Joe: 00:03 Hey guys, it’s Joe here from digital triggers and show me the nuggets and I’m super excited to talk to a Ryan Turner today who runs an email and, and a Shopify or e-comm specific agency. So Ryan is from email funnels.agency and also front row commerce.com and guys, I’m super excited because I’ve been going through some of Ryan’s content and I actually reached out as somebody that went and actually watch his content and I was like, man, I would love to have you on the podcast. So guys, we got a special treat with us here today. What’s up Ryan Turner?
Ryan: 00:37 Hey, I’m good. Thanks for the intro. We’re really excited to be here. Love your stuff.
Joe: 00:42 Awesome man. Well we’re excited to have you. I know that we
got a ton of agency owners here that watch our show. We got people that do stuff specifically for e-com, so I think that this’ll be a fit for them.
Joe: 00:55 I know that we do have some people that, that do what you
come every once in a while for your clients. So I think that or for their clients, so I think this will be a good fit for them. And then I know that there’s some people like me as well that have like side projects and things that they do on the side and they’re playing with Shopify. So I think that that’s a good fit for them as well. So I think we got kind of three audiences here that man, I think we’ll we’ll really get a ton of value out of today.
Ryan: 01:18 Great. Hopefully we should have something for for everyone.
Joe: 01:21 Awesome, man. So you run an email funnel agency, why don’t
we start there, tell us a little bit about that agency, how that works, how you got started and we’ll go from go from there
Ryan: 01:30 Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so my main project is called email
funnels.agency and you know, we’re very specialized. All we really do is run email marketing both done for you and kind of strategy consulting and we just do it for eCommerce brands. So anyone on like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce just help them figure out their backend, their lead generation, and just try and get the best ROI possible and all this money they’re spending on ads and influencers and all the rest of it, making sure they’re getting the most out of that. So it’s very focused. It’s just email just for eCommerce and it’s actually pretty much just using one platform, which is Klaviyo. Which I personally
believe is for most e-commerce brands, the best email solution out there. So we’ve chosen to specialize just in helping brands using using that tool and getting the most out of it.
Joe: 02:25 So I’m curious Ryan, in your opinion, what do you think Clavio is the best or Klaviyo’s is the best and maybe who wouldn’t be the right fit? You said almost everyone, right?
Ryan: 02:33 Yeah, for sure. So I mean, they really are at the cutting edge.
The amount of money that they invest into new features. And new developments and just making the platform better is like, I’ve never seen anything like it. All they’re doing is releasing new updates, new features that are mostly coming from their community. All the time. They’re very specialized. So you know, there’s all these email platforms out there, active campaign, MailChimp and things like that. And the way I look at those programs, those softwares, they were originally built just to do email for everybody. And then after they were like, Oh, Shopify has taken off this build a Shopify integration and like capitalize on that.
Ryan: 03:17 But Klaviyo was built from day one for eCommerce from the
ground up. So everything they’ve ever done is had e-commerce brands in mind. So like the kind of functionality and segmentation and targeting that you can do on their platform, there’s nothing else like it out there unless you look at really enterprise platforms that costs, you know, like six figures a year that like these tier one like eight figure brands are using, they bring like those kinds of technologies to smaller brands that are doing like, you know, 10, 20, 50 grand a month on their own though a Shopify store. So yeah, I think it’s the best.
Joe: 03:56 Okay. So everybody should be using that basically, except for those that are, you know, doing seven, eight figures plus and can pay for some, some custom type of stuff being built. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, there is.
Ryan: 04:06 There is a level where, you know, you’re doing multiple, you
know, say hundreds of millions a year. You might be looking at custom solutions and things like that. But really I would say like 99% of the brands you know, that are going to be watching this, you can’t go wrong with, with Klaviyo if you’re balancing cost and, and functionality.
Joe: 04:28 Perfect. And then how’d you get started in the industry, so to
speak? Did it start with e-comm did it start with agency wwhere are you from? How’d you end up where you are today?
Ryan: 04:37 Yeah, so I’ve really just been in eCommerce. I mean pretty much
all I’ve ever done. I started off in affiliates. I’m in London where I’m from. Umoved to, worked at a few affiliate networks, moved into a display,uyears. I moved to New York city to work at a,uactually to launch an eCommerce,uanalytic software company,uin the U S did that for a few years.
Ryan: 05:05 Then transitioned into Facebook ads. I actually worked at Jason
Hornung’s, Facebook ads agency for a couple of years. Ran some, some pretty big campaigns with him. And then really just, just wanting to change. And you know, Facebook was coming more and more difficult. It was becoming less and less, less profitable on the front end and people were starting to think, okay, like I’m breaking even on these ads. How can we get, you know, more from our customers? And things like that. And people are starting to think, okay, email is kind of like forgotten about maybe not that sexy. But now you see what these massive brands are sending so many emails. Cause that’s where it really where you, you make the money. So when I wanted to change, I just kind of looked into that a few years ago and just went with it and started to do really well.
