Episode 1 of my new series w/Stephanie Bregman

Hey guys, I'm joined here today with Stephanie. She's the CMO of a really great brand. I'll let her kind of talk about it in one second, but the thesis and kind of the goal of this first episode and kind of the series I'm starting is really bringing you people that run email across other channels on a marketing stack and kind of how they've managed this internally, how email fits into kind of the greater picture and any kind of tips and tricks and things that they're doing well and maybe even things that they could be improving on. So Stephanie, how are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So do you mind kind of telling me a little bit about kind of your background and your role and kind of the company that you're working for? Yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm the CMO for Manly Bands. I've been with the company, you know, working with them for over a year, almost a year and a half. And basically my role in the company is to kind of drive new growth and just to continue to help the company grow in many different aspects, whether it's on the paid side, on email, whether it's organic, whether it's brand partnerships. What's funny about all of this and kind of the fact that I'm on this first episode is one of the first things that I did when I started working with Manly Bands is looking at email, how can we utilize email in a different way? So before I was with Manly Bands, I'd been working in the digital e-commerce space. And I say this, it's really true, literally since the early, since the mid nineties. I grew up in a e-commerce kind of family with a family that run e-commerce business back in the nineties before, literally before they even had credit card processing online. And I had what was at the time, the first major at my university for e-commerce, which wasn't really anything at the time, because it was so brand new. But I've spent probably the last, you know, 10, 15 years really specializing in just e-commerce marketing. I did a lot of work in the medical side and I'm also now on the retail side. The retail side is a lot of fun, a lot more fun than on the medical side, but that's really where I started off. And for me, email is probably the most important tool for any marketer. And I say that because the return on email is so much higher than any other marketing effort that you put your time into. And I feel like sometimes email is an afterthought when it really should be the first thing that you do before you do anything. And so that's kind of why I wanted to talk to you about it today, because when I first started with Manly Vans, that was the first thing that I looked at before I looked at anything else was how are we sending emails? What marketing emails are we sending out? What do we have that we're doing to continue to stay in front of the customers, whether it's from an abandonment perspective, a post-purchase perspective, what do we have, what do we make that customer journey look like so that we are reaching out to customers and constantly being top of mind. In the very beginning, obviously, the company Manly Vans is over three years old. When I first started, there was some abandonment emails and series that had been put together, but there wasn't really any what I call broadcasting or marketing messages that had really been done at that point. And so it was really just trying to figure out, is our audience, people who are buying rings, which is sometimes what people consider like a one-time purchase, even though people do buy replacement rings and upgrades, will our customers buy again? And that's really how I started off working with email with Manly Vans, and we have since just absolutely taken off. I mean, within the span of just one year, I think we've grown almost a couple of hundred thousand contacts within the span of like a year. Wow. This is incredible. I'm stoked to continue diving in. So a couple of questions I have. So when you first joined and you kind of took a look at email, can you talk to me about who was doing email at that time? Was it the founder? Was it a freelancer? And what does your kind of marketing team look like today? And how many people are focused on email to just you? Is it more? Yeah, well, so what's really interesting about email, when I first started, there wasn't really anyone specifically doing it because the marketing team hadn't really been put together yet. It was at the moment, it was one of the, you know, probably like the CEO was working with like, you know, freelance writers to write the emails. And then they had a person as a consultant, I think it was like a graphic designer that was working part-time, putting these images together. So when I came in, it was really more just here, like the email sequences we've created. So there wasn't one person really doing anything with email other than creating the sequences and then changing them every so often to make sure that the content was kind of fresh. So when I came in, there was, I got a little understanding of what we wanted that voice to be like, but there wasn't really any strategy at that point. Now, if we fast forward to today, there has been so much change. So what we did was, there was a couple of things that we've done differently. We hired someone internally to manage all of our email marketing and the person who handles all of our email marketing, her job is more from a creative standpoint of like scheduling out what's coming up, what's new, what is, you know, what we should have in our marketing calendar, and then working with our creative director and myself and the rest of our so, you know, our social team, we will sit together on creative, on what we call our creative strategy calls and talk about, this is what's coming up, this is what we would like to do, you know, what can we do to make this great, what can we do to make this email stand out, you know, to make sure, number one, that it's on brand, that there's something fun in there. And we also have a comedian that we work with that does a lot of our writing. So we got out of some of those other consultants, we now have a full-time creative director, we have graphic designers, you know, we have a much bigger marketing team now, and then, you know, we also have our own in-house studio that we do, and we produce a lot of that content from. So our team has gotten bigger, but we do put a really huge focus on email, and email actually leads a