Email Marketing Course for Beginners (Email Marketing Explained)

All right, all right, all right. Let's get into this. No time to waste. Today we're going through the e-commerce email marketing playbook for brands, agencies, and freelancers alike. You guys are gonna love this. Let's do this. I don't wanna bore you with my background. I've driven a lot of money from email revenue to the tune of $75 million from my clients. Here's some of the clients that we've worked with currently in the past, some big brands, and also some small brands. Let's dive in. You don't wanna hear too much about me. I don't wanna talk about me. Let's dive into the content, and I'll help make sure you learn a ton of info today to go crush it for your business or your client's businesses. So today what we'll be talking about is we're gonna understand some of the core flows that you're gonna wanna set up first. These are flows that will drive a lot of revenue and a lot of engagement for your brand or your client's brands, and I'll show you guys some real examples. We'll talk about how to set up a campaign calendar and examples of different campaign ideas. We'll give you guys a whole list of different ideas to go through. That way you guys never run out of ideas. We'll talk about some list segmentation to engage your users and ultimately have great deliverability. Without deliverability, you don't have an email channel. We'll talk about some best practices and some helpful tips. At any point in time, if you have any questions, post up, let me know, give me some feedback. I answer every single question, so let's do this. So let's first make sure we're all aligned on the email types. This is super important, so that way when I talk about these throughout the presentation, you understand what I actually mean. So a campaign is a one-time send to a group of contacts. Think about a holiday blast or some kind of promotional send. Whereas a flow is an automated email. It's triggered every single time a certain behavior occurs. Think about an abandoned cart or a welcome series email. And then a transactional email, that's very similar to a flow email. It's an automated email, but it's specifically for when people do activities after they purchase. And these are traditionally sent from Shopify, WooCommerce, so on and so forth. Things like order confirmation and shipping confirmation. All right, now that we have the definitions, we're gonna dive straight into the flows. So we're gonna cover the welcome series for non-buyers, the abandoned checkout flow, and the post-purchase. So the welcome series for non-buyers, super important. This is on the pre-purchase side. Here is a cheat sheet. If you want a screenshot of this, go for it. If you want me to send this to you later, hit me up. But really the overview here is the first few emails of this welcome series for non-buyers is really important. It's gonna set the entire tone and the entire relationship for engaging with that subscriber. And it really is gonna get them used to hearing from you and help set the expectation. So I'm gonna go through each of these emails one by one, and I'll have examples. So you'll see it, right? Like an example, example, and whatnot. So starting with the first email, we're gonna say, welcome, thank you, and give any kind of discount code if applicable. So typically people are gonna opt into your list. There's some kind of pop-up that has some kind of offer, 10% off, $10 off, et cetera. So in the email, if that's the case, you wanna deliver it. In this per example, which we're gonna go through kind of the same example for this welcome series, so that way you can see email one versus email two versus email three versus email four changes in this different. So welcome to the land of magic spoon is this really nice header image that's captivating. It draws you in, it gets your attention. It has some relevant brand info, right? So this is a cereal company that makes a healthier alternative. They swapped up the junk for high protein, low carb, keto-friendly ingredients, really talking about the brand. And then it has a light call to action of try now. So that's email one. And at any point in time, if people convert on that email, instead of receiving subsequent emails in this series, they're instead gonna move to a different automation, which is gonna be the post-purchase, which we'll talk about a little bit later. So email two, we're gonna really focus on talking about the brand story, any kind of unique quality standards of shopping with the brand, and ultimately highlighting the benefits of shopping with your competitor, with your company over your competitor's company. So this really is kind of the email where you address what's in it for me as kind of a subscriber or the customer in their mind. They wanna know selfishly what can they gain and what can they extract from this. So let's look at that example. I think they do a really great job here through this graph. And this is basically a strong brand comparison where they're calling out their competitors without directly naming names. But they're talking to the Froot Loops, the Captain Crunch, those types of cereal brands. So us, we're thumbs up. We only have three grams of net carbs. Our competitors, they're thumbs down. They have seven times the amount of net carbs, right? So they have 21 grams of net carbs versus our three. Again, have the same call to action of try now. And then they go into the brand benefits again, really doubling down on this is a cereal that not only tastes great, but it's actually decent for you, or it's better for you compared to the competitors. Email three. So here's all about social proof, right? Social proof is so important to seal the deal. Social proof comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms. It starts with customer reviews, any press mentions, celebrity or brand endorsements, any kind of retail footprint. And you want to display your popular products in this email. So here's how Magic Spoon does it. So they have this really great kind of captivating header image. They've got this really great social proof