FREE RESOURCE: OMG's Ultimate Email Marketing Testing Checklist

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How can you triple your results from Email & SMS? Is crafting a single captivating subject line the key? Does discovering the ultimate promotion hold the answer? Likely not.

Making huge improvements is all about finding dozens of small wins, stacking them on top of each other, and letting the improvements compound.

In this episode, Nick Flint, our Email Strategist at OMG, breaks down 8 Email & SMS tests you need to run right now! We talk about how Email & SMS can improve EVERY other channel. We’re talking Google Ads, YouTube ads, Facebook, Amazon - ALL made better by leveraging Email & SMS.

Here’s a peek at what we cover.

• Why opt-in rate is NOT the key metric, you need to measure for your opt-in pop-up. (And why that spinning wheel might be doing more harm than good.)
• How making some prospects “work for it” can increase purchases and email engagement.
• Should you show your price in emails or make people click to see the price?
• How Everyday Cali used a creative “break our site” offer to drive engagement and get solid customer feedback.
• Plus, much, much more…

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Transcript

Nick:

One thing I want to emphasize here is don't just look at the number of signups that you get. A lot of people, they'll turn on that spin to win popup and they'll say, Hey, look, I'm converting 15% of site traffic to actually spin this wheel and give me their email. But a lot of those end up just being junk emails. Who thought they were going to get that a hundred percent off? That never actually hits.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today have we got a show for you. We're talking about email and SMS, both top tests you should be running. So some things we've learned recently, some of our top tests that we think you need to test as well. Plus, and I love this topic, how email can make every other channel better. So you're running YouTube ads, you're running Facebook ads, you're testing landing pages, you're doing stuff on Kickstarter, you're doing all kinds of other stuff. How can email and SS m s make all of that better? We're going to dive into it. And my guest today is the man, the myth, the legend, our resident email and s m s expert, but he's not just an email. And SMS expert, he's an e-commerce expert. My guest is Nick Flint from OMG So we get to hang out frequently, at least virtually we're in different cities, but Nick Flint, what's up man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Nick:

I'm doing good. How about

Brett:

You? Good, man. Yeah, I said we hang out, we live down the street from each other or something. You're all the way in Florida. I'm in Missouri. But I think you helped facilitate some of the virtual ways that OMG Commerce team members can hang out. And I think I could be wrong, we have a Slack channel for cat lovers. We have a slack channel for dog lovers. And did you create those or did somebody else create those?

Nick:

Someone else created them, but I am an active and avid member, and that came up because first my dog started barking when we were about to hit record. And then two, Brett is actually a kitten guy now. He got himself a cat. So I told him he has to hop in the OMG Cat Channel.

Brett:

I got to hop in that cat. Now what's the name of the cat channel? I think people will be entertained by this.

Nick:

We have cats are the best. And then for the dogs, it's dogs and their dogs. So the WG dogs and then the OG dog.

Brett:

Oh man, dogs and their dogs. What is up? So yeah, I would love to hear from listeners and you may be like, Hey, this topic is boring, don't worry, we're moving on. Although I think most people get into this topic, are you a cat person? Are you a dog person? Which is better. So what's interesting is that I like both, but I actually prefer other people own them and not me. However, I married an animal lover. I have eight kids, most of them love animals. So it's like a zoo around my house, not just because of the number of kids, but also animals. We just got a kitten, a kid's name is Lottie. I can't remember now why my daughter chose to name Lottie that way, but she's like at the cute stage where she's attacking everything and super small. And anyway, it's cute, but the cuteness only lasts so long. So which side of the fence do you land on, Nick? Are you cats are better? Are you more of a dog person? Are you equal opportunity? Well,

Nick:

It's hard to run with a cat. So I'm going dog side.

Brett:

Let's put a collar and leash on that cat and go for a jog. Does not work. Yeah, yeah, does not work. Awesome, man. So let's dive in. Let's talk emails. So I know you're always testing, you're a brilliant marketer. And actually just for those that haven't listened to the previous podcasts, give us your 62nd background. How'd you become an email marketing expert?

Nick:

So it kind of started off in the beginning of college, me and a couple of buddies we were into working out into supplements. So we thought there's this genius idea, we'll let people try supplements before they actually buy them. We were the kind of pioneers of the subscription box, but a few of the big ones beat us to it, like Ipsy and the other random subscription box company. So after a couple of years of doing that, we sold that off and I really just started doubling and tripling down on email and S M Ss marketing. I realized owning that company, doing all those different things, running the socials, product development, talking to suppliers, dealing with finances, that was the worst. And then email, s m s, I really just gravitated towards that. It fit my natural personality and my natural skills. So I just doubled, tripled down on that six years ago and been running ever since.

