And so in Lexie, I'll kick it over to you. I don't mind if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Flowium. That'd be awesome. We can kick it over to Andrea and then we'll just jump into you know, these five strategies kind of pick them apart. So I'm good. Yeah,

Lexie Hetu  2:23  

absolutely. We are Flowium. We're a full service, email and SMS agency. Me specifically My name is Lexie Hetu and I'm the partner relations specialists here at Flowium my job that includes serving as a liaison between our agency and checkout partnerships to find the most effective co marketing solutions for clients based on areas of opportunity and benefits to everyone. So we'll have a lot of good stuff to say for you today. And I'm going to kick it over to my colleague, Andrea.

Andrea Pohlmann  2:51  

That's me, I'm Andrea, Andrea Pohlmann Email Marketing Specialist here at flowing them with a specific love of SMS. So those are some exciting things. For me. I have worked in marketing for over 10 years for a variety of different industries, a variety of different clients. But now I focus my time and energy on nurturing your existing clients and making you more money.

Aaron Conant  3:12  

Yeah. Awesome. So again, if you have questions, drop into the q&a drop into the chat or email me Aaron@bwgconnect.com. So I think if we just jump into, like, we're gonna tackle five here. I'd love to hear the first one. Like, what do you see that people are missing or that you guys use all the time, that's like, top of mind.

Lexie Hetu  3:37  

SMS is a huge one right? Now, I just got to put that one out there. First and foremost, people are dying to get their hands on SMS.

Aaron Conant  3:46  

Which is interesting, because it's email marketing revenue, right? So you're bringing in SMS, there they go hand in hand, Are there cases where you say you don't need SMS? Or are you saying everybody should do these two together?

Andrea Pohlmann  4:02  

I'm gonna take it, I think it's my opinion that SMS should be viewed as a channel of email marketing. So when we think about email marketing, part of what we talk about is that this is the best way to get directly in front of your customer. So if you think about it, in the scope of like, how we live our regular life, right? So like, say, I meet you out in the street, Aaron, and I give you my business card, and it has my email on it. I've just given you a direct line of contact to me that you can use anytime you want, you can email me about anything you need to whatever it is, in the same way when our customers are giving us their email. They're doing the same thing for us, right as a business. So when we think about it like that, the natural extension of that is, here's my phone number in the same way that the natural extension of me meeting you in the street and being like, yeah, here's my contact information is to give you my phone number. So when we're thinking about SMS from a marketing perspective, we should always be thinking about it as another direct line to our customers. And that's kind of Why it's become such a big thing in terms of email marketing, right? So when you work together with those two things, that's how you like reach people in the best way possible.

Aaron Conant  5:11  

So let me throw something out there a on the one side it comes up is kind of leaders over and over again in the email space. And then we have like an attentive in the SMS space. So if they're supposed to be integrated, like, should they all be underneath one because right now, it seems I know a lot of brands that I'm talking to make 20 or 30 a week, those are in those are in separate bucket buckets. That they are, should they all be should somebody that's you know, on a 10 of go all in with a tenant of somebody on clay vo go all in with clay vo if it's one communication channel,

Andrea Pohlmann  5:48  

it kind of depends, right? So I encourage all of my clients to move all of their SMS over to clay VO. And that's not because we're a clay vo partner, it's not because we do their email in clay VO It's because specifically, it's my opinion that you have more accurate data when all of it is being recorded through one thing. And with clay vo you have all of those analytical tools. And that's why they are number one in email marketing, right. And when we pass that same kind of mentality over and we look at this, we look at SMS in the same way. What I'm now able to say is like, here's everything I've sent this person all in one place, these many emails, this many flows, this many SMS is and I can see where their purchases are actually attributed to. Whereas if it's in two separate things, that attribution model is pulling from two separate pieces of data. So like let's say I send Lexie an email from one of my brands today. And I send her an SMS tomorrow. Once from clay vo once from attentive. The next day she makes a purchase, when I go to look at my analytics for those that email that I sent today and the SMS I sent tomorrow. They're both going to attribute her purchase to those two separate things. So from my perspective, I'm like, Ah, well, I don't know what what actually drove her to purchase, right. Whereas if they're all in one system, the attribution can be more specific to a specific campaign that you're sending, whether it's email or SMS. And, again, personally, I think that that's a really important thing. Some people don't care, right? Like there are people who run businesses and they're like a sales a sale. And that's that and I'm like, good for you, man. Couldn't be me. Because my personal opinion is that the more information I have about why someone's doing something is the more I can encourage them to do it again. So in the same way that you would do that with two separate channels, outside of direct communication, or through outside of email, that's why I like to keep them together. So you can really see what people are doing and why.

Aaron Conant  7:45  

Yeah, awesome. Love it. So when you think about like increasing, you know, email marketing revenue, like, we'd love to hear your thoughts on that, and how the two things work together SMS as well, I think is what you're talking about us a lot around dat tribution, which is awesome. And then driving revenue, we'd love to hear your thoughts on that, then we can jump on to the next one for sure as well.