kind of from Men's Journal, Delish, and Fast Company. And then they have this direct call to action now of order now. Right, so really great email three, really draws people in. And hopefully you can get them to convert on this email. And then lastly, if people still haven't converted on this sequence, you want to focus on the community. Get them to follow you on social, join a Facebook group, get them to like your Facebook page, get them to follow you on Instagram, or maybe even get them to reply to an email. And that's exactly what we're going to look like in this email. So they're going to talk about the founders, right? So they're introducing the founders. These dudes are smiling. They're eating a bowl of cereal. They look very friendly and approachable. They say, we're two dudes that wanted to make cereal as good for you as it tastes, have their photo. And then they have kind of some texts like, yo, if you have any questions, hit us up. And the call to action of ask us anything is going to open up their emails, founders at Magic Spoon or whatever it is. And that way you can ask them any questions, you know, this, that, or the other. So that's the welcome series for non-buyers. It's super, super important that you have that set up, especially if you have a pop-up, especially if you're collecting emails, because people come to expect that. The abandoned checkout. This is really important. I want to kind of quickly pause on this right now to make sure we understand the flow in the funnel so you can understand the different abandoned emails that you have to be sending. So if we think about our customer journey and the life cycle, the most number of people are going to be at top, right? The most number of people are going to be at your homepage. Unfortunately, the smallest amount of people are going to be actually buying from you. But at each step in the funnel, as friction is involved, right, it reduces the conversion, which you want to serve people relevant content. So I'm going to go through it. Homepage, view category, view product, add to cart, start checkout, and buy. However, someone's on your list, they view a product, they don't add to cart, they don't start checkout, they don't buy, send them a browse abandonment email. If people do that, but they add to cart, don't do all the other things, then you're going to want to send them an abandoned cart. And then the last one, right, if everyone does all the steps except for buying, you're going to want to send them the abandoned checkout. So let's talk about kind of all of this. So the abandoned checkout, right, this email is so important because of the following. Look at the open rates. You know, 51% of people are opening it. So half the amount of people that are receiving this, opening it. Two out of 10 people that receive it are clicking. The two out of every 10 people that got this email actually clicked a link in there. And then really the most impressive stat is these two right here. One out of every 10 people that received the email, not just the people that opened it, but one out of 10 people that actually received the email actually had purchased. And this is over a 30 day period. One of our clients did $59,200 in revenue from a single email. And then the second email that was sent to anyone that did not buy had pretty good metrics. 41% open rate, 13% click through, and about a 5% placed order. These two single emails went out to about 3,400 people, you know, and about 3,000 people in the second one. So about 3,000 to 3,500 people in total. It did $83,000 in revenue in 30 days. So if you guys go set this up after this presentation, if you don't have this already, you will print money and you will thank me later. I guarantee it. Now let's talk about, you know, what constitutes this email? What goes into this? What in the world is it? So the overview of this email is doing this and having this set up is gonna help you recover and convert your most engaged visitors that are already on your website and have gotten through a majority of the checkout process. They just haven't bought. You need to do this to push people over the edge and get them to buy from you. Don't let them buy from your competitors. Don't let them not buy from anyone. Let them buy from you and only you. So email one is the abandoned checkout email where we're gonna focus on kind of reminding the customer of the item or the items left behind. And then we wanna showcase trust and credibility in the form of kind of reviews or testimonials, you know, if applicable. This is just gonna be a simple email where we look at, you know, one of our clients that we'd worked with in the past. You know, you have Ibex products waiting in your basket, has a linked up dynamic that takes people back to checkout. That way it's just, you know, all they have to do is enter their billing info and press buy, pretty easy. We're gonna dynamically show people the product or the products that they almost purchased. And then we're gonna have a call to action that drops people back at checkout, right? Simple gets the job done, guys. You don't need to complicate this. At least get something up and test and iterate over time and make this email perfect as you go. Just get something going and it will make money. I guarantee it will make money just by having something, right? You're losing out on making money by having nothing. So email two, if they don't convert, it's gonna be pretty much the same thing, but we wanna go one step further in terms of educating customers on what the company stands for. Hopefully encourage them to buy from you. And we also wanna dynamically show people the item or the items that they left behind. So here, right, we kind of have a little bit more to the email, it's a little bit dressed up, but we have this similar call to action that drops people back to checkout. We kind of highlight a nice lifestyle photo and image. We have some brand product and kind of quality standards we talk about. They make this really nice merino wool and this fleece. We talk about how it doesn't get you sweaty and it's more breathable, you know, whatever. And