Boost e-commerce sales with Damon Didier.

Speaker A: Foreign. I'm your host, Cash Miller. I'm CEO of Titan Media Works, uh, podcast production company. And this is Marketing Masters where we talk about specific marketing subjects. You know, there's so many things that go on. We're gonna be talking Black Friday, E Commerce. Yes, this is already passed, but every year this happens. You know, we've got Black Friday, we've got, you know, Cyber Monday, you know, you name it. And so it's important, you know, that companies are prepared for those periods because for a lot of retailers it is a, you know, one of their, it is the biggest time of the year for them. Um, I've got with me Damon Didier say that, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, close enough.

Speaker A: So he's with Winnet E Commerce and they specialize in, you know, email marketing for e commerce retailers. Damon, tell us a bit about your agency, like what you do and who you work with.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot Cash for having me on. So you know, I started my um, marketing journey 15 years ago and uh, today what Winnet E Commerce is, is an agency, like you said, that helps out uh, e commerce companies, uh, doing about $600,000 a year or more in sales, uh, Winnard E Commerce through email marketing, SMS marketing, loyalty and uh, rewards and all that and reviews. What we found is, and the clients we work with are entrepreneurs, like I'm sure a lot of your listeners out there that are looking to grow their business and frankly need an extra help to retain the customers they have today. You know, all of us are experiencing higher client acquisition costs. Whether it's meta or Facebook or wherever or ah, Google. And you know, really today the name of the game is, uh, two things, know, getting retention, um, to work for you, to, to sell more to the people you're talking to. And then number two is with privacy concerns, Google in 2024 is about to shut off, uh, cookies. So uh, what does that mean? Well it means first party data and those email addresses are now more important than ever. So we help um, companies, uh, in the e commerce space succeed, uh, through our retention based efforts.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's uh, it's interesting because like forever people will say email marketing is dead and all of this and it's not, if anything it's going to play an even more important role, you know, going forward. And then you also have, you know, text messages, you know, because there's a lot of loyalty programs and things that you know, people end up signing up for. But that is a huge area of how retailers, you know, take advantage of Black Friday, you know, periods you know, those holiday periods. Right. Uh, to really reach consumers. Right. You know, between email and text messaging.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So uh, you know the, the research shows that an omnichannel approach is the best. So that means uh, paid advertising and remarketing, uh, that means email marketing, SMS marketing, if you've got an app, push notifications as well, uh, anything you can to, to really communicate to the customer on their terms. Right. Some people we find prefer email, some prefer sms. Uh, a lot of business owners come to me and say, you know Damon, it's really annoying all these text messages that I'm getting. I'm like, well it might be annoying to you because likely whoever's doing it is probably doing it too much or something you don't care about. But just like email, when SMS and email is done properly, it's almost magical and it comes at the right time when you're thinking about something and it's highly focused and segmented towards you. So that the tools we use, we've got um, software developers on our team, I've even got a data scientist and the whole idea is to use data to make it more bespoke and unique to you. And ultimately the goal is to kind of make those communications magical for uh, the clients. And when you do it right it really locks in and you break through and that's where we're at. In fact I think right now is probably the golden age of email marketing uh, because of all the new tools with AI and everything else out there, uh, that are happening in the space.

Speaker A: Well, you mentioned data, so let's start there.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: You know, when you're prepping for you know, any sales period like that, how, how much does data play into it to really get you know, campaigns ready? Because you've got like say email and text, we always think that we're receiving them but they're actually, they are campaigns. There's going to be follow ups, there's going to be you know, things you focus on. So how, what role does that data play? How do you end up analyzing it? Like what does your team go through?