lot of our strategy, you know, for the whole company. So we'll look at what's coming up, and then based on what emails are going out, we will do SMS messages, we'll do social content around those emails, we'll make sure everything has to be strategically done together and planned out. So it's very different than what it was, there's a lot more purpose, and now there's actual marketing emails that are sent out sometimes, you know, three, four times a week. And these are broadcast messages, obviously a lot of them are segmented, but we have a lot more, I think we went from zero emails when I started, broadcast emails now to, like I said, like, you know, 20 to 30 emails sometimes in a month. Wow, that's incredible. I guess one more question, kind of like the past, and we'll kind of focus more on the future. When you started, are you using the same, you know, email platform that you were when you started, or did you kind of take someone from platform A to platform B? What did that look like? So when we first started, I think they were using, like, I don't know if it was like a MailChimp, I think they were using MailChimp at the very beginning, and right when I started, they switched to Klaviyo. And so that was good, I think, up to a certain point. They were a great software, but I had worked before, because I knew the company was really growing fast, I wanted to make sure that we were prepared to have more of like an enterprise kind of email partnership with a company that we can actually talk about strategy with, that we can kind of go to, you know, go into details about, you know, anything technical that we needed to do, you know, beyond like the typical scope. And so because of my past working with this other company, I had switched them over pretty early on to a company called Listrak, L-I-S-T-R-A-K. And Listrak has been one of my favorite email ESP partners that I've ever worked with. I work with them now probably with three, this will be my third time working with them with a company. They're just so easy to work with. They understand your business objectives, they become your cheerleaders, they become part of your team. You know, so I just find them to be much more helpful. Not saying that Klaviyo may not or may not have changed since I've used them. I just felt from a more enterprise perspective, I wanted to make sure we prepared ourselves for that growth and didn't have to make any major changes as we got bigger. Awesome. Yeah, that's a super interesting perspective. Most of the work that, you know, we do is obviously on Klaviyo. Klaviyo still can't pronounce it even though we've been working. So that's helpful to know. I've definitely heard of it. I've personally never used it. So I really do appreciate that kind of context and insight. You briefly mentioned that, you know, you kind of went from zero campaigns to a couple campaigns per week. How do you think about like the hybrid and the mix of, you know, campaign emails that are more kind of one-time sends and then email flow kind of automation side? Like, you know, in a given week or month, are you focused on both? Does it depend? Like, how do you think about those two kind of working hand-in-hand and how do you allocate time to both? So, I mean, our marketing emails basically are our biggest focus. Those are our broadcast messages and that's what's really driving a lot of our immediate revenue because there's an urgency there. The other sequences that we have, we work on, it depends. So like our typical abandonment emails, things along that line. We do shopping cart abandonment. We also do browse cart abandonment as well. The biggest difference with, we spend most of our time focusing on our marketing emails. That's where, you know, most of the urgency comes from. So I would say like 90% of our time are focused on marketing emails. The other 10% is making sure that the emails that we have that are running, like our shopping cart abandonment emails, like our browse cart, our browse abandonment emails, that we're constantly updating those. So we have like quarterly updates to make sure, because we have a huge series of cart and browse abandonment messages that go out, and just updating those series to make sure that they are up, you know, that they're current for what's going on right now. And then to make sure the language changes, because even though we may not have the same people coming on multiple times throughout on our site, we want to make sure the experience is different. You know, that if someone goes through the abandonment cart series emails and they leave the site and come back, they're not going to get the same three ones again. So we do make a big focus on that. And then also coming up with other ways of reaching out. So, you know, we, a lot of the stuff is kind of like set it, I say set it and forget it, but then we always kind of go back and make edits. But we have a lot of like post purchase emails that go out for, you know, for our customers anniversaries, or, you know, for their weddings, just congratulate for emails, ring upgrade type of post purchase emails, things like that are usually like more of a one time post purchase that they get followed by others. Those don't change as often, but we'll do things that are, you know, there's different things throughout the year that we may add to it. But I would say that most of our focus is really on the marketing emails. And there's making sure that everything we have that is recurring is constantly being updated. And any new ones that we do add, we just make sure that the flow makes sense. And they're not getting bombarded with too many emails, because there's a lot of flows that we have. Yeah, that I could only imagine. That's super helpful. So the next question I have is kind of a two part question, you can answer either part first or whatever makes more sense to you. So on the campaign side, like I want to kind of talk about like the, I guess a little bit more tactical in terms of the planning. The first part of the question is, do you guys use any kind of project management tool for email or kind of marketing specific, whether that's Monday, Asana, Trello, etc, kind of plan campaigns? And typically, how far in advance are you guys planning and kind of scheduling executing on your campaigns? Yeah, so kind of interesting. We we actually use a we use two different tools. One, we use a marketing tool called co schedule, which is really just it's our own internal marketing