then they have the dynamic product block and the call to action. But two very simple emails to set up. Go set those up right after this presentation. I would say do it right now, but I want you to keep watching. Go do this right after and let me know how it goes. By the way, if you're enjoying this, let me know. Give me some feedback, show some love. I wanna keep doing these types of things. And I love hearing from folks that have benefited from this content today, content in the past, or any content upcoming. So let's dive into the post-purchase. So we're gonna go through three different emails and this is gonna be for a company that sells weighted blankets. And this structure is gonna be applicable to anyone and everyone that sells anything online. So what we're gonna do is a post-purchase is really our way of showing appreciation for our customers by saying thank you. This will help strengthen our bond with, you know, our list, with our customers, with our community, and ultimately help reduce buyer's remorse. And this is gonna provide them with education about the product or the products if it's applicable. Things that would make this applicable would be high AOV. High AOV stands for average order value. So if people are buying grills or barbecues or spas with us, right, giving some education's important. In this case, you know, they sell a weighted blanket. They wanna make sure people know how to use it so that way they don't overturn it. Even things like supplements or haircare, skincare. It's good to give people information, you know, use this daily, you know, use every other day, do this in the morning, do this at night. You wanna help people create patterns and habits around your products, it's super important. And then finally, we want people to provide us valuable content and feedback, as well as join our community. So let's talk about the three emails. Again, we're gonna go through the same format, talk about it, show you the example, talk about it, show you the example, and so on. So the customer thank you emails, email one. We wanna show genuine gratitude and try to validate our customer's buying decision. And if we can provide them with the education I alluded to and talked about a little bit ago, that's great. Let's see how this company does it. So with them, they basically say, hey, you know, Todd here, someone on the team, while you wait for your order to arrive, I wanna let you know kind of how to use it. And while you wait, thank you again for your purchase. Here are the three ways in which we've used it and our customers have said that they've used it and had a lot of success. So one is sleep with a blanket, right? And they have some info on kind of how that works and why that's great. Number two is to use the blanket to calm down and ground, again, paragraph there on that. And then lastly, use it like a warm hug and some more info there. So just by doing this, this reduced people returning it, this reduced the number of support tickets. This was really, really valuable to make sure that we connected with our customer ahead of them receiving it. So the next up is product review request. And we're gonna have a really interesting and unique spin on how we actually did this. So we want them to leave a review on our Facebook ad or our Facebook post so that we can turn it into an app. And this helped us decrease our cost of acquisition drastically. So in this email, we're basically incentivizing people to give us a photo, a video, or a comment on the post that will ultimately end up being an ad. That way they can be entered into a drawing to win a free product. And we were driving dozens and dozens of positive comments and feedbacks every single week, which was huge for acquiring more customers. And then email three, we're gonna do it for this particular brand and this particular use case and ask people to join and follow us on social. And there's a reason that we're doing this. The reason for this is gonna be a few things. One is for this particular client, we noticed that a lot of people were consulting third-party review sites just due to the nature of how expensive these products were. And these ranged anywhere from like 100 to like $500. So people wanted to do some research before they just made like an impulse purchase. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to send traffic to those review sites to leave reviews. But just like we asked people to leave a review on Facebook, we wanted to do the same thing on these review sites. So that way when people went there, it would see pages and pages of great testimonials and great reviews. So this is an email from the founder that wants to check in, wants to make sure people are loving it. Again, make sure you don't send this email after people have used it. We're sending this 21 days after someone ordered, right? So depending if it takes a couple of days, maybe a week, someone in theory should have at least a week or two to be able to engage and experience and utilize the product. And then we asked them to also like us on Facebook and to follow us on Instagram. So that's gonna kind of wrap up the flow section. Now let's talk about campaigns. In here, I'm gonna go through kind of some tips, the campaign calendar, some examples, and a bunch of great ideas for you. So in terms of sending campaigns, how many do you want to send? Right, you probably want to send in the ballpark about two to five campaigns per week for your own brand or for your client's brand. And then from there, you want to leverage list segmentation. This is super, super important that way you don't burn your list, that way you don't batch and blast, and that way you don't have terrible deliverability. It's really important though too, while you're sending this many times and you're being this segmented, to leverage diversifying the campaign content. You can't just send sale after sale after sale. And you can't just send content after content after content. You want to vary between social proof and education and this, that, and the other. And we're gonna talk about a whole host of ideas. So here's