Happy Sunday!
Hope you had a great weekend so far. I’ve had quite the busy self-care weekend, this weekend! Started with watching Ali and Ramon on Shark Tank (LFG!), a Saturday morning workout, went to the office, read a chunk of Noah Kagan’s new book, Million Dollar Weekend (win a free copy here), celebrated the birthday of Nick Shah, recorded another episode of Limited Supply, and went to grab chai at Kolkata Chai in NYC. That’s what I call an enjoyable weekend.
I hope you had a relaxing weekend and you’re sitting down, feet up, AC at a comfortable temperature, and you’re ready to take some notes on all things email in today’s newsletter.
This past week on Limited Supply, Moiz and I went through the Presidential Candidate donation funnels, reviewing both Trump and Biden’s funnels. If you missed last weekend’s newsletter (10+ pages on their funnels), listen to the latest episode of Limited Supply to get caught up!
Over the past 4 years, I’ve amazingly hired the world’s greatest team of operators from this newsletter. Someone reads it and is either a great fit, or knows someone who’s a great fit. Plus, it’s a great filter to find those who are deeply integrated into the space. I’ve got 2 new roles I’d like to ask your help for: CRM Manager & Paid Media Director at Sharma Brands.
A few weeks ago, I put together a research report that Tatari funded, and we learned a lot from CMOs who plan to spend over $500,000 this year on advertising. Inside the report, you can expect initiatives that brands are doubling down on, the top ad strategies to achieve 2024 goals (hint, it includes leveraging TV), the biggest challenges brands are facing, how TV fits into a holistic, omnichannel strategy, and more. You can read the full report on this link (no email opt-in required)!
Also, before we dive right into today’s newsletter, I want to give a shoutout to Diamond Hook, another web agency in this space that I hired to build out the website and brand for Character. They helped us with the branding, copy, positioning, site design and build out. I’ve recommended many other agencies and portfolio companies to them as well. Thank you Diamond Hook team!
Okay… Today’s email is going to be a little bit meta :) That’s because I’m going to use my email newsletter to talk about email marketing for DTC brands. Recently at Sharma Brands, we quietly built out a lifecycle team (email, SMS, subscription, membership & loyalty), and have been working with a handful of brands on their lifecycle marketing. It’s been incredible. The biggest unlock, I think, was that we brought in senior growth marketers to lead the charge. Yes, email marketing is retention, but it’s also a very powerful new customer acqusition tool. That said, I wanted to take today’s email to go super deep into the world of email. We’ll save the rest for another Sunday!
If I do my job right with this newsletter, you should be able to read it and pass a test or a job interview about the 16 essential email tools and flows that you need to implement for every DTC brand.
We know that email is crucial to both activation and retention so it’s something we’re investing in heavily for our clients this year.
Also, quick note! There has been a ton of buzz about what’s happening with the changes being brought on by Google and Yahoo around verified sending domains. If you are confused or need help with your migration, please hit us up! I’ll aim to put together a notion doc that I share on Twitter with the full updates + how to mitigate any risk.
Alright, let’s jump into today's email about emails! Here we go.
So, no matter the size and stage, here are the 16 essential email flows and some relevant tools that you need to implement ASAP for your brand.
I would also set them up in this order:
Step Zero: The perfect popup
As I’ve said many times before, the very first thing that every brand needs to do is create a valuable email pop-up on their site. Literally every single dollar that you spend on paid traffic that’s not helping you convert visitors into contactable leads (aka emails and phone numbers) is an unoptimized dollar spent.
You absolutely must be trying to get your site visitors information every time that they visit your store (and then you can exclude them from the pop-up after they opt in!). Once you have someone’s email (and/or phone number or both) you can remarket to them with new offers and campaigns forever (or until they unsubscribe) with high degrees of deliverability.
That is… Unless our friends at Yahoo and Google pull the plug with their recent verified sending domain changes but thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case!
Obviously it feels like there’s an unlimited number of tools that can help you create the perfect popup but we like Amped. Amped has the best pop-up builder and backend that I’ve seen. We also use it for a bunch of other Sharma Brands clients as well. The software’s entire goal is to get your email capture % to 12%.
Anyway, when it comes to crafting the perfect popup, here’s what I like to see.
- Capture the visitor’s name, email, and phone number. You want their name for email customization and you want both their email and phone number so that you have two ways to contact each subscriber.
- Lead with a valuable offer. This could be a percent off, a gift with purchase, or something else. Remember: emails and phone numbers are a form of currency to your brand. Make sure that you are offering the visitor a fair trade!