Lexie Hetu  8:11  

Yeah, I can, I can definitely take over this one. So SMS obviously is a super powerful tool when you use it within email marketing, as Andrea just touched on, by using it to encourage customer opt ins to your email list, providing those exclusive offers. Or even just sending reminders about upcoming campaigns that you have going on. SMS can be used to encourage those customers to act within those email campaigns, like clicking through a landing page, or purchasing a product. So in general, try to think of SMS as a channel within email marketing, one where you have the opportunity to either reinforce messaging, provide VIP offers, or even just speak candidly, to a small group of people. There's tons tons tons of benefits to using SMS, in your email marketing campaigns.

Aaron Conant  9:00  

You signed up and please yeah,

Andrea Pohlmann  9:03  

I also think it's important to consider like how people interact with this technology, right? So I think about my own phone usage. And there is nothing that gets me to pick up my phone faster than direct communication from my sister, one of my friends, someone who's sending me a text message. In the same way. You know, with email, there's like your promotions tab, there's a spam folder, there's, et cetera, et cetera, within your Gmail account within your Outlook account, whatever it is, that doesn't really exist when it comes to SMS, right? So everything kind of funnel funnels into that one SMS inbox, and that's the way we're, you know, interacting with people now. So like, while there isn't a way for me to track, you know, how many people opened this because that that's not a thing that we're able to track. What I can say is like how many unread SMS is do you have on your phone right now? And like Currently, I have one but it came in like three minutes ago and we're in the middle of something you know, but in general, people open In their text messages, even more so than they open their emails in 2023.

Aaron Conant  10:05  

So then are you doing like SMS flows or QR for email?

Andrea Pohlmann  10:12  

Yeah, so one of the things that I found really successful for some of my clients is actually integrating SMS into the regular flow. So for example, if you have an abandoned cart flow, and you don't want to send an email immediately after they leave the site, if I send you a text message after you like, right after you leave, and then you interact with that and make a purchase, then you exit the flow. If you're still in there, because you haven't made a purchase yet. The next thing I'm sending us that email, right, and so alternating back and forth gives you a better chance of reaching someone within those automations.

Aaron Conant  10:44  

That is awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. It's just when we were talking about email, marketing Maximizer, I mean, the first thing we jump into is SMS. But it totally makes sense that I really liked the way you you laid it out, which is it is fully integrated, and it should be in those flows. Awesome. And again, for people who have joined drop questions, the chat the q&a, or just email them to me. But so that's kind of number one, SMS, what would be a second one of the five

Lexie Hetu  11:13  

that is my bread and butter, we'll be talking about tech stacks, there's tons and tons of different tech stacks that you can use for email marketing. Different tech stacks use for different things, depending on the size of the business and the goals. Some popular tech stacks for email marketing are your marketing automation platforms, your CRMs customer relation management tools, email marketing platforms like clay, VO and your analytic tools, Google Analytics, just to just to name a few of them. Tech stacks are super, super important when you're talking about optimizing your clients accounts past just that foundational flow.

Andrea Pohlmann  11:50  

I also would add that like something else that's I have found for clients that helps increase their revenue in email that's part of their tech stack is your loyalty program, or your referral program or something that encourages people to come back a second time, right. So you have to think about email marketing is a nurturing tool. It's not an acquisition tool. It's a nurturing tool. So when you think about what you need to add to your tech stack, you want to add things that help nurture people into becoming returning customers, or initial customers if they've been in your list, but haven't made a purchase.

Lexie Hetu  12:26  

Yeah, when when clients come to us, you can typically tell how satisfied they are with some of their current technology. And sometimes what's working for them can stay exactly as is. But sometimes there's an opportunity to kind of switch them over to another platform that maybe does an all in one package. You know, you can have something that focuses on loyalty programs and reviews or you know, just kind of packaging them in depending on what the client is looking for. And the biggest benefit of that is to just let the brand focus on doing exactly what they love and the tech apps and us as email, marketers can do all that backend work for you and take the load off there.

Aaron Conant  13:07  

Do you do an audit then like a tech stack audit? Because what I'm running into a lot right now is over the pandemic. Everybody signed up for everything, right? Because they didn't know what to sign up for. And the one thing they didn't want to do is forget something and realize they needed it. And so they signed up for everything. And then now there's a massive rationalization going on. We've done a couple of dinners on it so far. And my guess is by the end of the year, we'll have done another eight or nine around tech stack rationalization Are you able to like step in from like an email marketing point of view and say, Hey, here's what best in class looks like, and you're doing it or here's what best in class, but maybe you can't afford it. And you know, it's best in class for enterprise best in class for midmarket best in class recipe, I guess is probably.