Brett:

Love it. And what's cool about you, Nick, is you know what it's like to build a brand. You know what it's like to run a brand, done it and you did it successfully, but yeah, your passion is email and s m s. And so I remember when Chris Brewer, business partner first said, you got to meet Nick Flint. This guy's awesome, we got to do whatever we can do to get him to join team O M G. Glad he identified you, glad you joined the team and love having you around. So let's talk about recent tests. I know you're always tinkering, always testing, always looking at results. You both have that creative side. You can write awesome subject lines and headlines and stuff like that, great copy, but you're also really obsess about the data. And so what are some of the most recent tests we've run and what have we learned?

Nick:

So when we're working on the different client accounts, there's a ton of tests that we're running on a regular basis. We're actually condensing some of our top tests into a guide slash checklist that the listeners here can download. There'll be 50 different tests that we run for our clients and today we're going to hop into some of my favorite ones and some of the most impactful ones.

Brett:

Yeah, so top 50 tests that'll be available on the website. We'll link to it in the show notes, go get that guide, give it to your email person. You review it, there's going to be some gold there, but let's highlight some of those right now. Alright,

Nick:

We'll kick it off with the initial popup on the site. So whenever someone comes through it, you can always put 10% off, offer a fixed dollar amount, or you have the spin to win. And one thing I want to emphasize here is don't just look at the number of signups that you get. A lot of people, they'll turn on that spin to win popup and they'll say, Hey look, I'm converting 15% of site traffic to actually spin this wheel and give me their email. But a lot of those end up just being junk emails. Who thought they were going to get that a hundred percent off? That never actually hits. So don't just have the test set up where you're saying, Hey look, here's the wheel and here is the 10% off offer. And then looking at how many people sign up for each one actually look at the flow and see how does the revenue look for each subscriber after they sign up?

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good looking at the metrics that matter, right? It's the same when you're looking at a video campaign, Facebook or YouTube or whatever. Views are cool. We want to look at views, but what we really care about is clicks and signups or conversions or how that impacts brand lift or one of those metrics. So looking at the right metrics. And one of the things that I love, one of my favorite marketing quotes is how you bring them in is how they behave. And sometimes I think a 10% off offer or small dollar amount offer, that's a good trade probably, right? They're giving you their email address, you got to give 'em something in return. So that seems like a fair trade, but you may just have people wanting that a hundred percent off offer. They would never be a good customer anyway. And so if you're just purely looking at the wrong numbers, you're being led as straight potentially. So love that. Also, by the way, what do you recommend? So what if someone's not into discounts? What do you recommend for that initial pop-up offer?

Nick:

I like going with a guide. Just kind of figure out if your people are on your site looking for something specific, what kind of guide can you tie in there as well? We've also done this with a couple of landing pages where if they're coming from Google or Facebook and there's already an offer on that ad that they clicked on, we don't want to hit them with a different offer when they get to the landing page. So we have a complimentary guide like, Hey, you came here for 10% off supplements because you saw it on Facebook and we're going to give you the top five workout plans to follow while you're here versus saying, Hey look, here's another 10% off pop-up.

Brett:

Perfect. So testing the initial pop-up offer, but not just for signups, but actually for how that flow generates revenue. Love that. What's our next test?

Nick:

Next up we got email versus email and phone number. This is kind of one of the things where you see that superficial value of your number of signups, but when we're looking in the account and we're saying, Hey, for our customers who give us their email and their phone number, they end up being a lot more active, they're placing a ton more orders. We can hit them on both those channels later on. So yes, you might have a lower signup percentage when you're asking for both their email and their phone number, but like you said, you're attracting the people that you want to attract when you ask for that. If they like your brand enough to give you both, they're going to be better long-term customers. So try asking for both and see what the initial percentage signup looks like, but then also long-term set a reminder to go back in through those flows or even go look at that cohort in Klaviyo and see what kind of value do they bring.

Brett:

Yeah, and I know there are different ways to look at L T V because that does depend on the amount of time you're looking at True lifetime or whether you're looking at 10 years, five years, 30 days, 60 days, whatever, 30 days would be too short. But I'm confident, and I'm curious if you had any numbers to support this or anecdotes to support this when someone gives you email and phone number. So email and ss m s, LTVs got to go up for that person. I mean in general, any thoughts, stats or anecdotes there?

Nick:

So you have a couple of things you can look at one in the Shopify dashboard, they'll have different cohorts where you can see, alright, if people ordered in October, how many of them came back in November, December, January? And the darker the color, the more frequently they come back. And when we've turned on the two step popup where we ask for both, we'll see those colors start to get a little bit darker in Shopify so people are coming back quicker and we'll just have the different groups laid out within Klaviyo. You can go to your metrics, look at that, and it'll tell you by customer segment what the average order value looks like and how often they're coming back. So you can look at those too.

Brett:

Nice, love it. So two step, does this work for most? Are we seeing most brands do email and s m s or does it vary depending on the brand?