a bunch of ideas. Hopefully you never run out. If you run out of ideas, hit me up or drop a comment. Let me know. I've got a bunch of other ideas as well. But these are really the main buckets that are most applicable to the most number of people that sell things online. And I'm gonna have an example for all of these coming up. So just sit patiently. I promise we'll get through the goods. So new product launches, right? Influencer celebrity partnership emails, any kind of holiday emails, promotions or special offers, any kind of educational content or social proof, giveaways, bundles, gifting, current events. All right, let's get to it. So in the campaign calendar, right? So we kind of schedule at least a few weeks in advance, but hopefully a month in advance is ideal. We wanna basically mix up what we're sending. So for this particular client that sells hydration supplements, basically something that goes into your water that gives you electrolytes and whatnot. We talk about refilling, getting more, making sure you have inventory. We do a nice Q&A with the founders. We do some UGC, right? User Generated Content, featuring the community, talking about some reviews for a recent product we launched. We highlight the fact that we are on Amazon. If you want, you know, free two-day shipping with Prime. We talk about Daylight Savings Day, for example, or whatever holiday, and then we push a bundle and a discount. We talk about launching our new website. We tease a new product, and we talk about World Sleep Day, right? We send all of those campaigns in a two-week period to different segments. So that way only one person might receive two of these emails. Another person might receive three of these emails, right? So we're saving a lot of campaigns with a lot of different content to a lot of different people. That way we're able to maximize engagement and maximize revenue. If you're enjoying this, give me some feedback. Let me know, show some love. If you have any questions, also please do the same. I wanna make sure we're all on the same page. This stuff is gonna work really, really well for your brand and your client's brand and whatnot. So let's keep going. So new product launch. Most people understand this. This stuff is fairly straightforward. You got something new to launch, show it off. People want the latest and the greatest. Give them what you got. Next up, the Influencer Celebrity Partnership email. Most folks can't get a celebrity like Ariana Grande, but you can leverage influencers. Micro, nano, macro, whatever all those other terms are. Leverage influencers in your copy. Leverage influencers in your content. Leverage influencers in your email, on your website, and everywhere you can. This is really great social proof. Then we have holidays. Holidays are probably the most straightforward. This was just a Cinco de Mayo example. It's random, but Cinco de Mayo's fun, so why not? So leverage holidays. There's probably one or two holidays every single given month of the entire year, irrespective of where you are or what you do. You can definitely get away with sending a holiday email. From there, promos and special offers. One of our clients in the past had sent this kind of cool, fun promo email. Leveraging a special offer that had a limited quantity. The better the discount, the lower the number of available codes. So the best discount, which is buy one, get one free, which is equivalent to 50% off, essentially is only 20% available. And then 30% off have 25% available. And then $12 off have 30% available. This was a really successful campaign. Then moving on, educational content, social proof, right? This was a blog post that we turned into an email for one of our clients that sells wallets. We talked about what wallets over the ages have looked like and how they've changed. They used to be like these really big, bulky wallets. Now they're really thin and minimal and simple. So it was kind of a fun article, kind of social proof. People loved it. It was shared all over social. It was great. And then giveaways, right? People love free stuff. They want to earn free things. They want to share. They want to participate. But make sure your giveaway is applicable and relevant to your brand. Now, if you're a parachute, don't go give away an iPhone. Then you end up with a bunch of people that want an iPhone, not your bedding or your sheets or your mattresses. But giveaways are a great way to do it when done properly. Bundles, right? So kind of the whole play on the BYOB. Most of us know what BYOB meant from our high school and our college days. In this case, BYOB in the professional apparel world, I guess it means bring your own bundle, kind of fun and clever way to do this. Essentially, the bundles and the BYOB thing is we want people to take items that they might buy on an individual basis and mix them together, be able to save money. It's good for the customer because they get a save at scale. And it's good for the brand because you increase how much people are spending with you. Gifting, right? So men's razor company. Now, I bought a razor three years ago, right? And it still works. I'm not going to need another one. However, I might want to buy one for my dad or my brother or my grandpa or my friend. So people either A, buy from themselves or B, they buy from other to hit that gifting angle, especially ahead of the holidays. You know, whether that holidays, you know, Black Friday, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Halloween, birthdays, anniversaries, right? There's so many opportunities for gifting. Please do this. And then current events, right? So the Super Bowl, one of our clients in the past had print-on-demand. They were able to send up designs for the teams that are playing the Super Bowls or the NBA Finals or the World Cup or the Olympics, right? And depending on who won in timely fashion, they were able to really quickly and instantly send out a campaign about product or apparel that was available for that team that won or that country that won. And these performed very well because they're so relevant and they're so timely