Joe: 05:53 Perfect. Perfect. So that’s a nice segue, right? So it’s like you’re,
you’re making money, you’re breaking even whatever the scenario is on the front. It’s like how can we create more revenue? What’s, how do we get people to reorder things like that. So I originally stumbled across one of your posts. I know that we are connected on LinkedIn. We had chatted before and then I came across due to I’ve got to give you props and Epic piece of content. That video that you have talking about the three steps to generate 30% more e-comm sales was very, very good. So props on that. I’d love to kind of walk through kind of what that, what that post was at the highest level to catch everybody up for our combo here.
Ryan: 06:33 Yeah, yeah, for sure. So that was just a high level case study of
basically everything you need to be doing is I’m an e-commerce brand in email on a high level and it’s free for anyone. You can actually get [email protected]/case-study. And basically, I mean really we’re just talking about how email can, you know, wherever you’re spending money, wherever you’re advertising, wherever your traffic and sales are coming from, if you get email, right, it makes everything that you’re doing more effective because everybody that comes to your site becomes instantly more valuable if you have all these email strategies set up to make them buy again or to turn leads to customers and things like that. So if we want to talk about the three steps to you know, drive as much revenue as you can from email, the
first step of that is going to be optimizing your, your lead generation.
Ryan: 07:29 So, you know, you could have the best e-commerce site in the
world, you know, 10% of your visitors could buy but still you’re losing nine out of 10 people. And even then you’re out performing basically every brand out there. So we want to get as many visitors onto this email list as possible. So that’s the, that’s the first step there obviously have some interest they might not buy today, but they might buy, you know, six weeks from now. If you, if they’re on your email list. So the first step is gonna be really getting your lead, your lead generation strategy in place. So that’s going to be using things like onsite messaging. So exit intent, overlays, popups you know, the, the standard stuff that you see all the time, you know, you see it all the time because it works like 10% off your first order or free shipping.
Ryan: 08:17 And even a lot of these brands that typically don’t discount,
they are offering incentives on their first order because they know how valuable, like they’ll do basically anything to get someone in the door. And if you have good products, you know, they just want to get someone to make that first purchase. They know they’re sold on the products after that. So they’re all friends, like you know, sometimes even 20% off to get them on the email list and to get that first order. So that’s the first step. And something else I really try and get brands to do as well is use other forms of lead generation. And, and a big one of those is going to be quizzes. So like lead gen quizzes now for eCommerce are massive. They convert really, really well. The leads you get, it’s not just an email address, it’s an email address along with the answers to like 10 or 15 questions about preferences, problems, pain points that you can then segment on the back end with email and send people targeted offers and things like that, like subway season quizzes and popups or overlays, whatever you want to call them.
Ryan: 09:22 You know, those are my two go to lead generation methods
that really work well after that. So, you know, step two would be all right, you’re building up this list of non-buyers. You know, what are we, what are we going to do now? So really in that welcome sequence, which is a sequence someone gets after signing up as a non-buyer, we really want to try and cover every reason that someone might not buy from your brand on the first few days. So you want to focus on things like your USP, [inaudible], anything you can highlight about how your products made the quality problems, it solved, founder’s story, any kind of educational content that you can put out that your market’s going to be interested in and obviously a bunch of social proof
and those right there are covering most of the reasons that someone might not buy for from a brand, obviously apart from price, which is hopefully going to be overcome with any kind of coupon and things like that.
Ryan: 10:20 So that’s usually what the initial sequence looks like when
someone signs up for an email list by a quiz or or some kind of overlay. After that we want to go into, you know, post-purchase stuff. So this is where a lot of brands fall down. Like most brands, no, you’ve got to build a list. You’ve got to follow up with the waste. But you know, you make that first purchase and you know, what happens after that, you might get an email for like, Oh, here’s 10% off your next order or whatever. And then after that is pretty much it. I really like to see brands go into detail in the post-purchase phase. So what that means is, you know, if I bought this best selling product or I bought something from this very specific category, we want this person to over the following weeks go down a specific followup path that has cross sells and upsells that are recommending items based on what they’ve recently purchased.
Ryan: 11:16 And if you can go into that kind of detail in your post-purchase
phase, rather than just sending someone like a generic, like, you know, make another purchase email you’re really gonna start to get, you know, higher lifetime values. And just more repeat purchasers, which is, you know, what, what everybody wants. And you know, some brands think of that and they might be like, well, I’ve got 200 products, how am I going to like put a different followup path and for everyone? But the reality is, you know, it’s kinda like an 80, 20 thing, like probably a very few of those products or at least a couple of categories generating most of the sales. So if you can like start from the top, take your high volume items, the stuff that’s really making you money and bringing customers in and make sure that those items have their own paths for products that you want to cross sell and upsell over the following weeks after someone makes that purchase, you’re really going to see great results on on the back end.
Ryan: 12:10 And then, you know, somewhat related to that as they reorder
and replenishment as well. So if I buy something, like, I don’t know if I buy like a six pack of LaCroix or like a 30 pack of LaCroix in 30 days, I should be getting an email, like to buy that again. And hopefully put me on some kind of subscription or something like that. So reorder and replenishment is a big one too. So those are some of the things that we like to focus on in the post-purchase phase along with, you know, like VIP wind back and all the stuff that you know, most, most people do. But,
but really those like specific post-purchase sequences are aware. A law of these repeat sales come from if you’re giving giving people targeting follows based on based on what they’ve bought and then, you know, really after that.