Lexie Hetu  13:58  

But that is that is a huge focus for me in partnerships. Right now, obviously, you have those WELL, WELL KNOWN tech apps. But sometimes it's not a one size fit all depending on like you said the size of the brand. We do offer email marketing audits completely complimentary, where we take a deep dive of your ESP. And part of that is looking at your tech stack and seeing kind of how you can optimize with that. And I can't share very much. But coming very, very soon we will be doing much more of a deeper dive into a tech stack audit for our current clients. And probably just anybody who's kind of looking to have it but that is something that's in the works. And we recognize the importance of that Flowium

Andrea Pohlmann  14:38  

Yeah, one of the things I love doing for clients that I work with, is I look at the different items in their tech stack. And I see how we can best optimize them. So I'm not fixing what's in your tech stack, but I am gonna look at it and say like, Hey, I noticed that you have yacht po and we're not doing an email about like points balance every month. So why don't we incorporate that somehow into a flow that you don't have to think about that might encourage people when they say like, oh, I have 700 points, like I can get $10 off. That's like an easy low lift way for me as an email marketer to create something, anything really like usually a flow, but anything that will then kind of use that data in order to encourage more purchases.

Lexie Hetu  15:23  

And that's where the overall benefit comes in. For us as an agency for our partner who's now getting a new co marketing opportunity and a client and the clients happy, you know, we're working hard to optimize their account, which in turn ends up being better retention. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  15:43  

Good question. I guess that comes in. Oh, from Sarah. Any other marketers, email marketers are using a Mitra as their CRM platform?

Lexie Hetu  15:53  

I haven't either.

Aaron Conant  15:54  

I have not heard of it either. That's interesting. I've heard a lot. But anybody wants to chime in if you've used the Maitreya, Maitreya, your CRM platform, drop somebody in the chat. But again, if you have questions along the way, yes, keep dropping in the chat. We'll we'll address them as they come in. So in that tech stack audit, like how many times do people have it nailed down? And how many times do you have people? No.

Andrea Pohlmann  16:26  

I don't mean, no, I just think I'm sorry, Lexie, I will This is brief. My thing is that nothing is ever perfect. So I think nailed down is not a thing. That's my personal opinion. You can just

Lexie Hetu  16:38  

set it better. Yeah, there's, there's nothing that's ever going to be completely set in stone, even just the business, whether it's us doing their Strategy, or if they're doing it in some other marketing channel. It's constantly evolving. So nothing is going to be a perfect fix forever, you know, you're always going to be have to looking for the next best thing. And even with these tech apps, they're they're growing, they're expanding. So these people are trying to adopt more and more technology to become that all in one platform. So when that's happening, you can't just be tied down to one thing

Aaron Conant  17:08  

forever, right? I mean, it's just getting harder and harder to be a digital marketer, right? Because people will just expect you to figure email, and they think it's so simple. But I think that was kind of the precipice between having a deeper dive like this and email marketing was, we did that webinar with Amira and Coley, and it was going to be content, and it all went to email, and everybody was so intrigued, because it's just something you should be able to do. And they don't realize, maybe you should have 20 different flows. And then now it's just not email and those 20 different flows, you need to be building in your SMS. Oh, by the way, those have to be touching all your different platforms to make sure that they're all connected in all those other the rest of your tech stack, like you're saying, constantly has updates and new connections that need to be made and new functionality. And you need to stay on top of all of it to have it perform. Otherwise, people are like, Oh, email marketing doesn't work. When I hear that, I'm usually like, What, no, it works. It's just maybe you're not utilizing it.

Lexie Hetu  18:06  

I was having a conversation, I think yesterday with someone who was talking about how they had a client and they really wanted to throw their all into social media marketing, and you know, paid ads through Instagram, and Facebook and all of this other stuff. And he said something, calling social media, a vanity channel. So especially with this generation, in this day and age, everybody's into the Instagram followers and the engagement on social media and how many people they can get in front of in a matter of minutes. Email marketing kind of becomes the underdog because you know, people don't really want to do it. It's super technical. Some people might even say it's boring, I invite you to rethink that. You want

Andrea Pohlmann  18:47  

to focus on chat about how boring it is, if you want, I can promise it's not,

Lexie Hetu  18:51  

right. Email marketing makes up so much of your online revenue. So why wouldn't you want to put your resources into something that's almost assure guarantee to boost your ROI?

Andrea Pohlmann  19:02  

Yeah. When we're talking about something like social media, there's like a very common misconception that organic social is about client acquisition, which is simply not the case. In a lot of cases, organic is also about nurturing. And when people are not seeing sales from their organic social media, they're confused about it. And the reason is that the algorithm is working against you. Whereas with something like email marketing, it's working for you. Right? So you have to keep that in mind when you're thinking about what part of your tech Strategy you're putting most of your digital marketing money into.

Aaron Conant  19:41  

So question comes in, currently using clay VO for email and attentive for SMS and use triple well for attribution measurement. Considering we're we're considering moving to a tenant for everything, email as well. Anyone have experience with the attentive email platform so

Andrea Pohlmann  20:00  

I have never used the attentive email platform. It's pretty widely widely accepted. In the email marketing industry that clay Vo is best in class for email. The reason that I would suggest going the other direction is kind of similar to what I've talked about before the analytics in clay, VO are going to be better than the analytics and attentive, it really depends on what you're looking to do. But in my opinion, the reality of email marketing platforms is that clay Vo is doing it best. And that's kind of that's like, no one's arguing that. So it really depends on what your budget is and how you want to a lot that budget. That makes sense. I would say if your email is performing well, right now, I would recommend not switching it to a different platform, because then you have to deal with all of your like, dedicated sending domains and all of those things again, which kind of will will inevitably change your delivered deliverability, at least for the short term.