Speaker B: Oh, it's everything. So uh, you know there's, there's different main cohorts so uh, there's the unengaged, so the M marketing message to unengaged. Uh, unless it's a Black Friday or, or a uh, a uh, big sales event, an anniversary event or something, we're probably going to leave a lot of them out because we don't want to work, you know, mess ah up deliverability. We want to make sure we're getting into people's inboxes, uh, you know, Gmail, uh, Yahoo, all of them are smarter than ever now. So if you send a few emails out and people aren't engaging those services, see it, and then will send all your other emails to a spam or to a promotions folder when we really want to break into that inbox. So for that big cohort that's like big one number two is we look at uh, the data from people that have been recently engaged but have not gone to a conversion event. So we break those down into um, we call them espresso shots. So three days. Yeah, it's an amazing segment. It's a three day engaged on the website but took no action. We've got a 30 day engaged, 60 day, 90 day and sometimes 120 or even 180 and we break all those audiences into pieces. And uh, those are people that did something that was meaningful to the website but did not take meaningful action to take the next step. Uh, and then on top of that we also have people like, we call them high rollers or waiting for WoW users. A high roller is somebody who uh, in the e commerce space purchases from you a lot. If you're talking about a local store marketing, you might be somebody who visits your location a lot. But uh, maybe they haven't uh, they haven't engaged or done something with you in the last 30 days. With our data tools we can look at their historical engagement and we, we look at the RFM model which is recency. How recent have they uh, done done business with you? Um, frequency, how many times over the last year? And then um, M is monetary value. So what's their, their average order value? And so on the high roller segment in particular, we first identify who those people are and then we identify the step beneath them. Who are the people that have like fallen out of that cohort that we need to get back up in there so that those are people that are ripe for a discount or an offer to get them back into that cohort. The waiting for WOW people um, take those metrics and then take them down another level and say okay, they're looking for something spectacular, what do we need to give them to bump them over. So um, in our bag of tricks if you will, we have about 30 segments that we pull from uh, when we plan a campaign out and we'll layer different ones on to uh, create the perfect cohort uh, for one of our email campaigns. And that's how we kind of look at it.

Speaker A: Okay, so now I got a question though. So when you're doing this, how is it actually getting. Because we say we layer and all of this. And what I'm asking about is the software, the tools that are necessary because business owners don't realize what you have to use to actually come up with this. You know. So walk us through a little bit of what it would look like if someone was, if you were doing it. What are the steps you would actually be doing? I would be going into this program, I would be pulling this data out. I would get the, you know, I really want to know that part because it's like, how complicated is this? You know, because we talk up here. Let's get into the, you know, a little bit.

Speaker B: Sure, no problem. Uh, no problem. Cash. So, uh, we use a piece of software, esp, uh, call email service provider called Klaviyo. And if you're not in the E Commerce space, you probably never even heard of them. Um, they actually went public back in August of 2023. Uh, they're a multi billion dollar company that like very few people have heard of. Um, you're ahead, you're ahead. Um, mailchimp is like the old stall wart. And we are, you know, we're an agency that works with them too, but not so much anymore. They've really, um, they've failed to innovate where Clay Vo has done better. Now there are other ones. Send in Blue Omnisend, yada yada yada. But um, you know, as the agency owner, I'm allowed to uh, make a decision on who we hitch our horse to. And Klaviyo is the best. So, so in the weeds, uh, a lot of those things I just talked to you about, Klaviyo is the tool that allows us to do it. Where I have not seen another tool in the marketplace that is as good. So when I say like the high roller segment, um, it knows like a Klaviyo, uh, you install it on your website and it's made for E Commerce. But we actually have lead generation companies that also use Klaviyo as well. In fact, Klaviyo now is um, going into the restaurant space, um, talking with a restaurateur, um, franchise owner, uh, right now for hooking in toast into Klaviyo and doing all that. And what Klaviyo is, is um, is what I kind of describe as a CRM for your marketing data. Um, so, uh, the term CDP is kicked around a lot today. Ah, customer data platform Klaviyo Has a CDP component, but it's our cdp. So what it allows you to do is um, cash, you go to abc.com or whatever website, it knows you went there. Um, I can't, I don't know who you are until you give me permission to market to you by providing your email. So as the email marketer, it's my job to do a good pop up or do some way of obtaining your email address and permission. Then I can track your behavior on our website because you've given me permission to do so. And what Klaviyo does is then it gives me an entire profile of what you've done. And so when I talk about segmentation now I know, Cash, that you've come to my website, you searched five site five pages, you looked at this product, that product and that product, but you didn't buy. So maybe two, three, four hours later I send you an uh, abandoned browse email that invites you to come back, maybe offering a discount or not. And then, um, if you still don't convert, then I do something else for you. And then after so much time then I move you to one bucket or another or I use those campaigns I talked about to attempt to re engage you. And I try to find the button that hits best for you. But really we've got jewelers on this platform, we've got uh, CBD companies. Like I said, we're talking to a restaurateur. It does all that and inside of it, it does it. So what I would say is what makes me have uh, purpose in life is the people listening. They can do a lot of the segments themselves. There's tutorials all over the place. But not only do we know how to make those segments, we've already created our own set of segments and on top of it we kind of know what does work and what doesn't. And sometimes Klaviyo and other ones will say, hey, this is a great segment. And we're like, not so much so, you know, we bring that like uh, institutional knowledge in to save time, effort and energy and money, uh, and making mistakes on segmentation. Other things just don't work well.