Ryan: 13:03 So those are kind of like a summary of some things we do with, with automations. And obviously you have the abandoned cart and things like that that everybody, everybody knows and loves. This is kind of like half of an email strategy. And on the other side, you have the stuff that’s not automated. So the things is like, you know, maybe not quite as sexy. Like everybody loves these email automations that, you know, it’s set it and forget it. Sales 24, seven, but really that’s only going to generate about half of your potential revenue from email. The other stuff is going to be your campaigns calendar. So like your newsletter, your sales promotions any content you’re sending out. So I like to get brands, you know, building a comprehensive calendar that has a few emails a week. That is, you know, running promotions, but also giving content like thought leadership, educational stuff highlighting customer reviews just single product promotions that don’t include any discounts or anything like that.
Ryan: 14:01 And really just have a balanced campaigns calendar so that you
know, you’re remaining top of mind and you know, you’re not just monitoring, you’re not just like selling and giving discounts or just talking about your products all the time. You’re really sending people a balanced a balanced calendar. And, and if you do that, I mean, you can get away with sending a lot. I mean, some brands email every day and you know, if you have a big enough team and you were in the right market, you can come up with something valuable to talk about every day. There’s not going to be the case for most, but most Brands can email a couple of times a week. And if you just do that consistently, plan it out in advance then you’re going to generate as much again or more than you do from your, your automations.
Ryan: 14:42 So there’s kind of a, a summary of what the whole process looks
like.
Joe: 14:46 That’s beautiful. And as an agency is it kind of like step one is your, is your setup, right? Then step two is part of your setup two and then step three is kind of, then we do that every month. Or are you constantly working on step two and step three, how do you roll it out as your agency? The three different steps? How’s that actually work in reality?
Ryan: 15:08 Right. Yeah. So it depends where the brand’s starting from. So
usually there’s kind of, there’s kind of one or two situations. So the first situation is you know, they kind of just like blown up either from ads or from some kind of viral products and they realize they don’t really have any email in place. They might be doing abandoned cart or something like that or just something that Shopify sends out and they don’t really have anything.
Ryan: 15:35 They’re overwhelmed and we’re like, we just need everything.
So in that situation, really priority number one is to get the automation set up and to get, you know, some kind of consistent schedule. So like this just get something out once a week, like a newsletter or something. While we’re building out like a content calendar for the, for the coming months and starting to plan, plan something out or really getting those automations set up as quickly as possible. Once the automations are done, they do require some ongoing optimization and split testing and things like that. But it doesn’t take too much time. Then we’re really focusing on this up the campaigns frequency this look at, you know, things like the segments that we’re sending your emails to. And really focusing on like sending out a balanced campaigns calendar, figuring out what you want to do for the next few months with holidays, promotions and things like that.
Ryan: 16:30 And then, you know, other brands, they have everything up and
running. It’s doing pretty well, but it’s just time intensive and they just, they know that they’re like kind of just checking the email box and they’re not getting as most as much as they can out of it because sitting down and planning a campaign’s calendar for the next three months and actually creating it and making it happen. It’s just a lot of work and it’s not exciting and you know, they’re trying to focus on like their influencer strategy and like new Facebook ads and stuff like that. And you know, all that. They’re really only sending out one email a week when they know they should be sending out three, but they don’t know what to send. They don’t just want to keep sending these coupons out all the time. So that’s like the, the other side.
Ryan: 17:16 And you know, those guys will probably need some work in
their automations too. But generally they just, they just need someone with a ton of resources to get like consistent campaigns going out. Which is something a lot of brands don’t do unless it’s like a holiday or like July 4th or something like that. Yeah. Black Friday, Christmas, like whatever, you get to black Friday and you’re like, dammit. But like, we’ve not done anything. Like, I mean, now we’re like 10 days before black Friday as we do this. There’s a, Hey crap, we don’t have
anything right now. Like, yeah, yeah. And it’s if you haven’t sent any emails over a year and that now you just want to start blasting big lists of emails for black Friday, I mean, that’s, it’s not as easy as that because you might have a lot of people in there that you shouldn’t be emailing. You can do yourself some real damage if you’re emailing the wrong people and things like that so you’re gonna need to be prepared in advance
Joe: 18:06 100%. So talking about front row commerce your, your training
that you’re, that you’re working on releasing and then email funnels agency who, who’s the right fit for each of those different services you offer. Right? But done for you, done with you versus a course.
Ryan: 18:33 Yeah. So the agency stuff, so email funnels.agency there’s two things we really do there. One is just the complete, you know, hands off done for you. So a brand, maybe they understand email very well, but they just don’t have the resource in house. Maybe they just have no idea and just don’t want to figure it out, but obviously have the funds to do so.
Ryan: 18:54 So any brands that fall into one of those two categories they’re
doing, you know, more than 50,000 a month or so in revenue. Pretty good fit to talk to us and, you know, run through a strategy call and see if there’s anything that we can, that we can do. And you know, we’ve worked with brands doing anywhere from 50,000 a month. A few like startups that want to get everything set up that have funding all the way up to, you know, like millions of dollars a month in, in some cases, but most people, you know, somewhere in, in between those. And then front row commerce is a new venture that I’ve just launched that is really just focusing on training and education. Because there’s a lot of brands out there that want to understand email, you know, they can’t, they don’t necessarily have the funds to you know, hire a full service agency to do everything for them.