Nick:

Kind of depends on the brand and who they're after. We have some more B2B focused brands that we work with and they're like, Hey, this guy's buying equipment for his office. He doesn't necessarily need to sign up for s m s because he's on his laptop all day anyway.

Brett:

Yep, makes sense. Alright, so we got initial popup, we got asking for email and phone number, what's our next test?

Nick:

Alright, we're going to make them work for it this time. You're going to try two different things here. You got your discount code displayed directly in the popup. So hey, give us your information and the success screen, you have two options. Either say, good job, you unlocked your code, here it is, go use it. Or make them actually go to their inbox and open up that first email. You have two trains of thought here. One, they're on the site. We want to just get their buying journey as fast as possible. Give 'em the code, get them to check out, and that works well for the impulse buys. But if you're a little more of a premium brand and people really want you, they're after you, you've set that reputation as being like, Hey look, we're the best. Come and get it. Then you can make them go to their inbox, go ahead and click on that first email, get their discount code in their inbox, and then they'll go back to the site and that'll help out with deliverability for that profile in the future because they actually took action on the first thing you sent them.

Brett:

Nice. So you're using that one. I think that kind of the more someone engages with your brand, I think the more likely they are to continue taking action. It's kind of one of those things that I remember hearing back in the catalog days of marketing pre-internet, when people would send out catalogs, they wanted to get you to interact with the catalog because once you started marketing in it, or if you added one item to your order form, you just start adding more, right? So there's this idea of once I get you to take action, you'll keep going down that path consistency. And so I like that engage with the email because now you're kind of clicking and working a little bit. You're probably going to continue down that path, but you bring up a really good point. That also means you're much more likely for that email to be delivered to that user later, right? Because they've clicked on it, they've opened it, they're indicating to their email service provider that, Hey, this is an email, this is a company who I want to get emails from.

Nick:

And you can get a little more granular with it too and use that initial email to your advantage. So if you're a clothing brand, you sell men's to women's clothing, they sign up the popup, you say, perfect, go to your inbox to get your discount. Now you can actually see which button they click on shop men's or Shop women's. You can go ahead and tag them in Klaviyo at that point saying, Hey look, they signed up, they got their discount and then right off the bat they clicked on the go shop. So we're going to mark them as interested in men's clothing. Nice. You can talk to them differently,

Brett:

Gets you a little more data about that person right away. But again, you got to kind of weigh it, right? Is this more of an impulse purchase and you may have too much drop off if you have them take extra steps or is it more of a premium and you want them to take extra steps? That actually increases the likelihood of conversion. So you got to measure it, you got to test it, which that's why we're saying it's one of the top tests. So alright, what do you got next?

Nick:

Showing prices on your campaigns versus making them go to the site and see them. I've seen this go both ways for different brands. Sometimes if we show the price and it's higher than they're expecting, they don't even click on the campaign at all. Sometimes if they don't know what the price is, we make 'em go to the site. Once they're there, they're like, all right, now I really want this. Now that I've read the description, I've seen the images on the site, I read some of the reviews. So practice hiding those prices versus actually showing them and see what the different clicks look like there.

Brett:

Yeah, I love this principle so much that we think about this a lot in terms of YouTube. So as an example, there's a certain type of YouTube ad where you can run product listing ads or shopping ads right by that YouTube video. And the thing about Google shopping ads or product listing ads is they show the price Now, same thing we've found to be true there. If the price is less than what people expected, where it's like, whoa, that's a really good value. Then showing the product, listing ads to a brand new customer maybe before they've watched very much of the video can really work. Right now they're watching the video and they're saying, oh, these prices are cheap. I want to learn more about it. Versus if it's a little more than what they anticipate, I like keeping that price for when they land on the site, let them watch all of the video and be sold by the video, then let them land on the site and be further sold and convinced and excited about the brand.

And so they overcome that price objection. And same principle here. If I look at the email, I just see a picture of the item, the shirt or whatever, and I don't get a lot of details about it, I may never click, but if you leave that out, I may click and then once I interact, I got to have it. So love that. Totally worth testing. And it's probably also worth testing maybe if someone's never purchased so they just opted into your new customer flow or something versus they've already bought for me a few times. In that case, maybe it's better to put the price in it. Right? Just got to test it. Sweet. What is our next test?

Nick:

Next up we got short versus long flows. And another one I've seen go different ways for different brands. So if we send out something like a welcome flow, whenever we hop into the account and we're testing out some new popups for them, we're just going to go ahead and ab split that into random segments. On the left side, we'll have a shorter flow, here's your discount, a reminder about your discount, get it last chance. It's going to expire in 24 hours. So something like a little three-step flow. And on the right we'll see that longer path. So a little bit more education here. So we're going to give 'em the discount, we're going to pull in some customer reviews, we're going to tell the brand story, we're going to highlight different features about the product. Hey, last call for your discount code. There's five different emails in there, so what ends up converting better? Just having that little short and sweet on the left side or on the right, if we talk about it more, do they need more handholding to get them to convert?