Aaron Conant  21:00  

Awesome. Thanks, Chris. You can shoot me an email. And I'm pretty sure there's somebody in in the network. I mean, there's 9000 brands, now somebody I've chatted with, I can connect you with around the attentive email and see if it's worth it or not. Right from that standpoint. And then, so I'm more than happy to connect you so that other people Yeah, darlin Awesome. Yeah, so let's jump on to number three. What? So we've gone through SMS, we've gone through tech stack, what would be number three?

Lexie Hetu  21:38  

I think just as Andrew just touched on it deliverability

easy segue. Yeah,

there's there's tons of different ways that you can make sure that your emails and your campaigns are in that healthy deliverability range. This is something that brand owners should focus on maintaining all the time, you want to have a good sender reputation. And you do that by keeping your list clean. You're constantly segmenting those lists and using email authentication protocols. So business should be using double opt in forms. Sometimes if that's if that's what's going to work for that brand, to ensure that only valid subscribers are being added to those lists. And you know, you're not messaging, faulty emails or anything like that. And you should monitor your bounce and unsubscribe rates to make sure that their email campaigns are reaching the right audience. When it comes to a healthy deliverability Strategy, it can, it can help to improve open rates, click through rates, and then that gives you more sales maybe.

Andrea Pohlmann  22:42  

I would also say that, you know, again, not not to like harp on the idea of like the promotions tab. But I use Gmail almost exclusively as a person. So it's the easiest one for me to talk about. And there are brands that I've signed up for that I'm obsessed with that I want to receive their emails that I shop at all the time, because I am a notorious shopper, ask anyone who works at Flowium, it's this idea that like, when I want to receive those emails, are they coming directly to my inbox? Are they landing in spam? Are they landing in promotions, are they landing in wherever else, and your deliverability Strategy is a big part of that? A brand that I'm not going to I'm not going to speak negatively about any brands, but I'm going to say it like this. If you are subscribed to Old Navy emails, they send so many, you'll receive like four emails in a single day. And all of them will land in your promotions tab. And that is because you're not engaging with them every time they send you an email. And that's going to be part of that deliverability Strategy, right. So if you're sending too much or too little, if you're sending, you know, stuff that seems kind of spammy, the email inbox providers are going to filter that stuff out. And the reason that that is happening is for the same reason that anything happens in any algorithm, right? So it's Gmail responsibility to make sure that I continue to use Gmail, if I'm receiving a lot of spammy emails, if if things are like kind of looking gross, or like, whatever, if I'm getting a bunch of junk that I don't want, then I'm going to stop using Gmail, and I'm going to switch and that's what happened in the great mass exodus from Hotmail, if everyone remembers that correctly, right. We all switched to Gmail around the same time. And the reason for that is because that started getting inundated with all those spam and all that other things. So when we as a brand are looking to send these emails, we have to remember that the people we're sending them to are just like us, and they don't want spammy garbage either, right? So when we're looking at deliverability, we're taking in all of these factors as well as like a bunch more that are much more technical. And in doing so, we're able to make sure that that email gets in front of the person that we want, and that they open it we near

Aaron Conant  24:51  

again, are you to do like an analysis on all this stuff. Because this is where what I'm having right now is I'm having a lot of like the mid The layer of eCommerce being removed. And everybody is now being asked to do more. Right? And to do it right, it's just getting harder and harder.

Andrea Pohlmann  25:14  

I don't I don't envy a business owner right now, if I'm honest. Because it's, it's really hard as a business owner to be able to know and fix all of these problems, right. And, like, within Flowium, and we have people who focus specifically on tech and people who focus specifically on Strategy. And I think expecting one person to be able to do it all is unrealistic.

Aaron Conant  25:38  

And that's kind of that's where it's at right now. Everybody's over simplified

Andrea Pohlmann  25:42  

100%. And I would, I would say that, like, when we're talking about these strategies to increase revenue, when we're when we're like, Oh, you just have to fix your deliverability. Like, if I say that to you, you're like, cool.