Ryan: 19:48 Or maybe they do, but they really want to do it in house. They
want to know that they’re doing it right. You know, I’ve taken most of the training programs out there that are focused on email for e-commerce and there are some okay ones out there. But I thought that there was a gap in the market for something that is just like comprehensive that leaves absolutely nothing out and is really just everything that you need to know to really get the best possible result. So I took about, I mean, it must be four months, almost full time just creating this program. It kind of grew into a bit of a beast, but it’s finally finished. So that is really for brands who want to do email themselves, they want to make sure that they are the absolute best strategy and they
want like a really in depth training that is going to take a long time to implement.
Ryan: 20:41 But once they have it, it’s really going to be a solid system. And,
you know, there’s support comes with that, like a Facebook group and [inaudible] and things like that. So, and you know, I have some agencies in their beta testing it, some eCommerce brands in their Beta testing it. And generally people are saying this is incredible. Definitely the most comprehensive thing I’ve ever taken. So really good, good feedback. And you know, we’re just kind of in the process of launching it now. By the time this comes out, there will be a free trial available where someone could just go through, take, start the content, no credit card required. You can just check it out. If you like it, you can pay to unlock, unlock the rest. So by the time this comes out and that’ll be, that’ll be available.
Joe: 21:25 Beautiful. So on the done-for-you side, really high end, 50 K a
month kind of plus in sales eh, or somebody that has some funding.
Joe: 21:35 Right. and then with the course, it sounds like probably mostly
that audience as well, right? Unless you’re an agency which could be watching right here, right now, and you want to do this for your clients you’re really looking for probably 50 K a month plus, unless you’re an agency with an e-comm client or a handful.
Ryan: 21:53 Um I mean the course, the course is going to be very reasonably
priced. Like I would say anyone that’s having any success with Shopify will be able to afford the course. I don’t really want to say the price now because I haven’t actually launched it yet and I haven’t decided what the price is going to be is, I want to say it and it’s going to be wrong, but the course is designed, like there shouldn’t be anyone that’s doing anything on Shopify that can’t afford this course.
Ryan: 22:17 I wanted to like get this out there to, to a lot of people, so it will be very, very affordable. So it’s not one of these like high ticket, like $10,000 packages or anything like that. So yeah, I have a lot of people speak to me. They can’t afford agency stuff. But I’m really trying to make the courses affordable as possible for anyone who’s having any kind of success in any economy. So I would definitely say this. A mass mass market product.
Joe: 22:46 Beautiful. Beautiful. So obviously you’ve went through Ryan
quite the learning curve, right? And you’ve went through lots of courses. You said you’ve had lots of clients that took you four
months just to record this product. Where do you go for inspiration? Right? Like, who do you watch, who are the brands that you watch or what are the tools that you use?
Joe: 23:05 Like where, where do you learn Ryan? Like who do, who do you
watch?
Ryan: 23:10 The one of the only people that I watch obviously I’m very
familiar with your stuff. You’ve out great stuff. The person, I mean, my favorite person in this whole industry is Sam ovens. Like that guy is just a different level. I’ve been hitting his stuff. I mean he started making courses. I think back in 2013 I pretty much bought everything he’s ever made. I’m actually the top affiliate for his current program consulting accelerator. The amount I’ve learned from that guy. It’s just I think he is. Yeah. The number one. The other guy that really inspires me, who I like to model is Jason Hornung. Like I said, I worked at as agency for a couple of years. He is the real deal. Everything he does is, you know, just, just best in class.
Ryan: 23:57 Honestly I, I try and limit like I’m kind of like a low information
diet kind of guy. I like to take a few people and it’s like, all right, these guys are legit and then try and block out like a lot of other stuff. So like for Facebook ads and just general agency stuff, I really like Jason for everything else, from mindset to anything to do with online business. I think everybody should follow Sam up and cause that guy cuts through all of the BS. So I w I would say those two guys for sure.
Joe: 24:28 Beautiful. And then thoughts on how you stay on the bleeding
edge in terms of e-com, right? For anybody that’s trying to stay on that bleeding edge, they’re not, they’re not you going through all these campaigns, right? They’re not running dozens of, of of different Shopify brands.
Joe: 24:44 Email marketing. Like where, where, where should they go as a beginner, so to speak, or what brand should they look at to see somebody that’s right now is doing it well?
Ryan: 24:54 Yeah. So I mean, if you specifically want to talk about email,
there are a couple of brands that the, I really like. I’ll get onto those in a minute. In terms of like if you’re just small and starting out or doing stuff with ecom, I mean, just keep up with everything you know, via Facebook groups really. So a couple of, there’s a, you know, the biggest, the couple of big Shopify groups like the Shopify entrepreneurs group. I have a Shopify email group on Facebook is pretty small. And then a couple of
the major Facebook ads groups like between those, you’re, if you’re just in a couple of those, you’re going to be on the pace.