Brett:

Yeah. And are you finding something similar there where we talked about before impulse purchase versus long consideration cycle? If it's a higher price point, I'm really deliberating on it a little bit versus something that's just easy to purchase. Does that usually help dictate or inform long flow versus short flow or what have you seen there?

Nick:

It kind of depends on the product. Not as much on the price point. A lot of times they're kind of tied into each other. So if it's a higher price point product, there is more kind of back and forth comparison shopping, different brands around. But sometimes it's education based. So if it's something new and novel and people need to kind of understand what it is, you might want to have the longer flow in place to educate them on. One thing that kind of pops to mind that I've seen recently on TikTok a lot is the pop darts game. It's like a little darts and they're sticky and they land on the table, but it's not like a brand new invention, but it's a new thing that people kind of need to know and learn about versus something like a water bottle, what a water bottle is already, you don't need to be educated on it.

Brett:

Yeah, don't need a five-step sequence of education on what this water bottle will do for me. Yeah, totally makes sense. All right. How many tests do we have left here for the pod?

Nick:

We'll do two more on the pod and then they can hop in and see all 50 on the sheet. Next. What's next up can be your tiered discounts. So whenever you have some kind of promo or sale running, go ahead and same thing, split this off in two different groups and try it out for each side. We're going to have half of them that get look 20% off site-wide, come and get it while you can offer ends to the end of the weekend, whatever the specific sale or offer you have at the moment. And the other half, the AB test, we're going to have a tiered discount. So 10% off of a hundred, 20% off of 200, 30% off 300 and C. Does that actually end up having a higher average order value if you put the tier a little bit higher so they add a couple more things to their cart, was that worth it or should you stick to the fixed price from then on?

Brett:

Yeah, I really like it. I mean, I've been shopping, getting new polos and new tees lately. I like true classic. I built a few others that I like as well, but I've noticed where I add a couple shirts to the cart and then they're like, Hey, here's some boxers for this price. And then by the way, you get to 200 and then you get a mystery gift or a discount or whatever, and it's pretty enticing, right? I'm almost there. I'm getting there. I may as well add one or two more things to the cart and get that discount. So yeah. Any other specifics? Anything? Is there any reason not to just test both? I bet sometimes these tests surprise you as to which one wins.

Nick:

So I mean really I consider your own margins at that point. I use the numbers 10, 20 and 30 there just because they're kind of nice round numbers, but it could even be the same with 15% off 20 and then 25, you don't have to give away 30%, but just factor your own margins in and say, Hey look, if everyone bought 300 bucks at 30% off, would I still be making money there? Make sure you are and then you can test it.

Brett:

Yeah, man. And that's been one of the trends that I love seeing in e-commerce. And we faced some headwinds as an industry, increase cost of goods sold, increased cost of ads, economic just wildness, ups and downs, and some economic uncertainty for customers, consumer confidence kind of going up and down. And so you got to be profitable and I love that. That's the trend. E-commerce brands are seeking to be profitable now. It's not kind of the days of just grow at all costs and top line. We'll figure out the bottom line later. That's not a recipe for success. And so yeah, consider your margins, give some discounts, give some incentives, but consider your margins. Don't give away the farm. It's not worth it. So I love that. So tiered discounts versus standard discounts. What's our final test that we'll talk about here on the pod?

Nick:

Last one we'll go with is content versus product push. So if you have a product you want to sell, try out some different emails here, try out just talking about the product versus some content behind it and then tying that into the product.

Brett:

Nice. Yeah. And what have we seen here? Any examples or details here? So

Nick:

Fitness brands is always an easy one to talk about. So hey look, here's this pre-workout, it's got these six ingredients in it, it'll boost your workouts and these specific ways, come and get it now. Versus hey, here's this new workout we developed for chest day. It's going to give you a huge chest, it's going to increase your bench. And by the way, take this pre-workout before you go hit the gym because it'll help out with this workout we just gave you.

Brett:

Love it. Yeah, fitness brands are really a natural fit for this. I think supplement brands are too. I've been taking beef organs supplements recently, had a couple of buddies recommend it, started reading about it. And this particular brand that I started ordering from their emails are awesome. They're really engaging. They talk about some stuff you didn't know about. Meat-based products actually are very, very nutrient dense. So yeah, it's just been, I find myself reading every email they send and then there's always content talks about the product too, but there's always content. Again, I think this probably depends a little bit on what you're selling, but I think this works also for apparel, right? Sometimes apparel, it's like, hey, this is the summertime shirt and here's why it's great. It's four-way stretch and it's breathable and it's likable and all these things. So got to test it.