Aaron Conant  25:54  

Yeah, the switch, hit the button. Let's do it. Now. No

Andrea Pohlmann  25:56  

problem. Let's do it. Right. But it's not that simple. And the the reason for that is like, again, that customer experience, right. And we all as not only, like, individuals who work in businesses, but business owners, consumers, we're all looking for the best possible customer experience. And that's not something that one person can just fix by themselves right away with, like a flicking a switch. So when we're looking at something like deliverability, it is not a flick a switch fix, you have to think about it more of the same way that you would think of something like SEO, right. So when I talked to somebody about SEO, I'm like, that's not going to be fixed overnight. It's not an immediate problem that you can fix, right? It takes time, because you have to build that reputation. And that's what SEO is all about. deliverability is very much the same. So it's this idea that like, if I have a dedicated sending domain, which I can set up in clay, VO and or attentive, I'm sure or whatever ESP or using that domain that I'm now using, I have to build the trust on in the same way that you would on your URL for SEO, right. Except in this case, I'm not trying to get the search engine to trust my domain, I'm trying to get the email providers to trust my domain. So it's not a one Strategy, you flick the switch, it's perfect. Now, it's about like warming your domain and understanding all these little pieces. And when we work with a client, that's something that we track month over month, like we we have to do it that way. Because there's no, there's no way for you like, here's, here's your deliverability score, I'm gonna fix it tomorrow. Like, it's just not a thing. Yeah, I just see issues

Aaron Conant  27:33  

with, you know, on an ongoing basis, you know, trying to explain this to executive teams, to upper management, people who have not grown up in this space, or even, you know, sometimes digital marketers who are used to just straight up performance marketing, and now they're charged with Ryan, you know, the entire department, maybe they're a CMO now, and trying to explain the intricacies of making email marketing, which is one of the top revenue drivers across the board. It's just, I mean, explain it doing is one thing trying to explain it to executive teams to get buy in on why the effort why the agency why adding a new person is worth it, or switching platforms, or adding tech stacks or removing things from tech stacks, just

Andrea Pohlmann  28:20  

so I completely get what you're saying. And I completely agree. A Mara has made a really good point here where she said, If email marketing can bring in 30 to 60% of your total revenue, executives find time to lose, yeah, you're right.

Aaron Conant  28:34  

It has to be put in there has to be built into a business case. So that's where I'm thinking as we're pulling out. And if I'm a brand on the line today, that's all I'm doing is I'm building a business case, this is what's this is how much money is coming in. But these are the five number one things I have to do. And here's what the investment in the time is going to take. But it's worth it. And if we're not doing this, then we're gonna take a hit on revenue. It's building that business case,

Andrea Pohlmann  28:57  

for sure. I like to also again, compare it back to SEO right? Is like when everyone started when it was.com Boom, and everyone made their first website for their business, right? And we said to them, like you have to be able to be found on Google. And they're like, Well, how do I do that? And I say you have to have a blog, you have to be posting this often. You can't stuff your keywords, you have to do this deliverability has much of the same kind of like concepts like on a deep dive level. It's like you have to make sure that you have your domain verified, you have to make sure that you're not sending to people who didn't give you permission to send to them, you have to make sure like all of these kind of like checkboxes. And I think what making that comparison helps people who maybe aren't currently doing the most in terms of digital might understand it a little bit better just like from pitching it to an executive team perspective.

Aaron Conant  29:46  

So for an SEO rights in here for enhancing reporting on email revenue, what is the overall experience bandwidth performance gaps between clay vo GA three slash four any suggestions for an analysis insert data audit between the two to better understand where conversations our conversions are actually taking place.

Andrea Pohlmann  30:07  

This is a really interesting one, because Ga Ga four is so new, right? So like, we're still kind of figuring out how that works. I tend to from a Flowium and email marketing perspective, we focus more on clay vo analytics than we do on Google Analytics, just in general. One of the things that I like to kind of think about or test is, if you're providing some sort of discount code, don't use the same discount code in different channels, obviously. And that's a really good way to see like a concrete number of like this sale came from this specific email. And these are unique codes that are not found anywhere else. And I like to do that with my clients at least once a quarter just to figure out if those in like those attributions actually make sense. But in general, I find that comparing the two and kind of seeing where there's gaps is the first step, as you've mentioned, and my number one suggestion would be if, if possible, okay, and this is, again, no digital marketer can do everything I'm not perfect, I'm not claiming to be, but what I suggest is when you're taking multiple pieces of data and analyzing them together, try to think about not just a single month or a single quarter look at it compared to say the year before. So a great example of this is like if I have a brand new client that didn't do much email marketing, and we took them on, and we set up all their flows, and we did all this stuff. And they've been running Google ads and been working on SEO for years, but they have noticed a drastic decrease or increase in their like revenue. I can say to them, okay, so last year, at this time, this is what you were making based on your Google Analytics. This year. This is what you're making based on your Google Analytics. And here's what Klaviyo says about where that money is coming from. The other interesting thing that I love about clay vo analytics, and I could talk about this all day. So we won't, because we're trying to keep it short. But the idea is that like what I like to do is I like to look at individual conversions every once in a while. And the reason I like to do that is if you look at a profile in Klaviyo, you can see not only which emails and SMS is you've sent to them. But when they've opened them, and how many times what they've clicked on, when they made a purchase in the timeline of when we sent those different campaigns or those flows, that for me, it gives a better indication sometimes on a very micro level, like very micro level. Oh, I know for sure that this has worked. You know what I mean? I hope that answers your question. Yeah, I mean,

Aaron Conant  32:39  

I'm more than happy to connect you. Yeah, with Sarah afterwards, you can do literally a deep dive and a walkthrough. There's five more questions that have come in over the q&a. But I want to make sure I want to get to those. But I also want to make sure we get through all five. And so we've gone through three, what would be number four? And then we'll hit five and then we'll, if everybody keeps dropping in their questions, we can we can tackle those as well. As as we get closer to the end. Yeah.