Speaker A: You know, these platforms, the more robust they, you know, become, the more complicated. And that's why, you know, the advantage of someone that's using it full time, because you understand it, you know, you're using it continuously and you're also able to experiment with, you know, different clients, um, and take the results of that and potentially apply them for other campaigns. If there's, you know, cross you know, similarities between them.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You know, so I think. Yeah, and, and this thing, this is an ongoing thing because you're installing, you know, know, their code on the website. And so it's continuously building up every time you have a visitor, no matter what they do, if they, you know, if they give up their email or not, it's still tracking, you know, everything that went on and then. But if they do give up the email now that's going into the, you know, the list side of things and it's basically able to say this person already did these things, so let's put them on this list.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, it's actually a newer feature. It's called backfilling. So you might have come to our site 10 times, never identified yourself. But, uh, once you give us the email and permission, we backfill all of your history so now we can start looking at things. So, um, you know, in my previous life, my whole, my whole business career, I've always been on the corporate side, never on the agency side until I started WIN three years ago. And what was a Pardot certified, um, uh, email marketer and Pardot, ah, now called Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But they, uh, what they did was a thing called lead scoring. And lead scoring, super expensive, like you do it through HubSpot, it's like a thousand dollars a month, but we can actually do that. My agency's got our own proprietary version of it called Win scoring. So what we do is as you bounce around and hit different categories, we're scoring you up. Every client's a little different and you know, like with a jeweler that we were looking at yesterday, uh, there's engagement rings and wedding rings and wedding bands and jewelry. And by looking at those scores over time now we can send you a bespoke message that says, well, cash has been on our site two times. They've, they've looked at one, uh, standard deviation above the mean worth of, uh, scores for wedding bands. He's obviously interested in it. This is wedding season. What do we need to do to get, you know, cash over the finish line with us? So what we'll do is we'll use um, some of the automation in Klaviyo to score them up. Then we will take it over and make a flow or an automation that talks to people like you and people that do the same thing that you do in a very bespoke way, saying, uh, we're not going to be creepy about it, but we're going to be like, you know, we know what you've already done. So we're going to be like, hey, you know, you're a guy looking for jewelry. We know that guys always have like big questions about jewelry. Going to offer extra help. Did you know cash that you can go a virtual appointment with one of our advisors free of charge. We have a time available tomorrow. Click here to book. So those kinds of things that uh, when we really dig into an account and we're there, we're looking at the lifetime journey. And that's what uh, Klaviyo allows you to do is say, hey, what's this journey been and how can we get in there to you know, influence behavior and uh, and make a conversion happen. And um, I do want to say again, like this is a E commerce type software but it works for all kinds of industries regardless of um, where you're at.

Speaker A: Well, okay, so now let's add in another piece to this mix because we're building up like what this looks like. Right. You know, so let's add in the text messaging part. How does, how does that play? Does it take advantage of these same kind of stats that are working, you know, like what, how is it integrated?