Ryan: 25:30 Anytime Facebook changes, you’re going to know about it. Any time someone’s doing something different with like messenger bots or email, it comes out in those groups. And anything that’s worth knowing is going to be in there. So I would say go in a couple of the biggest Shopify groups and then the couple of biggest Facebook ad groups. And you’re going to be covered. I, in terms of brands, the I like to follow. Like I said, we, we really do stuff with mainly just with Klaviyo now. Any, any of their featured case studies that they put out on their blog, those brands really know what they’re doing. So a couple of come to mind. And then I’m going to blank here. Bombtech golf is one of their great case studies. Taylor stitch is one of their great case studies. Any, any brand that is featured features.
Ryan: 26:21 A case study on Klaviyo’s blog is for a reason and you should
follow them for email for sure. There’s a, I’ll reel off a couple of brands that I follow religiously for email. One is Ann Marie Gianni skincare. Another one is glossy, a kind of big VC funded like makeup brand. Another one is Casper like the mattress. Another one is perfect Quito. And then another one is, is Bulletproof. Like they they’ve asked for is kind of biohacking biohacking brand. Most of those guys, they send out a lot of email. They do a lot of content they sell via content. Which is the, the approach I like to, I like to take and you know, they have a good balance between promotions, sales, value added and things like that. So those are a few brands that I really, really like to follow.
Joe: 27:15 And then looking at your, going through that training that you
had, you listed a piece of software that actually follows the major brands and their emails. What was that tool called?
Ryan: 27:24 Yeah, sure. So this is a tool that I use every day. It’s called nail
charts.com. Basically that you just, you can kind of like quote unquote track a brand in there and it will, it signs up to all these brands. Most of the E commerce it will like buy something, sign up to their newsletter and basically map how everything that they’re sending and you can see. So I use it all the time for inspiration. So like a couple of those brands that I just mentioned, I’m almost looking like what have they done last month? What did they do last year for like Thanksgiving or July the fourth and things like that. And so if you, you know, track a couple of competitors in your industry, track a couple of like aspirational brands.
Ryan: 28:08 And so yeah, and yeah mailchart.com. I don’t have any
affiliation with them. But yeah, you can just track brands and basically see everything that they’re doing with email design, subject lines, everything. Go on, find like black Friday ideas and yeah, it’s really great resource.
Joe: 28:25 Yeah, that’s a fantastic when you were going through your case
study, I hadn’t never heard of them before. So that was pretty fun.
Ryan: 28:32 I actually only came across them maybe a year ago. I didn’t even
realize that was a thing, honestly, like never even realized to, you know, to, to even look for something like that. Yeah, really great tool.
Joe: 28:46 Beautiful. So focusing on kind of number three, right? So not
lead gen. Lead gen would be step one. Step two would be the post-purchase sequences, all the automated stuff. Focusing then on three. Do you think that there’s a good balance on how many emails you should be sending?
Joe: 29:04 Like obviously we know brands that get away with five or seven days a week. We know brands that are only sending a couple of week is, is it really like, just do what you can send as much as you can, like and then obviously watch like the unsubs and see what’s best for your niche. Is that like what you would advise people or, yeah.
Ryan: 29:24 Yeah, absolutely. So you know, frequency once a week can be
right and like every day it can be right. But my rule is don’t send anything. Like if you don’t have anything valuable to send, like if you, if you’re going to be sending emails every day, you going to be putting out a lot of good stuff and people need to, you know, need to be pleased to open your emails. Generally if you’re going to do higher frequency, you really want to learn a segmentation and how to figure out who you need to be sending to.
Ryan: 29:57 Because most brands, there are going to be a segment of
people that will happily read an email from you every day. Even though most brands aren’t going to get to that stage where they’re sending those. So you really need to, you need to figure out segmentation. And that base, the, like the high level of that is you’re just looking at your email list and you’re saying who was actually responding to what I’m sending in the last X number of days. And the period that you use is defined by how frequently you send email. So if we’re only sending like one email a week, you might look and say, okay, I’m going to send
this to anyone that has engaged with any of my emails in the last 90 days. That means they would have received, you know, 12 emails in the last 90 days.
Ryan: 30:41 And if they haven’t opened any of those 12, like don’t bother
emailing them again. For the most part, it’s just no point apart from maybe like black Friday or something. So you just want to make sure that you’re emailing people who are interested in and have shown engagement. And if you do that and you’re monitoring your open rates and you know your, you know, high teens, twenties 30%, as long as you’re, you know, anywhere in that range, you’re fine. You’re, you know, you’re safe, you’re not going to do yourself any, any damage, you know, your frequency is good. And that you’re emailing a good interested segment of people on, on the other hand, if you have segmentation wrong and your, your open rates are down like below 10% consistently or, or funny, like, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13% of us, like you’re average, you’re kind of on the borderline, you’re put, you’re sending emails to a lot of people who are either not that interested or you kind of have a bad reputation.