Lexie Hetu  33:14  

The next one on the list is advanced segmentation, you know, we just talked about how to have good deliverability, and all of the pieces that kind of go into it. Segmentation is a huge one, you wouldn't believe how many people come to me and Andrea can probably attest to this too, who say, Oh, when I send out a campaign, it just goes to all of my subscribers at once. That is a huge nono in the email marketing world. So businesses can increase their segmentation for their campaigns by using known inclusions and exclusions and a bunch of other available data from those customers, even personalization tokens, and do all of this custom stuff for these people to stick them into individual groups. At flowing them, we always love to say that good segmentation and deliverability combined is about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. And that is so much harder than you would think it is. But by using these inclusions and exclusions, you can get the very bare minimum of where to start with that.

Andrea Pohlmann  34:17  

But I would say some of kind of like the baseline ones because like that's a question we get asked all the time. Because I would say I like to include people based on their demographic data. So like, their age, their gender, their location, things that they've browsed on our website, things that people have purchased or not purchased, things that they've shown interest in. Lately I've been toying with. I know AI is like the most exciting thing and digital marketing right now. So I'm going to just say this, but CLEVEO has AI tools that predict lifetime value of a customer based on what they've been doing on your site, how they interact with your emails, things like that. And so one of the inclusions that I've been messing with with some of my clients is is the idea that like, if their lifetime value is above a certain threshold or below a certain threshold, we recommend them different products. And that's a specific way that you can say like, I want to talk to you specifically, these people who I know are going to be making this level of purchase. In terms of exclusions, some of the common ones that I like to use or like, if you have a preference page set up for your email marketing, which you should, then you can have like frequency preferences. Some of my clients have a lot of customers that only want an email once a month, they don't want to hear from us every week or every day or however frequently we're sending people who have never opened your email signed up for your list, never opened an email that's going to help your deliverability because it's showing that more people who are subscribed to you are more interested in what you're doing. You can also exclude people who I don't know who who have gone to spam a certain number of times, or people who you know, are have already purchased a product that you're promoting. And using these inclusive inclusions and exclusions kind of going back to my like, way a long time ago conversation about like, I've given you access to email me, email me about what I want to hear, right. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  36:15  

Love it. Do we want to jump to number five? Yeah, we just start tackling questions. So I'm gonna love it. Last

Lexie Hetu  36:24  

one would be additional automations that your business can use to help increase your revenue. So businesses can use these with email marketing by streamlining processes, and increasing their efficiency of their email marketing Strategy, like their welcome emails, win back campaigns, abandoned cart, emails, all of these high revenue building flows. And even customer satisfaction surveys, going back into tech apps, get someone who does a quiz calculator, countdown timer, some sort of survey in there. This is just another reason to optimize. And additionally, businesses can use automated triggered campaigns to send out these personalized messages based on their customer interactions, as well as automated segmentation to specific customers. You know, when we're talking about this long term goal flowing and aims for 20 found, or I'm sorry, 20 flows within your first year. So that includes your nine foundational flows, and all of the emails that go in it. So it's not just as simple as you know, just one abandoned cart email, one wind back flow, one sunset flow, you know, you got to take the customer through a journey through each one of these

Andrea Pohlmann  37:37  

steps. You see what all money flows, money flows easily. I also think it's really important as a brand to think about your personal customers buying behaviors. I had a call with a potential client a couple of weeks ago, where we talked about the idea that like, here's a flow that we would make custom for you. Because we know that when someone buys this item, we want to try and cross sell these items that go with it. Things like that are not going to be a standard flow that you're going to find on like a blog somewhere on the internet. That's like, you have to think about like, what does my client actually want? How do I get them to do the thing that they want to do anyway? Like, how do I remind them? I'm terrible at remembering things just as a human person, right? So when I make a purchase, and I'm like, oh, I should have got x y Zed as well. If I forget about that, and a week after, after the product has arrived, I've unpacked it, I played with it a little bit. And then a week later, I get an email. It's like, hey, when this make the thing you bought better. And if you as a business owner don't have to think about that or send that messaging that automation will do the work for you. Right. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  38:54  

Yes, it will, if you know how to set it up. Right. Yeah, exactly. Have all the flows defined. Did you have everybody say is segmented correctly, exclusions inclusion list and everything up then? Automation is amazing.

Andrea Pohlmann  39:06  

Yeah, absolutely. Once you do everything else automation, perfect. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  39:10  

I like the fact that it is number five. Right? That's that makes a lot more sense than if it was number one. And then we had to tackle what everything else looks like. Some questions that come in, what are some strategies to increase your actual email list itself?