Speaker B: Great question. So uh, it's interesting. So in our uh, experience SMS converts faster on that first conversion but in the long run doesn't have as much ROI that ah, we've seen as email. Um, also there's not a lot of things you can do with a phone number that you can do with an email address as far as retargeting lists and look alikes and meta. So with that said, uh, what we normally the approach that we take is even if a client is like, well I don't know if I want to do this, we say listen, let's give it a, give it a try, 90 days to make this work. And the way that it works is we ask for an optional phone number up front because some people don't want it. If they do provide their email address, excuse me, their phone number along with their email, then we just send them out like in a welcome series, a couple little messages and we see how they interact. Um, one of the things that's great about SMS is it's is interactive so you can say, hey, welcome to Cash's jewelry store. Are you looking for jewelry, engagement rings or wedding bands? Click one, you know, type in one, two or three and then you can make it more engaging than like even an email is, and it breaks through because it's on your phone. What we do then is uh, start aggregating the data and looking at behaviors, automated, you know, in an automated fashion to see is this person a email ah, person or are they SMS person? Like what do they prefer as a communication type? And then when it comes to doing campaigns and talking to them, we will dive in deeper with those people based upon the communication channel they prefer the most. That's the strategy behind it of course. I think most people love um SMS on a transactional basis meaning um, after you buy something online, get, getting those alerts that your item's been processed, shipped and arrived so that um, if all else fails in the E comm world we use that to kind of get in there and then ask for permission to market to them in the future and then see how that goes. And you know, if they're not interacting with sms it's, it's smart from like a money perspective but also just from respecting your customer perspective to kind of dial those back and down. But um, really SMS does a great job especially for meta, uh, traffic we get from there, um, for you know under 30 cohorts, uh, of people, um, female, uh, is quite a bit. And then also for that first purchase, that first conversion does a great job of that.

Speaker A: Yeah. And just like email you're able to put them into those separate, separate groups and really define your audiences and who you're sending the messages and what type of messages you're sending, you know, based on the things they've been doing.

Speaker B: Yes. I mean think about it like we can literally in a text message send them an MMS with the product they were looking at saying you left this behind and all you have to do is click. And in fact like Shopify when it works with Klaviyo actually you can click a button, it goes right to checkout with that item. So it's like right? So yeah, and it's a, that's the whole idea. It's uh, Bill Gates talked about this like 30 years ago in uh, his book the Road Ahead. It's mass uh, customization and that's what Klaviyo through email and SMS really offers is that mass customization at scale. So you're not having to worry about it, it's just doing it on its own. And that's where we come in, is making all those automations just everywhere in the journey uh, to uh, kind of engage and sell.

Speaker A: Okay, so now AI of course is taking over everything. It's calmed down a little bit but we don't realize it's integrated in so many things. So how is that going to Play into, you know, both email and text messaging and you know, going forward and what, what do you see as far as changes happening or advantages it's going to bring to the table?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's, it's huge. Uh, so to your point, it's already happening to all of us whether we realize it or not, even in the email space. So you know, a lot of the spam filters today, uh, even M sms, you know, getting caught by uh, mobile providers, that's all AI driven. On the creation side, uh, Klaviyo for example on January 17th of 24 is coming out with their AI tool to help you, uh, create email messages. We use Photoshop and Figma, um, for graphic design. So both of those have uh, AI elements that are either rolling out or have already rolled out. Ah. What those two things mean in my mind is one is more beautiful emails that are more bespoke. So what that means is like for a smaller business and maybe somebody that doesn't have the, the budget to afford a graphic design or a top end one or even to get maybe photography that you need, there's an opportunity now to take your product photos, use an AI graphical, uh, generation tool and maybe put a person in it like they're using it or like, you know, integrate the two together in a way that only a professional designer could previously do. I think that's really, really good. Um, it's still going to need human um, oversight though. So it's not like you can just set it, forget it. Um, that's really interesting and I think that's going to be great. Um, on top of that, on the copywriting side, we're already seeing with OpenAI's tools, the copy side, we use a lot of those tools. But what we found still is it doesn't know that um, Valentine's Day is great for a certain product. In the jewelry segment, it doesn't know that, uh, coffee, you know, pumpkin spice latte in October is a launch of the pumpkin spice latte flavor. So it does need a lot of hand holding there as well and strategy behind it. And, and so I think there's something there too. My, my fear with AI is that it's going to be AI generated emails sent to an AI listening inbox that just gives you, gives users a hash at the end of the day saying, hey Damon, you got 10 emails, here's one from your favorite shoe company and here's a hash of it. I definitely hope it doesn't go there because um, I think there's still a human element involved in it. And I think that that's what scares me about it. But I do believe that um, it's like any new technology when it's put into the right people's hands, uh, it can really create a much better product and can be used to deliver better value for customers. And, and I do believe we've got ah, you know, a number of years where we've got Runway with that to go going forward, um, before it gets to just uh, completely AI to AI driven world. Which scares the heck out of me. But I don't think that's going to happen for a long time.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's, I say it's been a rapidly changing landscape when it comes to it and it's amazing how many tools are. Because you mentioned Adobe and yeah, they've incorporated it extensively, which is actually making a big difference, you know, and how it's used. So I mean there's, like I said, there's so many good things going on there. Um, with mobile technology it's changed quite a bit. It's, the change seems to like it slowed down and stuff. But we are so addicted to our phones. Yeah. Do you see like we get, we know text messages are going to get through of course, you know, but email marketing. Yeah. Is there anything major you've got to do differently, you know, knowing that hey, most people are checking, you know, less and less. We use computers, we use them for work and things like that, but we don't use them, you know, on the go as much. So are there anything, you know, changes you see coming up that are going to make a difference there?