Ryan: 31:38 And you know, a lot of people are getting them in their spam folder because you’ve kind of done some bad practices in the past. So if you can maintain open rates in the high teens and if you can send every day and get that, that open rate, fine. If not, then you need to, to, to figure out your strategy. But yeah, segmentation is a thing. If you want to go away and research it, look for guides and things like that around email segmentation. You know, I have some training on it. You really need to figure out segmentation if you want to up your frequency and yeah. And you need to be planning out in advance. You need to be building a balanced calendar that has, you know, the things I mentioned earlier, promos, product info, social proof education and yeah, that, that, that basically basically sums it up.
Joe: 32:30 Beautiful. How, how worried are you these days with email
deliverability? So that’s something that you focus on a lot. You think as long as it’s kind of just taken care of correctly from the get, you don’t really see it as a big issue, kind of. What are your thoughts? Highest level?
Ryan: 32:43 Yeah. I’m very focused on it, but not a all. Worried about it. It’s
very easy to maintain good email deliverability. So one of the things, so segmentation first of all is going to play a big, big role in that. If you’re emailing people who are interested and have a history of opening and engaging with your emails, never going to have a problem and that’s, you start sending out stupid stuff
and affiliate links and all that. In terms of how to deal with it, you said something about you know, building it up.
Ryan: 33:18 I think just now there are things that you can, that you can do.
So what the main thing that platforms, like, you know, all the inbox providers, so Gmail, Yahoo, the rest of them, what they are looking for is they’re looking for engagement. So are people opening your emails? Are they clicking them and are they replying to them? So what I like to do is when someone first comes onto an email list with a brand, we want to get them engaging straight away. So we want to get them opening, we want to get them clicking and we want to get them hopefully replying. So the first kind of interaction that a brand has with a new subscriber for the most part is going to be the welcome sequence, which is, you know, someone puts their email address in the footer or a popup or a quiz or whatever your lead generation point is.
Ryan: 34:09 They’re going to go through the welcome sequence. That might be three, five, seven emails, whatever it is. So what we want to do is you want to get the engagement on that sequence as high as possible. So you want to get really high open rates. We want to get people clicking through those emails and we want a couple of emails in there that are, you know, have the sole goal of getting replies as well. Because if someone comes into our brand straight away, they’re showing high engagement, that immediately gives us a much better chance of getting future emails into their inbox. So, you know, 30 days from now we’re sending out a sales promotion. These people have a history of engaging with us. So they’re more likely to get our stuff. So you want to start them off on, on the right foot. And you know, that’s gonna build up over time.
Ryan: 34:56 Your, your deliverability is going to get better and better. The
better your your engagement gets. And then the the opposite of that is just completely strip out anyone that does not have a history of engaging with your emails. So segmentation, go into your platform, received emails from you are not open to any of them, like just don’t bother sending to them anymore. The, the sales that you’re going to get from that are going to be terrible. Any small amount of sales that you would get from continually emailing, those people are going to be vastly offset by the fact that you’re harming your deliverability by setting off potential red flags with Gmail and things like that because they see you’re emailing someone over and over, okay, you’ve sent this person 15 emails, they still haven’t opened. Here’s number 16. Here’s number 17. Like, you cannot keep doing that.
Ryan: 35:50 After a while, you’re just going to start going into the, into the
spam folder. I’m so focused on the people that are opening and clicking, forget about the people that don’t show any interest. That is, that is basically the the long and short of it. And just to wrap that thought up, I would say the first one or two emails in the welcome sequence, get the open rate as high as you can on that by split testing the subject lines, angles, everything. Get the click through rate as high as possible. So don’t give everything in the way in the email. Get people clicking through to the website. And then also in the welcome sequence, have an email or two that is designed specifically just to get a reply. So it might be a plain text email or just a really simple email that asks the question.
Ryan: 36:37 It might be so a really good example of a brand doing this is
BombTech golf. They’re one of the Klaviyo case studies. I think they just say like they sell golf clubs and I think they just say something like, I can’t remember what it is, but it’s something like which brand do you use currently? Just let us know in a one word reply. We’re really interested. We’re intrigued to know what you’re using. So someone to open that they can just click, I didn’t know anything about golf, but Titelist list I guess is the key golf brand. They can just write title list and reply. Now one that’s going to start a two way conversation and, and things like that. And you actually get a lot of sales from that because brands don’t typically do that. But it shows like Gmail and Yahoo and all these inbox providers.
Ryan: 37:19 Like wow, we have a company, a brand sending marketing
emails and people are replying to them. Like what? Like that never happens. So your engagement is really good right off the bat. And that’s really going to do wonders for for your, your deliverability. So it’s more about engagement is more about emailing the right people. It’s less about the content itself. Obviously don’t do anything stupid, but is, is less about the content and more about the engagement. Is, is my my kind of summary and we have a huge, huge section on deliverability in my, in my program. But at that pretty much, I pretty much summed it up. Yeah.
Joe: 38:01 Those are two great tips, man. The getting the click through and
the order notification and then some type of plain text just asking a a or B, you know, this or this like simple response, one word responses.
Joe: 38:14 I’ve done some stuff that’s been a lot trickier. Not trickier, not
like deceptive, but like, Hey, respond and I’ll give you a free training or something. Like, look, I sold this in the past for this.
You get this if you just respond, I want it. Yeah. But I don’t even think it needs to be, like you said that crazy. It’s just give me a one, one word response would be a easier for me of a campaign to come up with and to run.