Andrea Pohlmann  39:25  

That's a big one. So what I always say is that the first step is understanding what will make your client sign up, right? So when you land on a page, any website that you have ever shopped on, right? If you are there, and no pop ups come up to encourage you to subscribe. You're not going to write no one's like, oh, man, I wish I wish I got more emails that no one ever write until I have a pop up that says like, Hey, if you sign up for our email list, I'll give you 10% off If you sign up for SMS, I'll give you 15, right? And those types of opt ins are going to be really important. Similarly, like everyone's familiar with, you arrive on a website from an ad, usually that you clicked on social media, I'm telling you about your own life ready? So you land there, and that wheel comes up. And it's like, how much am I? How much of a discount am I going to get? So gamifying, your opt ins is also something that's very popular and helps a lot with increasing actual conversion into an opt in. But none of that matters if you have no traffic. Right? If you know no traffic, so you have to set up these things. It's like it's the chicken and egg, right? So if you have no traffic, you're gonna get no opt ins. But if your opt in forms are no good, it doesn't matter how many traffic how much traffic you have. So make sure that both of those pieces are kind of working together, and use them to encourage people to sign up. And it doesn't have to be a discount, like, like, as I mentioned, a discount because it's the lowest hanging fruit, right? But there's definitely other ways to get people to opt in within those forums, depending on what your customer needs. Or wants. How do

Aaron Conant  41:08  

you guys deal with low domain reputation? Issues for cold emails? Domain?

Andrea Pohlmann  41:15  

Yeah, so the first, as you've mentioned, kind of in this question, as well, is encouraging, by sending to an engaged and loyal audience. So that's number one. Number two is like once you've already done that, because you're saying what else apart from that, right, so you have that initial like we're sending to our engaged audience for the first couple of weeks, in smaller portions, whatever it is, then once you have that, that strong engaged list, whether it's a 3050 9120, day engaged doesn't matter. Once you have that, that's when you start including other segments. So one of the things, one of the ones that I'm obsessed with right now is active on site. So if I know that someone who's already subscribed, they're already opted in all that stuff. They're not in my engaged list, but they were active on my site in the last week. Right, they're showing some site type of interest in being on our site and in our products. So I'm going to create a segment that says, is not suppressed for email is has been active on site in the last seven days, and has it, you know, predicted lifetime value of whatever, right $500 Let's call it and that's like, those are all made up. Right. But But theoretically, I include that segment, in addition to my engage segment to try and expand my engage segment, right. So everything kind of comes back to that those micro segmentations or like a one that I I was trying to reengage some people who were to purchase during Black Friday of last year. So I created a segment that said, like, has made a purchase between November 15 and December 15 2021 years 2322 and has not made a purchase since right so that that group, if I include that let's call it 1000 People with my regular engaged that I'm building that engage segment and warming up the domain with people who I know have interest or have made purchases from my website before. Does that help? Yeah, I think so.

Aaron Conant  43:12  

At what point do you recommend sunsetting and unengaged email? And the other one? Are there agencies that could help us continuously monitored them monitor domain reputation, and send suggestions on a weekly basis? So, couple more?

Andrea Pohlmann  43:28  

Yeah, so the first one, when we're talking about sunsetting, it's going to depend on your product and your customer lifecycle. We create exclusions for our clients that are that are about like how many times has something bounced or how many times has something, you know, gone to spam or whatever it is. But in terms of sunsetting, it's going to really depend. So if I'm working with a client, who they're like, their product is something that you would need to repurchase every 30 days, like a medical product or something like that, it's going to be a very different thing than somebody who's selling something that's like going to last for the entire year, or like I have a client who sells coffee machines. So obviously, you're not buying an espresso machine as often as you're buying test strips for your blood, your like blood sugar monitor, right? Those two things are gonna be very different. So your sun setting Strategy should have tie ins to what your actual product is. And that's going to depend like that's how you're going to time it right? Because I'm not going to sunset somebody after 30 days when I know that this product lasts for many years, necessarily. Right, right. For sure.

Aaron Conant  44:35  

Are there agencies that could help us continuously monitor domain reputation and send suggestions on a weekly basis?

Andrea Pohlmann  44:42  

weekly basis is probably more frequent than you would need would be my first comment about that. Secondly, I would say that there's most email agencies will help you with domain reputation, domain reputation from an email perspective. So So I know Flowium with the clients that I work with, I meet with them on a weekly basis. And when there's, you know, when it comes to domain reputation, it's sometimes take longer than that to see even incremental change. So I would say that what you want to do is find a trusted partner such as Flowium is quick, quick, classic sales pitch, who will monitor it for you on an ongoing basis, and be constantly working on how to fix it? I think from a consultancy perspective, it would, I would argue that it would make more sense to hire an agency who actually does the work for you rather than make suggestions about how to fix it, if that makes sense. Only because as we discussed previously, it's kind of hard to say like this, one person will be able to do it all. Whereas like, if you hire someone who is an expert in doing that, they're going to be able to make more change in a shorter amount of time, or in a longer amount of time, depending to actually move the needle. And just before we

Lexie Hetu  46:00  

move on, I know that we are getting close to our 230 Mark, I just want to throw it out there that if anybody wants one of these free email audits that we do for your ESP, or if you're interested in hearing more scheduling a consultation, you can absolutely reach out to me, I can put you in touch with people from our team, we're always down to talk more about email marketing, because increasing your revenue. It's why we're here. And it's what we do.