calendar. That's where we post all of our emails, any website changes that are happening, any ring launches that we're doing any social posts that are happening, any blog posts that are being launched, everything that's happening is on one calendar. And then we have different views of that calendar that we can access. So someone only really needs to see the email view, they can just see that they want to see just the social view, they want to see everything all together. The reason why that's so important for us is that as things do move around, we want to make sure that everything that's around it moves with it, that's important. So it really allows us to kind of take a look at things, even though we will go in there and we'll plan things out months and months in advance. Things are constantly being changed on a daily basis in there. And that that a lot of that has to do with what's happening in the world right now. Back in March, when you know, when COVID hit, you know, we literally, we tore everything up that we were doing over that next month. And we redid every asset that we had to make sure that we were talking to what was happening. Because even though luckily for our company, we weren't as affected by COVID because of the fact that we are an online company. We weren't as affected. But we also changed our messaging around because there's a lot of people who are getting married and, and the messaging was changing. It wasn't, you know, people didn't care about, you know, brides and grooms, where are you getting married? Now they're wondering, like, how am I going to get married? How is that going to happen now? What's this new world going to look like? And so, you know, we change assets around. So, you know, instead of, you know, but we still try to keep it to brand, our stuff is usually very satirical, very funny. And we had like this, the first thing we did was we did an image of a bride and groom on a cake separated. Like it looks, it looks like someone cut right through the middle of the bride and groom and push them apart. And it said, you know, in, you know, we're all in this together, just six feet apart. And we had so many people in the beginning who thought that was hysterical and they laughed because we're all trying to get to this terrible thing right now in the world and trying to, you know, trying to make us, you know, make light of it as we can, because we are all going through a really tough time, but we want to still make sure that our customers are, that we're still here from them. They can still get their rings from us. We're here to help them if they need advice, if they need help on where to go for their weddings. You know, we created a virtual guide for all of our brides and grooms to help them during the process while this was happening, just from speaking to a lot of the brides and grooms that are our customers. So it was, it's important that we had to change that message and using CoSchedule to make those changes and to push assets back was really important. Now, from a project management perspective, we do use Asana. I find that it's really, really easy for us to work with our designers and our team internally with regards to assets. So I use one software basically just to kind of plan out the calendar and then I use Asana to do all of our project management internally. And then the calendar shared throughout the whole company. So everyone at all times knows what's happening and what's launching and what's going out when. So it's very helpful. Yeah, this is great. And again, obviously we're kind of in wave two of some of this COVID stuff and there's a lot of uncertainty. So I think everyone that's going to be watching, kind of listening to this will really benefit from a lot of the things that you just mentioned, because unfortunately we're not really out of the woods with it. So yeah, this is great. I guess kind of the last question I have, and then we'll open it up to see if you have any kind of final thoughts or anything else you want to discuss. Kind of focusing on the tool side is again, that's something that I get a lot of questions about. Are there any other tools for email outside of the ESP, outside of kind of the project management tool, anything like on the design side, anything on the copy side, is there any other tools that you guys are kind of using that you enjoy or kind of recommend that people might kind of benefit from knowing about? Honestly, I mean, for me, the biggest tool for us is our team. And I know it sounds crazy when I say that, but I want to expand on that. Basically, because like I said, we have a comedian that helps us with our copy. We have a great creative director and great designers to help put things together. And the team itself, we come together and really come up with awesome and fun and different ideas that are always getting people's attention. So I honestly don't think it's about the tools because anyone can go out and buy, you know, InDesign or Photoshop or use iStock photos or do any of that. But you have to really care and you have to care about the customer experience. You need to care what you put out there. Like 99% of it is the assets. You know, obviously, you want to make sure that the copy is good, which is all part of the assets. But without strong assets, your emails will never perform and people won't, you know, won't understand. You have to use that to really tell your story, to talk about your brand. And so I think that it's very, very useful for people to hear that you're not going to be able to buy just a tool to help. You really have to think about who your brand is and what's the message that you're trying to get across. And not, you know, it's not just fly by night. Let's just throw emails out there. There has to be a purpose of why you're doing it. So that monthly strategy of like laying out what you're going to do, how you're going to do it. It plays across not only through email, it comes across on our social, it comes across on the website. There has to be a cohesiveness in the branding and what you're trying to say because it helps the customer. It makes sense to them. And then it leads to better conversions because if you're sending them to your website and there's nothing being mentioned on there from what your email shows, you know, the conversion rate won't be as high. If they see a connection to the site and the banners are there and there's text that talk about what they saw in their email, that makes things