Speaker B: Sure. So, uh, a couple things, big ones. Here we go. I was kind of do a bullet list. So whenever an email is created you definitely have to check to make sure that it's mobile responsive and the mobile uh, pixel width is 600 pixels. So if you're putting images in your email that are bigger than 600 pixels wide, you're probably uh, making an image that's too big, it will take longer to load on mobile. Um, a lot of clients that are big clients that we've taken on have images that are over a megabyte in size and on a mobile device that take forever. Uh, bullet number two would be phones, um, go to dark mode. So you need to take that in consideration when you make an email because that white or transparent background that shows up white during the day when will show up black at night and that might make a lot of your stuff look really bad. On a dark mode version of Your phone. Ah, so very, very important to check that. The other big one is on the privacy side. So iOS 14.5 and now iOS 17 now are coming out with more and more security um, pieces. Uh so the first one was like third party cookies on uh, different uh, devices. Um, but now uh, with Apple Mail, with Apple Messages and uh, private browsing for Safari, if you put a link inside of your emails or that you're not, you're not formatting it correctly, those UTM tags are being stripped out by Apple. And you know as Apple goes, so goes the industry. Just a matter of time until everybody starts doing that. So it's really important to be very cognizant of uh, some of the security and privacy trends that are happening and to avoid it. The other biggie that's very timely right now that uh, is in the future is this. And this is like I'll pause for a moment for Ah, effect. 2-1-2024, um, Yahoo and Gmail are putting in new uh, like identification um metrics into your email sims. Um, there's a number of things I'll hit the three biggies. One is it needs to come from your domain, not from a general ascending domain. So if you don't have dedicated domain set up in your email today, you need to get it going before February 1st. And on top of that problem is if you haven't, you need to warm up your list to that new email domain starting like yesterday. Um, number two is it needs to come from an email that like uh, on your team. So it shouldn't be a crazy email, it should be one that aligns with your brand. I don't know how they're identifying this but just make sure we use like send or mail, ad or hello. Nothing crazier than that. Finally here's the rough one is DMARC settings. So you need to have a DMARC record in your domain, um, settings of your domain host so that uh, it has a DMARC policy. The policy could be anything but it just needs to be present. And if it's not present, what's going to happen? If any of those three things I just mentioned aren't set in place by February 1st, you're going to find your email deliverability is going to go into the toilet for especially Gmail being the biggest uh, inbox provider in America. So super, super huge. And we're working on all of our clients. The uh, DMARC piece caught us off guard. Uh, it's a simple fix, takes like you know, 20 minutes, uh 30 minutes to fix. But uh, definitely important.