and they're so current. And then let's talk about some segmentation and deliverability. So we're in an iOS 15 world. You know, the adoption for iOS 15 hasn't been as high as it has on iOS 14. Obviously time is probably going to catch up and at some point it will become maybe more and more adopted but iOS 15 has removed the ability for the open rate, right? So 2021, 2022, 2023, you know, we're playing in this world of iOS 15. So we've got to play by different rules. However, depending on when you watch this video, you might still have data that is available from pre-iOS 15, where you could take someone that's open the last 30 days or 60 days or 90 days and be able to hit them with content. Or maybe you move to just folks that have clicked an email in the last X period of time. Whatever you do, leverage segmentation. Don't send an email to your entire list of anyone and everyone. Make sure that these people have some recency, some frequency to what they're doing with you guys. Monetary value, right? The whole RFM model. I have a really great video on my channel, on YouTube on RFM. If you want to get that, hit me up. But RFM is this new thing. Or again, it's kind of an older thing but it's growing in popularity where you really want to segment people based off of how recently have they been active or a buyer or engaged? How frequently are they doing it right? Are they opening every email? Are they opening most emails? Are they opening some? And how much are they spending with you? Are they buying everything you put out? Are they buying nothing that you put out? Are they buying a few things that you put out? So really a good model. Segmenting ideas. So we talked about engaged segments in the last one. VIPs are great. Gender-based segments are great. Geography segments are great. Past purchasers of specific products are great. There's so many ways that you can skin this. Doing something is better than nothing. And over time, as you get your bearing, you can be able to increase and decrease segments and get a little bit more granular in the larger size list that you work with or you have, the more that you can segment. So that's segmentation. And it's super important that you clean your list. This is so important for a few things. One is, in addition to segmentation, obviously you want to clean your list because A, your account health. You want to increase your deliverability by getting rid of the people that are just wasting space and making you pay money and they're never going to open or click or buy. But two, in that same note, you pay typically your ESP, your email service provider, Klaviyo, Drip, Privy, OmniSend, Sendlane, MailChimp, whoever you use. If you have any questions on who to use, hit me up. And you pay them typically based on the number of profiles that you have. If you're paying for 10,000 profiles, but 3,000 of them are only the good ones, those 7,000 people are costing you an extra 10, 100, maybe even $1,000 a month, potentially depending on how big your list is. Deliverability, right? So you want to make sure that pre-iOS, post-iOS, some of these things, you had at least a 20% open rate. With iOS, it might be a little bit trickier, but looking at some of your historical data, you get an open rate of 20% or higher, probably good. If you're in the 10 to 20% ballpark, you have room for improvement and you have less than 10% open rates, then you are in trouble. Don't get help. You need help or else you're going to be in spam for the rest of your life. And then let's kind of round this out with a few tactics. And kind of what I want to talk about is this giveaway hack. So everyone does this giveaway. This is going to work in 2021, 2022, 2023, right? These are things that we've been doing each of these years and all the previous years. So everyone does this giveaway, right? Sure, great, whatever. You get a lot of people on your list, but they're kind of a hit or a miss. They're not really qualified. They're not really primed. They just want free stuff and I don't blame them. However, do this. So on the right-hand side is what we did with one of our clients at another brand. We did a cross promotion. So Hydrant and Snow partnered up. They introduced each other's brands to one another and they gave straight up discount codes. This is very conversion focused. It allows you to partner with other brands, which is a benefit of a giveaway. It allows you to get introduction to new audiences. But this basically tucked a direct response conversion approach and this did really well. And then lastly is 2021, 2022, 2023 is the year of AMP. AMP is Accelerated Mobile Pages. It allows websites to be more engaging, interactive and actionable, right? So landing pages and websites are like that. That same technology is coming to email. Dynamic content layout, media are some of the exciting things. Got a few slides on that. So this is an example of expanding content. So the left-hand side is kind of the part that you see in the email. If you want to see the whole full right-hand side, just click that read more button within the email, right? And then expands, right? It's really cool. And then here is like a product carousel. This is a really, really nice thing. Be able to rotate between products within an email, right? You just can kind of go from left to right, right to left, so on and so forth. Really, really cool. So thanks guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this. I enjoyed this. A lot of times when I give talks like this and presentations like this people ask how it was free, right? Why I would do so much. I really, really love giving value. So hit me up, follow me on Twitter. Every day on Twitter, I'm kind of posting a copywriting tip and a marketing tip, agency tip, getting clients, this, that, and the other. Hit me up on Instagram, sharing a lot of that same content on stories, making a lot of reels. And that is my email. So if you want to screenshot this page, if you want to hit me up, let me know. Always available for any questions. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. All right, guys. Thank you so much and cheers.