a lot easier. So I think it's really about making sure that you're being consistent with the branding from all of your assets throughout all your assets and making sure that you really think about what am I going to do differently as a company that my competitors aren't doing? And what is my brand voice? And I think that's what Manly Bands does really well is looking at, you know, who we are, who our competitors are, who we want to be and making sure that our customers know that, you know, we don't take ourselves so seriously, but we want them to know that we are experts in our industry. But we still look at this process in a satirical and fun way because the process of going into buying things for your wedding is very stressful. Wedding planning is stressful even without COVID. So, you know, we want to be that piece of the puzzle that makes things just a little bit easier. That's awesome. Yeah, it's fantastic. One actually last question. I lied. I just came up with it right now. For this specific brand that you're at compared to other brands that you may have been at or just kind of in general, I personally love the emails from the design copy, just like the tone, the voice, right? Like it feels like something that people would want to share with their friend or to a friend. Do you guys get a lot of replies to email saying like, this was hilarious, like, this is amazing. I love you guys. Do you guys see a lot of like social sharing of like the GIFs and other assets that you create? Like, can you talk a little bit about that if that's something that's happening? Yeah, I mean, we don't see it as much on the email side, I think, but we see it a lot because what happens is a lot of the emails that we have, we duplicate that a lot in our social, obviously, the graphics are done in a different way. But we see that a lot on social. So we'll put out images or videos or things along that line, and people will literally share and they'll go, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. We get that a lot with our videos. But some of the GIFs and images that we put out like the one I told you with the six feet apart, you know, people, you know, we have a lot of engagement with that. So it really, you know, it's really important for us to put out assets that people are going to talk about that they're going to want to share. And some of our best videos are ones, you know, where it just kind of pokes fun at what, you know, at reality of what's going on really in the world. You know, what is the process like when you buy a ring? And I think that anyone who is getting married or has gotten married, will understand that the process is very similar for all of us, you know, 10 years ago, you know, if you wanted to buy a ring, you went into a store, the girl looked for her band, and when the guy's looking for his band, they look at the wife, and so I guess their fiancee, and say, well, what should I get? I don't know what I want, you know, and all I see are like the same kind of rings, I see a silver ring and a gold ring, some with diamonds, some without it, you know, maybe, maybe a wood, but there wasn't many options. And, you know, at the time, people thought, well, I guess guys, people, well, the industry thought guys just don't care. But I mean, this is something they have to wear the rest of their lives. They clearly care. And we joke around about it in one of our commercials and say, you know, guys didn't care about, you know, about rings, they wouldn't be watching this whole, you know, long movie about one, you know, and, you know, kind of focusing on the, the likeness with the Lord of the Rings, you know, guys do care, they want to make a decision, they don't have many, you know, a lot of times they don't have a lot of decisions in the wedding making process. And so this is like one that they should want to make, they should want to be excited about it. And when Manly Bands came around, you know, John and Michelle, who are the co-CEOs of the company, they had the same exact experience. They said, you know, you know, John is a self-proclaimed bigger guy, so his hands are larger. And when he went to the store, they not only could they not find a regular band for him, they couldn't find one in his size, he couldn't find one he liked, they pulled out a catalog and said, you know, here, pick one. And they gave him like three boring options. They're all over thousands of dollars. And he said, this isn't right. This isn't fair. What kind of experience is this? And so that's why they came up with the idea for Manly Bands. He said, we could do this so much better. There should be an experience behind it. And the one thing I will say is that we back up the experience. A lot of companies just stop with their email or they'll stop with their ad. When you buy from us, from the very first time you see a commercial to the time that you purchase, to your working with customer service, until the time that you get your box to your door, it's an experience. And we put a lot of effort and money into that because we believe that that customer deserves it. They deserve to have that experience. This is a very special time in their lives. And we want them to have something that's special too. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for all the insight and the time. I really appreciate it. And I learned a lot. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot for others to kind of really grasp from this. In case anyone wants to like connect with you or reach out, like, is there any medium or platform? Is it LinkedIn? Is it Twitter? Is it your email? Is there any way that someone can kind of connect with you? Yeah, no, anyone who wants to reach out, you can definitely reach out to me on my LinkedIn profile. You should be able to find me under Stephanie Bregman. And then you can also email me as well. My email is Stephanie with a P-H-S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E, Stephanie at manlybands.com. And yeah, no, I'm always happy to help and, you know, lend help wherever I can. Email's been something I've been literally active in for a long time. We have a great team and a great agency we work with. I have a really strong person on my team, Amanda, who does an absolutely incredible job on the email side. So it really is about having great people on your team and any kind of advice I can give to anyone, I'll be happy to help. So thank you so much for having me. Awesome, Stephanie. Thank you.