- A lead magnet/educational resource. If it’s not a discount, free sample, or gift with purchase, the other approach that I like is to ask the visitor to trade their email and phone number for a really valuable piece of educational content. The best example of this is the Jolie water report where they tell you exactly what’s in your water once you enter your name, email and zip code. This is the gold standard for a lead magnet.
Email 1: The post-purchase email
I am going to return to the welcome flow in a second (i.e the series of emails you should receive just after someone subscribes via your pop-up or 1-2 minutes after they make their first purchase even if they didn’t subscribe via your popup, BUT, before I do that, I need to talk about the only other email that you absolutely NEED to have live before sending any traffic to your site.
This is even more important than the welcome flow so I wanted to start here.
And that’s the post-purchase confirmation email.
To set this up, you just have to connect your Shopify store to Klaviyo or Sendlane and you can make it happen. Basically, anytime someone orders, they should receive a branded email from you immediately that includes:
- A Thank You Note! Start with a thank you message. Bonus points if you include the customer’s name.
- Order Details: i.e a summary of the purchased items, including product names, quantities, prices, and the total cost.
- Order Number: i.e the unique identifier for the order, which is important for any future communication or customer service questions that might come up.
- Estimated Delivery Date: An approximate date when the customer can expect to receive their order.
- Shipping Address: A confirmation of the address where the order will be shipped.
When their order ships, make sure they get an email with another personalized intro, followed by the shipping carrier information, and an easy link to track the package. Majority of your customer service complaints will come from people who say, “Hey, when does my package arrive?” If you can make that clear up front, you will save yourself a lot of tickets.
Email 2: The story-forward welcome flow
This is the welcome flow that subscribers should get via your pop-up or after they made a purchase. If you want to be fancy you could have different flows for each cohort but regardless, you need at least some version of this for both to start.
I see the welcome flow as the main introduction to your brand. New subscribers have just given you permission to pitch them on why they should buy from your store… think of it as your Shark Tank pitch, but for your subscriber’s inbox.
I have a pretty funny way of thinking about the welcome flow, but bear with me over these 6 emails.
Introduce yourself to them (this is the first date)
- This email is you casually introducing yourself, sharing your background, and showcasing some of your value props and attributes — don’t get too formal here but you need to cover the basics.
- Timing: Send this ASAP after someone subscribes on your site OR immediately after they make their first purchase even if they didn’t previously subscribe.
- Content: Include a warm welcome message, an introduction to your brand story, and what subscribers can expect from your emails (i.e., deals, new arrivals, product guides or giveaways, etc.).
Email 2: The second date email:
- Here’s where you explain why you deserve a purchase… aka, you speak more about the benefits of what makes you better than the competition. For example, if you have a particular ingredient, tell your reader how that ingredient benefits or enhances their life.
- Timing: 48 hours after the welcome email.
- Content: Offer a light discount (can just be something as simple as free shipping or a free sample or gift with purchase)
- If you use a discount code, make it something easy to remember for later (i.e., FREESHIP or SAVE10)
Email 3: Show off the product:
- Timing: 72 hours after the second email.
- Content: Highlight one or many of your best-selling products. Include customer testimonials, social proof, and reiterate reasons to buy.
Email 4: Bring out the receipts:
- Timing: 72 hours after the third email.
- Content: Bring all the social proof — Share your best customer reviews, UGC, influencers who have posted, press coverage snippets, what your mom says about the product, etc. If they haven’t purchased yet, this should get them over the edge.
Email 5: Give them a last chance:
- Timing: 1 week after the fourth email.
- Content: Include a great offer to get them to purchase. Talk about what the brand is known for, aka show your hero product, and add more social proof.
Email 6: Give them the benefit of the doubt (if applicable)
- There’s a chance they don’t want to buy because they don’t trust you.
- Redirect them to buy in retailers or marketplaces you’re sold at (Target, Amazon, Nordstrom, etc.)
- It’s much better for them to buy DTC but if this is applicable to you (aka you are in retail) then this email builds great credibility for your brand.
Having this setup properly means that you can drive sales in your sleep which is the ultimate goal of any business owner.
It might take a few days (or even a few weeks) to workshop the copy and design of these emails and perfect these flows.
Still, this alone can dramatically increase your engagement and revenue without you having to spend another second convincing someone to buy.
It’s all automated and once you build it, test it, and realize that it’s working, it can just run!
The other thing I would include here is the founder story email.
After your welcome flow (or maybe somewhere within it) you should try a founder story email. This could be designed in Klaviyo or it could be a really simple plain text email from the founder so that it feels more real.