Alright, awesome. So that was just a taste and Nick Flint, that was just a handful. That was just a few people got their money's worth for the podcast just by hearing those. But we got 50, I say you wrote them, not me, but 50 email and SMS tests, go to MG commerce.com, grab that, we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But also, I'll just plug this right here, Nick. If someone's listening and they're like, man, I would benefit from someone like Nick Flint running my email and SS m s or helping out with it. You do audit accounts, right? You are willing to get in and give some feedback on someone's email and SS M SS campaigns, we do that for our clients and we could do that for others as well. And so anything you want to say about that?

Nick:

Yeah, so a lot of times when I'm hopping into an account and looking at your current setup, how many campaigns are going out, what do your flows look like, where are your popups being run? I'll be able to give you 3, 4, 5 quick bullet points that are kind of the heavy lift. So I'm not saying, Hey, here's a 20 page P D F of what I found. Read through this, give me a synapsis and then I'll give you some advice from there. Hey look, these are five things that we would do if we hopped into your account. You can also implement them if you'd like. So whenever we do those audits, they come away with some actionable items, not just some random metrics. We pull out

Brett:

Actionable, not just audits to make your current person look bad or to make you feel guilty or inadequate, which that's where a lot of audits go, whether it's an audit on your Facebook account, Google account, email accounts, most agencies play the game of let's make you feel bad, let's make the current person doing this look bad and let's give you some anxiety. If you don't go with us, sometimes you got to just say it like it is and sometimes it's a mess. But yeah, we'll give you the 80 20 of what it's going to take to be successful with email or go to the next level with email for your brand. So hit us up, omg commerce.com. Would love to chat. Let's talk about other channels. So we got some things to test to improve email and sms, but one of the things I love about email and S M Ss is it makes everything else better. Facebook, YouTube, landing pages, stuff you're doing on a Kickstarter or whatever makes it all better if you're strategic with it. So what are your thoughts on what are ways we can leverage or improve or enhance other efforts through email and SS m Ss?

Nick:

So a lot of times when people think about email, they think about how can I get sales on my site directly from email? I want to set up some flows, I want to set up some campaigns. I want people to go from there to my product page to check out and then they're done. But I think you can build up this engage list, this audience that likes hearing from you and leverage them on other channels as well, like Google or Facebook or Amazon.

Brett:

So what does that look like? Give us some specific ideas. How can we pair email with some of these other channels?

Nick:

So you start off with your engaged audience and you say, all right, what could I do with them to help boost my other channel? Since marketing's not just these individual silos, they should be working together in sync. So one big thing is pretty easy to get up and running would be asking for product ideas and feedback from the customers themselves. So hey, we're launching a new pre-workout. Should we do cherry or raspberry? And just ask 'em to either respond directly in that email, then you're getting the deliverability boost from people responding to you, or you can go ahead and have two buttons, click on, click here for cherry, click here for raspberry. And then you can see, alright, who voted for cherry? So when that product drops later on, you can go send an email to those 500,000 people who all said they wanted cherry. Say, Hey Nick, thanks for picking Cherry. We went ahead and took your advice and we just launched that. Here you

Brett:

Go. Or you can send it to everybody else that voted for the other flavor and be like, Hey, sorry it didn't win, but here's $5 off. We think you'll love Cherry too, or something like that. You could have fun with it even on the people that didn't vote for it. But I do love that email is not just for one way communication and getting people to buy stuff. And it's not just for educating people, it's for educating you. It's for using that as a feedback loop, as a feedback mechanism to know what product to launch. What do you not like about the brand and love that. Very smart. I think there's not enough people using email that way. Give us another idea.

Nick:

So if you have an reviews integration set up that links in with Klaviyo, something like Shopify reviews or stamped, you can see who has left you a four or five star review and who was happy with you. And this is kind of top of mind for me because we had a brand that didn't have great reviews on, it was like three, four years ago during Covid or something, shipments were delayed and their Trustpilot score was like two stars but only had 15 reviews. And on their site they had hundreds of four and five star reviews. So what we did is we took that audience saying, Hey look, these people, they like us. They told us they like us. So we've sent an email saying, Hey, if you love our products qa, leave us review on Trustpilot as well. We made sure we didn't violate any of Trustpilot little random rules like incentivizing. There was no incentives there. This is all organic. And people who liked our product, they also went over to Trustpilot to talk about it. And now when people search for that brand on Google, they'll see a good score there. So that could be helping out with other sales channels too.

Brett:

Yeah, love that. Asking for reviews. What about some ideas for Amazon? So we've got a thriving Amazon department at O M G. We help sellers and brands grow on Amazon, but how can we leverage email? We're trying to launch on Amazon or if we're just trying to improve on Amazon, what are your tips there?

Nick:

So this is kind of a full company strategy. If you want to have both an Amazon channel that's thriving and your own D two C site, you have to have balance between the two of them. I know a lot of people, they prefer people shopping on their regular site, they could see their information, they can go ahead and retarget them later. They really own that customer versus saying 'em to Amazon. But Amazon's a huge powerful channel too. So if you're company that has both channels up and running and you launch something new on Amazon, go ahead and use your existing list to send people there to really make that launch successful and help it skyrocket in Amazon rankings for your categories.