Speaker A: Yeah, those, I think those are the things that like everybody, especially small business owners, they say hey, I could do this myself, I can go on mailchimp. And yeah, but mailchimp or other providers aren't necessarily educating and staying up on, you know, on top of those things that are going to happen and then suddenly yeah, you go to send and you're doing everything you've been doing for the last, you know, whatever, a couple of years and so, and everything tanks and you can't figure out why.

Speaker B: Right. That's exactly it. The hardest part. You know this from, from your, your experience. It's, it's hard to figure out the why. Like oh, my traffic has gone down.

Speaker A: Why.

Speaker B: Well, uh, great, quite. It could be a thousand things. Um, but this is one February, uh, first going forward, that is a big thing. And um, you know, listen, if you, if, if listeners get started on it, you know, even the last week of January, you will be fine but it's got to get done. And um, so yeah. And you know, whenatecommerce.com's our website, if anyone wants to contact us about it, we're happy to provide more information. No problem.

Speaker A: Yeah. So you know, email and text messaging play this like huge role especially with you know, everything E commerce and sales related roles and stuff. What would be some of their like the t. Top level things if you know, if you're getting into E, you know, if you're an E commerce retailer and you're going to get into haven't been really using email, what would be your top things? Especially you know, considering you know, we get to the fall, we get to back to those Black Fridays and things like that, you know, to be ready for that kind of thing. Because it's, you don't just start right before you should be, you know, going, you know much, you know, well in advance of it.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'll give you three things. So um, first off, you got to collect email addresses, bar none. That's huge. Even if you don't have an entire built out email strategy that is. Okay, just start. And the point is those emails that you collect today that you're not doing maybe a lot with, you can use them in the future. So you might as well start today. Every day you wait is an opportunity missed. So uh, that's number one. Number two, how do you collect them? Do pop ups? Um, a lot of people, you know, tell me when I get on uh, my first introductory call. I hate those pop ups. Listen, you hate the Pop ups. But your potential customer does not. And our customers, your customers are smart enough to know that I'm going to provide you my email in exchange for something else. So when you ask for that email address, give them something of value, whether it's a PDF, uh, it's inside knowledge that they can't get anywhere else, a discount, I don't care, just do something to uh, add some value and like that right there. When every new client I start with, you know, when we start a new engagement, we 100% go on that signup form to get it to go on there. Then the third thing, that's the big one is just send emails out. So, you know, you don't need a proper perfect email if you're just starting out. Just send an email out, you know, two times a month. People ask me, Damon, what's the minimum number? Well, if you're just starting out, just do two. Do one. Just, just get it going and just start getting a cadence. Um, like most people I talk to, it's not easy to do. It says easy does hard. Um, a lot of times people will batch it and do like five at once and then schedule them out. But the whole point is that, uh, just need to get started, just get it going now and then. Of course there's all kinds of stuff after the fact, but you got to start somewhere. So uh, that's how I would start.

Speaker A: Okay. Hey, this has been great, Damon. Yeah, it's. How would people get a hold of you? They need an email marketing, text marketing, you know, experts, how do they get.

Speaker B: I'll, I'll talk to anybody. So um, just, just find us at www.winitecommerce.com all spelled out very similar to my, my uh, URL or my name right there, just winning ecommerce.com there's a contact us button. When you contact it, it comes to me. So, uh, we will talk, we'll chat it up and uh, I'd love to help out anybody listening. Uh, uh, win at E Commerce or win at email marketing in general.

Speaker A: Okay. My name is Cash Miller. I'm the host of Marketing Masters. We've been talking about email marketing, Text marketing. Yeah.

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker A: It is something that is often overlooked, but it still provides some of the most valuable, um, marketing that you can have out there. It's also one of the most cost effective things you can do, you know, you know, it's a long term play. You build those lists, you will be able to bring in sales and if you're in the E Commerce space, if you're not doing it, you know, you're nuts. You know, you're just. You're crazy because you're missing this, like, this massive opportunity, you know, even smaller retailers, uh, everybody can take advantage of this, you know, so. I'm the CEO of Titan Media Works. We do podcast production. Thank you for joining us today. We will see you on the next episode.