Within this email, you want to share the story of why the founder started this brand and what they hope to achieve with. Explain their personal connection to the brand and why it matters. Remind them that you are still a small business and thank them for being a part of your business journey. Consider offering a custom discount code like “Founder10” for 10% off to drive another sale.
Emails 7-10: The abandoned browse, add to cart, and initiated checkout recovery flows
The next essential emails to set up are what we like to call winback flows. Again, pretty much all big ESPs that integrate with Shopify can help you automate this.
Also, fun fact about abandoned carts — Research from Baymard Institute said that 69.82% of all online shopping carts are abandoned. That means that 7 out of 10 people who add a product to their cart on your site bounce without completing their purchase. They also estimate that ecommerce stores lose roughly $18 billion in revenue annually because of cart abandonment!
That’s why these flows matter!! Think of these winback emails as part of 3 tiers.
Browse recovery (i.e you send this to someone who was browsing the site but didn’t add to cart).
Add to cart recovery (you send this to shoppers who have added to cart but bounced before purchasing).
And checkout recovery. You send this to shoppers who initiated checkout but bounced before completing their purchase. Obviously every email will have slightly different copy based on which tier it is.
An example of a great abandoned cart email that you could send 1 hour after a shopper session would be:
Subject Line: Still thinking it over, (Customer’s first name?) Your lip balm and radiant mascara await
Hey (Customer name)
We noticed you left some items in your cart and we must say, you've got great taste!
We understand that life gets busy, so we saved your cart for a smooth return.
Additionally, to make your decision a little easier, here's a 10% discount on today’s purchase with us.
Your items:
- Peach lip balm
- Paraben Free, Radiant Mascara (True black)
P.S. This discount is just for you and will expire in 48 hours. Don't miss out!
For abandoned carts and or abandoned checkout recovery emails, the best practice is to offer a discount. For users who just browsed, you don’t need to add a discount. Just a reminder that prompts them to come back and buy.
Email 11: Post Purchase Upsell
The next email to add to your toolkit after the winback series is the post purchase upsell email. In general, you can get pretty technical with your post purchase upsells and cross-sells based on data but the best practice is to send this 1-5 days after they make their first purchase and again 2-3 weeks after if they don’t convert.
You can use Klaviyo’s integration with Shopify to automatically recommend products in the same category or craft an email using data that pulls from what other customers who also bought this item shopped for from your brand. This can all be dynamic and 100% automated for you once you set up the flows. You just have to set up the if this then that triggers inside of Klaviyo to make it happen.
Email 12: Refer a friend email
After setting up your post purchase upsells and cross sells, I would look into adding a refer a friend email to drive more word of mouth. Turning your existing customers into affiliates is the fastest (and cheapest) way to scale a brand without using paid ads.
I really like Social Snowball here. They have some pretty incredible features where subscribers who participate can receive points, commissions, discounts, free products, and cash payouts from your brand.
The name of the game with referral programs is creating a strong enough incentive for someone to want to recommend your brand to a friend. Once you can get this flywheel working though, it’s one of the most powerful engines for growth that exists today.
Here’s an example for a great refer a friend email that you can use:
Hey [Customer Name],
We hope you're loving your [Product Name they purchased]! Your support means the world to us, and we'd love to spread it even further.
We’d love for you to share the love with your friends while earning some rewards while you're at it.
Introducing our Refer a Friend program!
Here's how it works:
- Use the unique referral link below to invite your friends to check out our brand. You can share it directly or spread the word on your favorite social media platform. [Your Unique Referral Link]
- When your friends shop with us, they get 20% off their first 3 purchases!
- Each friend you refer receives [Discount Amount]. (Reminder: This could be any reward that you want)
- By referring your friends, you also get [Reward]: For every friend who makes a purchase using your referral link, we'll give you [Reward]. Think of it as a little thank you from us to you!
Okay, I’m going to stop here.
Basically, when it comes to refer a friend campaigns the 3 things that matter the most are explaining what your program is, what new referred customers get as a reward and what you as the referrer get in return.
This could literally be anything but these are the three key elements that you have to hit.
The general strategy is to keep A/B testing rewards and incentives to learn what converts best and then keep pinging your customers with variations of this email about your program every month until they refer someone!
Email 13: Product Feedback/Customer Surveys.
The next email to hit is product feedback/customer surveys.
For this, we love to use Okendo who is a friend of the Sharma Brands family and portfolio company.
For product feedback, it depends on the product and use but you should send this email 2-3 weeks after your product was delivered. Make sure the customer has had time to consume or use your product before hitting them with this flow.
Again, you could also offer a discount (but you don’t need to) if they do complete your survey which could be an automated email that is sent to the customer as soon as they submit. I really like to use these emails to gain key product insights that the brand can use to improve.