Brett:

And that's a little bit risky. You may want people to purchase from your store better margins there potentially. So sending customers to Amazon can feel a little bit risky, but most shoppers are considering Amazon anyway and there's a lot of benefits to getting that initial acceleration of sales on Amazon. It's going to help your ranking, going to help your momentum, just like Nick said. So I think it makes sense. I think for most brands, if they're established and they've got a thriving D two C business and they've got a good email list and then they launch on Amazon, we usually want to hit that list at least part of that list. Hey, consider purchasing on Amazon, consider reviewing on Amazon. And that can help you get launched much faster on Amazon. What about something, what about something like Kickstarter, Nick? How have we seen clients use email and Kickstarter together?

Nick:

Exact same setup there. Just like you would have a product launch on Amazon. So you have a Kickstarter campaign getting ready, you're doing all the work for it, you have your goal set that's probably undershot, so you make sure you hit your goal whenever that actually goes live. I know Kickstarter, I forgot it's 24 or 48 hours. They want you to hit your funding goal in that amount of time and then you make it on their main page. So if you grow that email list and you have a new product launching on Kickstarter, you send all your email subscribers there, go buy it, you hit that target goal of your revenue for that Kickstarter campaign, boom, you're on the front page of Kickstarter and it'll help accelerate the sales there.

Brett:

Awesome. Love it. What are some other little tips? I want to get into Google and Facebook and some other things, but what are just some other tips? How can we utilize email to get marketing assets or to get other things we need to make our marketing better?

Nick:

I mean, U G C seems to be a pretty big hot topic these days. You want people with your product gc

Brett:

Love it.

Nick:

I've seen full agencies pop up of just getting people U G C from people wrapping their products, just

Brett:

U G C agencies. Yeah, and I mean it works, right? U G C works for YouTube, works for Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and really anywhere you have online video, U G C, real U G C, good U G C compelling and authentic U G C. Very powerful and I think that's going to be true forever. So what are we doing then with email to help us get U G C

Nick:

So we can have a post-purchase flow whenever that product comes in. There's some apps like wonderment that can actually track product delivered and follow up with like, Hey, hey, if you want to shoot us a picture of you in your new shirt, you out there skateboarding with a new skateboard, you ride in your new e-bike, then send it on over to here. Some people set up a specific section of their site to push them to, and you can actually have that call to action to, Hey, send us a picture of you rocking your new thing and we'll shout you out on Instagram or whatever that reward may be. Love

Brett:

It. Awesome. What are a couple other ideas to use email and then we'll get into some specific other channels.

Nick:

So one thing about me that my wife doesn't love is I like to do things the cheap way. At least at first. If I can find a cheap fix for something, I'll try that out before paying the professional to do it. All right,

Brett:

So is your wife like let's just pay for it, let's get it done right the first time. Is that kind of her mo?

Nick:

Yep. And I'm more the, I'll think about it for a week, I'll YouTube it, I'll try the cheap fix and that's probably why my fans still clicks and why I have it off right now.

Brett:

Yeah, so I get that. I can see from both angles. I don't really fix things. I'm not like a fixer of stuff breaks around the house, I got to call somebody, but I get that. I like the frugal aspect, but I bet your wife just gets stuff done faster in terms of it's fixed and it's working.

Nick:

Yeah, she does. But if you're frugal minded like me and you're concerned about the bottom dollar for your company, how you were saying earlier, brands are more focused on profits now, not just revenue should be. Yeah, I love using email as that cheap touch point, that cheap little point of contact with your customers. And then let's say you have a product launch coming out, shoot out a couple of emails talking about it, people who didn't convert, alright, try out the SMSs. They're a little bit more expensive to send, but that's the next touch point. Try out a couple SMSs, a couple more emails, and then you can resort to something like postcards, which are more expensive to send, but it's that higher touch point because it's showing up in their inbox. So email can be the cheap option before you hop over to SMSs and then you can go to postcards from there.

Brett:

Love it. And we've seen a lot of good success obviously from S M S, but also postcards as well. Shout out to post pilots and the crew over there. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in post pilot, but that doesn't mean that my belief in it is not. I think that just underscores my belief in it. But postcards can work great as well. Make that part of your flows. So let's talk about Google ads for a little bit. I'm a Google guy, love Google Ads, been running Google ads since early two thousands. How can we use email to make Google ads better? Yeah, how can we do that?