Ryan: 38:38 So I love that. Yeah. One thing I actually see people doing
outside of eCommerce, which I haven’t gotten to e-commerce brand and managed to persuade him to try this yet, but you opt in for something like a training or a PDF or whatever and the email that you get, you think it’s going to deliver the thing and it says reply to this email and then we’re sending it to you, like just reply yes that you actually want this.
Ryan: 39:03 Now that straight away like that is going to set you up to have a
massively engaged list because basically everybody is opening and replying to that first email. So you could, I’ve not tested this with e-commerce but I imagine that would do very well, you know, reply, if you want your coupon code, the you’d, you know, to set something up to send it back. You obviously you’re going to lose some initial sales on the front end there because people are not just seeing the code, getting it and buying straight away. So you need to, you know, balance this and see if it’s actually worth it. But in terms of just talking about engagement, that is the kind of thing that is really gonna ramp that up.
Joe: 39:40 You said something too that was brilliant on the order
notification. Try to get a click through thoughts on how you do that realistically. Like that’s great, but my brain just goes how do I do that?
Ryan: 39:52 Um really it wasn’t on the order, no notification just in the first
couple of emails. Yeah. So really the vast majority of emails that the vast majority of people, the first things are going to get your welcome sequence. So most people are not ordering straight away. And a lot of brands they’re just doing, they’re just using Shopify for the order notifications. You can send them via third party tool like Klaviyo, but there very strict on what you can have in those emails. They, they can’t be classes like marketing emails. So you can’t do too much clever stuff with the order notification email cause it is a legally required email that you have to send, I believe. So they won’t let you like get tricky with it. But I was talking about getting the open rates and the click through rates as high as possible on those first welcome sequence emails.
Ryan: 40:46 And setting up that really high engagement from the start.
Joe: 40:50 Cool. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I was trying to think of a
good, yeah, I’ll have to go look and got me intrigued now. What’s a good way to get a good click through rate? Right out of the beginning I’d do like a scratch and sniff coupon or something like that. So they don’t know what they’re getting or something. Right. So that they got to like go see like curiosity based. Like what’s, I mean what are some good for rate emails
Ryan: 41:13 Uh with the the good thing about using a, the good thing about
using, you know, a coupon to you know, build your, your list is people that want that coupon. They’re signing up for it for a reason because they want to make that first purchase. So typically you know, your, your first welcome, it can be very, very simple.
Ryan: 41:35 People are opening it for the coupon. You don’t want to go into
all this stuff about your brand story and all this stuff. You just want, here’s the coupon, you want it, like click here to, and it also applies it basically. So in Shopify you can do these like autoplay Groupons click here to shop with 15% off. Like just give them what they, what they wanted. And you’re going to get a high open rate and a high click through rate on that because that is the sole reason that people are opening the email. So just like remove all the distractions. I don’t have all this other stuff in there. That is, that is not necessary. And then, you know, if we’re talking about later on in the sequence, that’s when it gets a bit more tricky. So, you know, you might, you know, maybe your second email or third email or whatever it might be a piece of content.
Ryan: 42:20 It might be a video or some kind of blog posts that like builds
your authority but also subtly sells your product. Well, what you want to do in the email is you want to sell the piece of content. So one of the one of the examples I use for this exact topic in my program is an email from perfect keto and I believe it’s from that welcome sequence and it’s, so their whole product line is around ketosis and like the keto diet and things like that. So early on they have a video and it’s like three tips to get into ketosis quickly. Like that’s the subject line. So anybody that signs up like, Oh, I want to see these, like that’s great. You open the email and it’s just like, you know, one small piece of copy, like one line again pre-selling the video and then the CTA and the video is just a screenshot of the video with a play burn.
Ryan: 43:12 So you have to click, go through and watch the video on their
site. So anyone that opens the email, they want to know what their three tips are, but you don’t give away the whole three tips in the email. You say, here’s the video that we made that
explains these. And that’s it. And then you get them to click through. So you sell the click rather than anything else. So that asset, super simple email, very little copy. You’re getting them in, you’re getting the click and you’re getting them the hell out.
Joe: 43:41 Perfect man. That’s beautiful. All right. So we’re going to wrap
this thing up real quick. My, my team Edwardo from my team that reached out to you to schedule this put a note here and I’m curious your take on it. He said he said that one of the things that you talk about is a same day upsell. Can you talk about that via email? What is that? Why does it exist? Give us a little context.
Ryan: 44:03 Yeah, for sure. So this is something that works really, really well.
So you see a lot of there’s a couple of apps that got released over the last few years for Shopify. I think one’s called car hook. One’s called one’s Ezras app. It’s called like OneClickUpsell or something like that where you make a purchase. They’re kind of like taking over the Shopify cart, so you have control over it, you make your purchase and then the thank you page is basically in OTO, like you’d see in a regular funnel. So it’s like, you know, get this extra tee shirt for like 50% off. You’ll never see this again and whatever. And that works really well. You can do the same thing by email. Basically.