Aaron Conant  46:24  

Yeah, and of course, everybody should, if it makes sense, sign up for a free audit, why not do it? They come highly recommended from a ton of brands in the network. Let's see here. Best practices. So one no here. For attendees, if you're not focused on email marketing, I would encourage you to reconsider. You know, because guarantee your competitors are using email as well. That's a great comment. Best practices? Do you have best practices for converting leads without offers? Sticking to things like brand story and design? For sure, I

Andrea Pohlmann  46:58  

would say in terms of design? Not really, it very much depends on kind of what your own audience will respond to? And I hate that answer. And I'm sorry that it's the one I'm giving you like, I hate it. It's a shitty answer. But I'm sorry. But when we're thinking about things that will help people convert that are not about, I'm giving you a discount, or I'm offering this or I'm offering that, the thing that I would say is you have to be offering something. And I'm not saying that that thing has to be a discount. So when we're looking at things like brandstory, or we're looking at things like information, or we're looking at things like a PDF gift guide, or we're looking at whatever it is, think about it like this. If I were asking you to give me your email right now, and we don't know each other from Adam, right, so I'm saying to you give me your email, you're like why? Right? The answer to the question, why is the thing that you should be talking about in your opt in form. So if it's get discount, like get offers and say, like learn about offers and sales before anyone else, or it's, you know, will provide you with best in class knowledge about whatever industry it is, or it's will provide you a free audit or will whenever it is any of those things are answering that Why Why should Why should the client give you your like their email? Why should they give you their phone number? When you can answer that why? That's where you're going to find the way to convert those the traffic into subscribers. Awesome, love it.

Aaron Conant  48:30  

Comment comes in. I need Lexie's email interested in an audit?

Lexie Hetu  48:35  

You can have it? Have it? You got it?

Aaron Conant  48:38  

We'll send it out to everybody afterwards after the call for sure. Everybody can just through you know, reply and sign up. But you know, Lexie, what's your email really quick?

Lexie Hetu  48:48  

It's Alexis@flowium.com.

Aaron Conant  48:52  

All right. Just put it in here. To everyone. 

Andrea Pohlmann  48:59  

Puppy, sorry. My dog just woke up when it happened. Boy see.

Aaron Conant  49:07  

So we're almost there. Right now. We'll see. There's other questions that come in. How often should we email subscribers? Two times? Is there good options? It all depends. Should they just

Andrea Pohlmann  49:21  

not broken record? It depends on your audience. I would say that like if you're sending campaigns and you want to optimize those campaigns, once a week is usually enough. If you're doing heavy segmenting, you're gonna you're gonna send more because you're sending to smaller segments each time. If you are in the middle of a sale there's strategies that we use in email marketing for sales like a double down where we send one in the morning and one the evening. So it really does depend the worst answer I hate it so much but I but it is the truth.

Lexie Hetu  49:53  

It is true. It's what makes Flowium so cool is that we come up with custom strategies depending on and who the brand is kind of what their brand voice is what they're selling who they're talking to, you know, is the content educational or more whimsical? Like? Are they selling dishwashers or clothes or perishable goods? You know, everything is custom designed based on the specific client coming to us.

Aaron Conant  50:19  

Yeah. Awesome. And I see we're pretty much right here at time. Let's see, like a key takeaway that Andrea will do a key takeaway, and then we'll kind of wrap it up. There's a few more questions that we didn't have a chance to get to. But that is don't think we'll have enough time. So let's go ahead and wrap it up. key takeaway. Lexie. And then Andrea,

Lexie Hetu  50:38  

any of those questions that you have below if you want to chat more, you can reach out to me my email is in the chat schedule a complimentary audit. It's free. I'd love to chat with anyone more on this topic. If you have questions, comments, concerns, we'll get you set up with myself or someone like Andrea.

Andrea Pohlmann  50:56  

Awesome. I would say my key takeaway for you guys today is think about your audience. Talk to them, the way that they need to be spoken to you individually, you're not going to do well with cookie cutter email marketing advice. Keep in mind that they have given you their personal information and how you use that is going to directly impact how effective your strategies are. Awesome,

Aaron Conant  51:24  

then with that, I think we're right here at time. Thanks again, everybody for the great questions that came in. Thanks, Lexie and Andrea, for you know, answering let us put you on the hot seat while you're in real time. While you're like giving us the top five strategies. Again, I encourage everybody to follow up with the team at Flowium They're fantastic partners of a ton of brands and the network just come highly recommended and they're super nice people as well. And with that, I think we're gonna wrap it up. So thanks again, Lexie. Thanks, Andrea. We hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday everybody. Take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event.