Nick:

So the first you can do is set up a good back and forth structure and open conversation between whoever's running your email and whoever's running your Google account. Luckily at OMG Commerce, we do both of those for a lot of our clients. So we have that internal communication like, Hey, what's working on your side? Here's what I'm seeing over there. But if you don't have that going back and forth, maybe you have two freelancers doing it, maybe one employee is doing it over here and one's doing it at home, make sure you have that back and forth communication. And once that's set up, you can kind of help each other learn from what each person is doing. If I'm noticing that a specific landing page is working really well for emails, so the brand gave me four landing pages to send people to, I noticed that one's really taking off. I'm going to go let our Google accounts know that, hey, look, try this landing page out over here. I've seen a lot of success with it through email.

Brett:

Love that. And you know what you may find is, okay, this landing page is converting well from email. That might not be the best landing page for top of funnel YouTube, but it may be the best for remarketing display campaigns or remarketing discovery campaigns on Google. And so I love that getting that dialogue going of here's what we're seeing with these landing pages, these are the audiences or the flows where it's converting. How can you use that to make your campaigns better for these channels? Because yeah, what's converting well on email, it's probably going to convert well with Facebook retargeting as well and with Google and Google Display network and discovery remarketing. And so yeah, get that dialogue going between those channels. What about on Facebook? So how can we leverage email and Facebook together?

Nick:

So you kind of have a similar setup, but now it's with ads or specific videos that they're running on Facebook so we can kind of notice things super fast on Facebook. So one of the accounts we work on, they have a different agency doing their Facebook account and we have that same back and forth communication where we're sharing insights, Hey, it's what we're learning over here. And they do the exact same thing over there. And they noticed that this one ad was just taken off way more than the other ones they were testing. So they passed along those assets and said, Hey, definitely try these out because people who are seeing this ad, they're seeing this ad on Facebook, they're seeing what we initially showed them, we also want to make sure they're seeing them within email.

Brett:

Nice. And was that the partnership with Smart Marketer and l I think the nail polish brand or was the Skittle?

Nick:

That's the one, yep. So basically the manicure that had five different colors on the nail polish was performing well. So we're trying that in emails now too, saying, hey, if people would, they rather see five different colors on the nails or just a full green set. And they notice that on Facebook it's converting really well. So now we're testing that out on emails too.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much. And that's one of those where man, just good images or good videos, if they convert on one channel, they'll probably convert on another. They at least need to be tested. And so yeah, that's a really cool and compelling image, like five different colors of nail polish on someone's hand. If that's working well on Facebook, let's try it on Google Display network, let's try it inside an email. It's likely to boost conversions there as well. And what's so cool about this, Nick, is as we start stacking all these little improvements, you start testing all those 50 things we talk about in the guide to improve performance, improve opt-ins and all that, you start making these little improvements in 50 different areas that compounds and that makes a big overall difference. Then you start looking at, hey, well what learnings can we take from these other channels and apply to email and what learnings can take from email and apply to these other channels? Now you're talking about another set of compounding and acceleration and after the course of a few months or several months, you could be talking about some real material improvements in performance. So love that. What about landing pages? What do you thought? You already talked about landing pages a little bit, but maybe is there another point you had on landing pages?

Nick:

And like you said, Hal, it's not just the top of funnel versus bottom funnel here. What always works on one channel is not necessarily going to work on the other, but you should be definitely looking at which landing pages you're using, you're setting traffic to, and at what point in the funnel should they be connecting with those pages.

Brett:

Nice. Cool. What about, see a note here for product leads or for mystery products? Talk about that. What's that idea?

Nick:

So one of the hardest things for a brand to do is to get people to make their first purchase on the site. They've seen some reviews, they might follow you on social. There's been brands that I've been following for probably years I haven't bought anything from. I just haven't seen that thing to spark my interest to actually make me go ahead and place an order on the site. So we'll test out a bunch of different small lead gen type offers through email. It might be something like free shoelaces with shoes. It might be buy one water bottle, get one free. It might be an exclusive flavor drop that's coming up. And we'll see the different lists. We'll have it split off between people who have never purchased from us before and people who have purchased from us before. So that same offer of free shoe laces for if you order a pair of shoes, which I mean hopefully they come with laces already, but this is a bonus pair.

We'll call it a bonus pair. And hey look, when we send it to non purchases, they didn't really get excited about that, they didn't really take us up on that offer. But if it was a new flavor drop and we had that campaign split off between purchasers and non purchasers, all the people who have been holding out for this long, they all hopped on that and actually placed their first order. We're going to share that with the brand saying, Hey, look, when we talked about your new flavor, that was a great lead magnet. So start using that for some of your lead magnets on other platforms too. Yeah,

Brett:

I love it. And you'd mentioned one of our clients that does mystery gifts, which I love the idea of mystery gifts and one of our longtime friends Groove Life silicone wedding rings, I bought several over the years, they're friends of mine and I remember one time I went to purchase and they're like, Hey, buy this and you get a free mystery gift. Now I'm a pretty smart marketer, I know what's going on. My guest was okay, this is probably unsold inventory that they're wanting to get rid of. But I was like, I trust these guys, I like this product. So I clicked, I bought it, my mystery gift was like a thin bezel, pink ring silicone ring. So it's like, dude, I got something for breast cancer awareness month. I got something if I'm rocking like a Hawaiian shirt or Miami style shirt, it's a pretty cool ring, but it got me. And I do wonder something like a mystery gift that may work better for your existing customers, getting them to buy again rather than a brand new customer who doesn't maybe have the trust in the relationship yet. But test things like that and see what the impact is. Love it. Awesome. So I think you had one more idea or maybe multiple if I skip something, but talk about other ways we can kind of tie in email and our Amazon business.