Ryan: 44:43 This is an idea that I first got from a guy called Drew Sanocki who was with a brand called karma loop or a very successful eCommerce brand. He now does email for e-comm to they did it and he explained that strategy and basically what you’re doing or the way I teach to do it is you make the purchase. You know, you get the standard Shopify receipt that just says thank you for your order. And then a few minutes later or the same day, like maybe five minutes later, anywhere up to an hour later, you just get an OTO email. This basically you know, thank you for your purchase. Here’s basically a one number two today and you know exactly the same idea, buy this complimentary product for 50% off, like for the next 24 hours or whatever it is. And that can, like if you’re doing ads and breaking even or close to breaking even on the front end, if you run an offer like that, that just has a couple percent take rate, you can change something that goes from breakeven to profitable real quick.
Ryan: 45:50 And you can be making a lot of money on day one where you
would otherwise be breaking even instead of waiting like 30 days to get a customer to profit. So cash flow is just a massive issue for eCommerce brands. Obviously a lot of them are like paying up front for product, then you have to pay for ads and then you know, you’re running your ads at breakevens, you’re
still in the hole. So any, anything that you can do to improve that same day ROI if you don’t want to use one of these apps to do it in Shopify. And there’s a lot of reasons that some brands don’t. You can do the same thing in email with basically a, an instant upsell where you’re trying to get someone to make that second purchase on day one with a onetime offer.
Joe: 46:33 That’s beautiful. So I’ve always seen like I’ve seen the one click
upsells. I helped a little eCommerce company here in South Florida implement that and their thing was like, well, what do we upsell? Like they sell very simple products just redesigned differently. Like just make it the same thing but say 50%. Right? Like their cost of goods and their shipping is like nothing to add. One more is like , I mean Penny’s like it costs almost nothing and I think their take rate is like 25% on that upsell. So that’s really good Ryan. And that definitely helps them be profitable when they’re driving cold traffic. Would you also send an email, like if they said no basically to the upsell, maybe you still send it and say you got 24 hours to or something before we ship your package. Like, would that be an idea or what would your thought be? I’m just curious.
Ryan: 47:24 I have not implemented the email upsell for any brands that are
also doing it on site. But I would definitely say it’s worth it primarily because, you know, if you’re on like a mobile or something, a lot of purchases are happening on mobile, you might see this, you know, you might just not even pay attention to it. What you’ve hit your order, that’s it. You’re done. You, I can see like a lot of people not taking it on mobile, you know, you couple hours late or you come home and let you get the offer again in your email. You can kind of you know, you’ve got a little bit more time to review it or whatever. So I would say absolutely try it. I know you’ll add filters and Klaviyo, whatever, people that have not made this other purchase. So I would say, yeah, try it. I’m sure it would add, I’m sure it would add additional revenue. I’ve not done it where you’re doing it onsite and then trying it again by email, but I can’t really see how it wouldn’t improve the the, the conversion rate.
Ryan: 48:23 Beautiful. Yeah, that’s a, that’s an amazing one. And I think
probably very often overlooked as well.
Ryan: 48:30 Absolutely. Yeah.
Joe: 48:32 Awesome man. So I really appreciate the last 50 or so minutes
of our time here together. It’s been really, really good. I know that I’ve had some aha moments to help me implement for a couple of e-comm companies that I work with and also a couple
of little projects that I’m running on my own. So first and foremost, man, just want to say thank you for your time. And then in the, in the spirit of wrapping things up, instead of asking you to recommend three books like most podcasts, do we do things a little different here? I want to ask you, what’s the one book that when you look at your business, Ryan today you think has made the biggest impact on the way that you actually do business?
Ryan: 49:11 For me, this definitely applies to businesses. Basically just for
everything in life. It’s called the slight edge. I don’t know if you have yeah, it sounds like you’ve, you’ve heard of it. Like in one sentence. It’s basically just consistency over time will compound and if you just keep at it like it starts off like this and you think, Oh, this is not working, it’s not working and it goes like this. And then before you know it like, and that just applies to everything. Business, life, whatever it might be. That is basically the principle. But I would just say everybody needs to read that book. What are their in business, what are their trying to achieve? Anything that book, like the philosophies in, in there. Really I found super valuable. I can’t remember who wrote it, but it’s called the slight edge.
Joe: 50:04 Yeah, man, you’re like the third person. I think that’s said this
and I haven’t read it yet. So it’s going to the top of my list.
Ryan: 50:12 Yeah. Pretty easy read. I’m not too much fluff. And the guy’s
story is interesting as well cause he’s been up and down on like highest of highs, lowest of lows. So I think like that and they had his story and I think
Ryan: 50:28 A lot of people will. So yeah, absolutely.
Joe: 50:32 Perfect man. So we’ll ulink up,uevery resource that you’ve
mentioned here and I just want to say thank you, Ryan for, for giving with so much value. UI really appreciate it and we’ll make sure that we link up to your free Facebook group as well. Uand,uthanks man. And I’m looking forward to connecting again in the future here.
Ryan: 50:49 Appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Joe. Thanks for everything you do.
I’m really happy we did this. So again, I appreciate it.
Joe: 50:56 All right guys. That’s it. That’s a wrap. Another episode of show
me the nuggets and the book. Please, please take a moment and and comment and thank Ryan for coming on the show.
Super excited to finally get him on. All right guys. Sayonara thank you.