You want to know: What did the customer like or dislike? Where could the brand or product experience improve? I also like sending these as plain text emails with a link to your survey and a note from the founder. This just feels more personalized and typically has a higher opt-in/engagement rate from what I’ve seen.
Email 14: Promo Templates
After you have nailed everything above, the next thing to create are promotional templates.
You should have an email template for 10% off and 20% off sitewide etc or other product specific sales that you can run at a moment's notice when you want to drive more revenue at the end of the month.
Another email I will add here is the New Product Drop email that can be templatized as well.
Whenever you drop a new product, variant, colorway, etc, you can have this email prepped.
Email 15: The Back in Stock Email
Listen, we didn’t name the podcast Limited Supply for nothing! Running out of inventory happens a lot to DTC brands and you should have back in stock emails prepped in your library of templates as well.
Email 16: Holiday Campaigns
I’ll only briefly touch on these but after you have done everything else above, the last place to look (before going deeper and A/B testing all of the flows above) is at building out holiday campaign templates. You could do this on a quarterly basis or, at the beginning of each year.
You basically want to think about and prep emails for the major holidays that are relevant to your brand or if you plan to run a sale.
If you are in the US, that’s typically:
- Easter
- Mother’s Day
- Memorial Day
- Father’s Day
- July 4th
- Halloween
- BFCM
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas & Hanukkah
- New Year’s Eve
- New Year’s Day
Obviously, there are multiple other holidays that might work for your brand so you typically just have to pick and choose.
Segments and Closing Thoughts:
Alright, so that was a lot. This email about email marketing was literally 12 pages. You should be able to derive a full page of notes. If you put your notes in Notion, share that link with me and I’d love to share it out!
One big macro thing that I wanted to end with is the concept of segments. Within all of these campaigns, you should continue to experiment with segments and what we in the email/retention world called RFM.
That stands for recency, frequency, and monetary value.
When thinking about segments, the best marketers typically consider these 3 things:
- Recency typically refers to how recent a customer’s last purchase was. (It could also refer to when you sent them their last email)
- Frequency typically refers to how frequently they purchase
- And monetary value typically refers to how much they spent within a given time period.
Each of these are filters that you can segment by for more targeted marketing campaigns.
You should also be segmenting based on general email engagement (i.e opens/clicks) and then excluding segments from new emails after they take the action you want them to take within any of these flows.
Honestly, there are so many ways to segment subscribers but it’s all based on the concept of “if this then that.” I.e if this subscriber opened but didn’t click a link in the last 30 days, then send them this campaign.
OR If this subscriber did purchase on the second email of your welcome series, then, exclude them from the next email in your series.
Segments are a complex but important topic so maybe I should write an email on this in the future!
If you need help implementing any of these flows for your brand and want to stand up a world class email program, please hit us up.
We do email strategy, design, copywriting, automation flows, templates and more. As I said at the top of this newsletter, email is a massive part of both sales and retention so we’d love to help you out. Fill this form out if you are looking for an incredible team to takeover email for you!
Alright, that’s it for this week. Now onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Toki — The loyalty, membership and referral platform that lets you build a KITH-style loyalty program.
Have you ever wanted to build out a fully-encompassing loyalty, membership and referral program that actually works, isn’t built on tech that was built 10 years ago and then sold to another company, and runs flawlessly like a program at SEPHORA or Starbucks? Let me introduce you to Toki!
Toki’s platform allows you to connect with your customers in ways they appreciate. You can implement push notifications, tiered reward programs, cashback, Apple Wallet Passes, rewards for making UGC, paid memberships, and more. They basically took 8 different SaaS companies and put them together to create a powerful modern-day retention engine.
From a technical standpoint, Toki integrates with all the major players, including POS systems like Shopify POS and Lightspeed.
If you’re ready to build a more robust retention engine for your customer base, add valuable zero-party data, and have a best-in-class customer experience, book your demo with Toki on this special link!
Toki was also started by an incredible founder, Elise DeCamp!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s 12-page newsletter was full of value for you. I’m going to be rolling out a really fun referral program shortly for the newsletter where I’ll be giving away anything from Jolie shower heads to AirPods Max’s to a MacBook Pro! Stay tuned for that.
Tonight is Sunday (sans football), so make sure you take time to get your 9 hours of sleep tonight. This video by Matthew Walker reinvigorated my excitement to sleep on time. Highly recommend spending 20 min watching it!
I hope you have an incredible upcoming week. Take care of yourself, stay hydrated, get your sleep, break a sweat. I’ll see you next Sunday (Superbowl Sunday), same time, same place.
Have a great week!