Nick:

So one of our brands actually got really creative. I've given all the credit to them for this one. It was a California, they have some really cool California gear and merch. Cali,

Brett:

Shout out to Chris Lynch and the gang, one of the coolest brands. If you're ever in La Jolla, California, just north of San Diego, do a kayak tour in La Jolla shores, then buy some of their rad gear, which is, I know what we're helping with on the email side. So yeah,

Nick:

Go ahead. And their campaign idea was they had a developer build a new site. They've been working on it for months. They did their own QA testing and they got it live and they sent an email out their list saying, Hey, if you can go break our site, then we'll give you a 50% discount code. So they saw a ton of people going over, they're all clicking the links, try and get some 4 0 4 error where they're try and get some product page to display weird. So they could have spent a couple more months testing every little thing on the site, or they could have had something broken that they didn't know about that should have been addressed sooner. And they had their email list go ahead and tackle the site and click through everything. And they use that for their new website launch to see if they could break anything on there.

Brett:

I love it. And what's so cool, and you may or may not know this, but did that lead to sales from those that were on the site trying to break it? Did some of those people purchase? I'm sure they did.

Nick:

So they gave them a 20% off discount. Like, Hey, if you try to break it, you can't let us know. We'll give you 20% off. The good and bad thing here was the developer did a pretty good job on their new site if there wasn't too many broken things. So they got some sales from the people reaching out saying, Hey, I'd spent 30 minutes, I couldn't find anything. And then in that case they would give 'em like, all right, thanks for trying, here's a little bit higher of a discount. But they did get some sales, but there wasn't that many broken things on the site.

Brett:

I love that so much. Yeah, just a creative way to get interaction. And then once you've, now I'm motivated, now I want to click around on the site for maybe 10, 15 minutes and try to find something where it's broken. Even if I don't, I probably found something that caught my eye and I like the 20% discount, one of the 50, but I may go with the 20. It's really interesting. That reminds me of this ad, this campaign that Joseph Sugarman wrote a book called Triggers. If you've never read the book triggers, it's awesome. Joseph Sugarman was the guy behind the blue blockers sunglasses, but also a lot of other products that if you were alive in the eighties and nineties, like you would've noticed. But he ran this ad for something like a thermostat, I don't know, it was a more expensive product, a couple hundred bucks and basically said, this ad has seven typos in it for everyone you find take $10 off the price and this is when you mailed stuff in. But anyway, he heard from people saying, I spent two hours staring at this ad trying to find all the spelling errors. And so it's like these creative ways to get people to engage with your site or your marketing or your ads, it can make a difference because once you get someone's attention, they're really spending time with you, their likelihood of purchasing goes way, way up. Really good stuff. Nick Flint, did I miss anything or did we miss anything on the leveraging email for other channels?

Nick:

Yeah, I can pull one more out for you. So a lot of times customers like hearing from other customers, not just the brand. People are going to say how great their product is all day long, but they want to hear from people like them. It's a lot of times email marketers, they'll hop on your Shopify store, they'll scroll down the product page and see how many reviews are there, make sure you're also checking your Amazon listing for reviews. We've seen brands that have ton of reviews on Amazon, not as many on the Shopify stores. So go ahead and hop on over to Amazon, check out those reviews too and see if there's anything good you can pull out for the email campaigns. Same thing with Facebook or even maybe Google reviews. So make sure you're not just looking at one spot for reviews. Look at the whole ecosystem where people can find you and then you're probably going to cherry pick the best ones from there.

Brett:

Nick Flint, ladies and gentlemen, Nick, you crushed it. As always, love those tests. Love the ways to make email and all our other channels better. So much appreciated. Hopefully we'll get lots of people downloading that guide and also a lot of people reaching out wanting that email audit.

Nick:

And if you find a typo in the guide, we'll give you a free email audit.

Brett:

I love that. Yeah, look for a typo in the guide. We'll give you a free audit. Plus maybe something else for free. So look for those typos. Well played. Nicklin well played. Awesome. Well as always, thank you for tuning in. We would love to hear from you. Hey, connect with me on the socials. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn these days, so hit me up there. Or the other social platforms, I'm kind of hit or miss, but I am there some YouTube shorts, I'm pretty active there. And on YouTube got clips from the pod on YouTube, so go check that out as well. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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