Oren Meets World: master email marketing for brands: step-by-step guide to campaigns, automation, and retention

This is your guide to mastering email marketing. Whether you're a marketer trying to improve your skill sets, a designer trying to learn about implementation, or you wanna own and operate your own brand, or you have a brand and wanna expand the toolkit, in this video we're gonna walk through all the key concepts and how to do them well. We're gonna talk about actually getting subscribers from your web traffic and social media. We're gonna talk about automation and flows and emails that send automatically. And we're gonna talk about campaigns that you're sending out ongoing as promotions. We'll talk about software, ideas for each, and just give you a complete playbook that you can always come back to whenever you wanna make sure that you're running through all the best practices of sending great email. This video is very focused on e-commerce brands and wanting to sell. I'll likely do a separate video if you're establishing yourself as a personality or starting a newsletter, but that's coming later. For now, let's get into it. So the reason email subscribers are so important is they're with you for the life of your brand. Social media traffic is not owned. Algorithms can change at any time. Ads aren't reliable. And if you do email well, it should be a double-digit percentage increase inside the revenue you're doing for your e-commerce business. And even if you don't run just in e-com and you sell into stores, you sell other things, it's extremely useful to be able to continually touch those people and educate them on your releases, your products, and your brand. So first, we're gonna talk about getting subscribers. I'm gonna hit the low-hanging fruit. If you are a brand, you have to have the subscribe available on your website. I would highly recommend having a dedicated section on every page at the bottom above your footer that encourages people to subscribe. But you also have to have a why. One of the things that people miss is giving anyone a reason to actually subscribe. There are a few. Most websites or most brands will just say, hey, keep in touch with our recent releases, et cetera. If your brand doesn't have a lot of desire for those and people aren't kind of foaming at the mouth to get the new things that you have, that's probably not gonna be enough to get people to sign up. So there's a few techniques you can use. The first and most common is a discount. And if you're the kind of brand that's okay with doing a discount, 10%, 15%, 20%, whatever it is, it's definitely worth calling that out on your subscribe. The second is actually giving people some level of value, saying, hey, you can get this free guide, you can get this playbook, you're gonna get a freebie when you place your order, free shipping, whatever it is. But just remember, you're probably gonna have to give something to get something. Now, I'll talk more about guides and content as a tool for this in a moment. Because in addition to having that place on your site, you're also going to wanna have that same option available in a pop-up. No one likes pop-ups, but the truth is that they convert. And a good pop-up will get you a single digit percent and sometimes even higher on pages that people land on. And when you're running ads and when you're generating traffic, this really helps you make the most of it. There's two types of pop-ups that most people use. One is a pop-up that fires almost automatically upon landing which tends to have a bit higher of a conversion rate but be a little bit more annoying in user experience. The second is what's called an exit pop-up, which is when someone goes to click out of the page, it shows them the ability to subscribe. And really, it comes down to whatever you wanna test, but I'd recommend implementing one of the two and then having it so it only shows up for every so often before someone's subscribed and isn't showing constantly. We'll talk about some options for this when we get into platforms. The third option you have is your social media. Many people see things like ManyChat which allows someone to comment on a post and get sent a link. That's a common tool that creators use for email signups, but brands should make use of this too. And the second thing is your link and bio. Whenever you have a social media profile, it doesn't have to just take people to your store. Giving them an email signup option is a nice soft call to action to incorporate as well. But real quick, let's go back to guides and content. What most people don't realize is that digital content is a way better way to get someone to sign up for your brand, especially if you don't wanna give a discount than almost anything else. And you can give them all kinds of content around that. In fact, you can say things like, hey, get a link to our 10 most popular YouTube videos. If you have a fashion brand, give a guide to styling your product. A beauty brand, it could be tips or a video. In almost any brand, there's some way to give information for that value, whether it's a PDF or just a video. But you'll see it will work wonders if that's in your offer to both increase your average order value versus discounting it, and to get people to convert for a different reason versus purely money. So next up, we have flows. So flows and automation are words that are used interchangeably. But what it means is these are emails that are automatically triggered when someone signs up for your list or completes an action on your site. There's a few that we're gonna talk through. The first is an onboarding flow. So when someone subscribes to your email, they either get an email directly sent right to them, or they'll get a set of many emails to educate them on the process. They're sent over time. And I highly recommend this. If you're looking for a framework for this, one that I use very frequently is there'll be an email that comes right away on subscription that introduces the brand and some of the popular products of the brand, an email that comes a day or two later that then shows some of the best content of the brand and things you really wanna show off. A few days later, let's say two or three, you send an email that's about the brand and showcasing the history. Maybe a week later, you begin to introduce all your best sellers. And you can follow up a month or two later with more of your common products. Now, based on your brand and the content you have, you can decide your own adventure. But I would recommend having that onboarding series be four or five emails over the course of 30 or 60 days. So make sure to set up an onboarding flow so that when people sign up, they get educated on your brand. And in all of these emails, I would say your number one objective does not have to be just to sell. If you are selling every time someone opens an email, then they're probably gonna open them a little less. But if you encourage and add some other things in for personality, whether it's great social media videos, beginning curation, or just telling more of your story, introducing personality, it's gonna go better. Next, there's new customer flows. When someone actually buys, you have a new opportunity to basically offer them a discount on their next order, thank them for their purchase from the founder, recommend similar products that might go well with it, ask for a review, ask for a referral or a recommendation, even ask for content. Those are all email types that can come a day, a week, a month after a purchase. Same thing for people that purchase many times. One thing that I love to call out for brands who are looking to build real brand value and loyalty is take your top 1%, 5% of customers, identify how many orders that is, and set up a specific flow for them that lets them know with a direct email from the founder or some special gift or code or acknowledgement that they're one of your top people and that you value them. Another common flow type that I really like is high volume subscribers, your super fans, people that open every email. How can you give them even more content? Something to think about, especially as you begin to build a larger list and really get into email marketing, but something you may not have to do off the jump for a newer brand. But with all these, inside your email platform, you can go design several emails, set triggers for timing a day or 24 hours from an action and put it together in these very simple widgets that guide you along this. I think this is a pretty good time to talk about email platforms and what email platform to choose and some of the tools for them. And then we'll get into campaigns and some final best practices. So one of the most popular platforms for email marketing is called Klaviyo. They're one of almost every Shopify brand of some size uses. They have a big competitor called Sendlane. Those are two of the really popular platforms for big, large email lists that have all these features that we mentioned. But the side of these brands that I wanna make sure we understand is that they're expensive and they cost a lot more. So when I started my new valuables brand, I went for a more affordable alternative that has a bunch of the same tools, which was OmniSend. And I also reached out to OmniSend when I was doing this video to partner with them to explain a bit of how OmniSend works. So the first thing I like most about it is they just have a much discounted approach, especially as you're building out your first followers, you're not paying hundreds of dollars to get your email subscribers, you're paying much less. And they have dedicated forms, pop-ups, automation, email deliverability, all the things you need, templates that you can actually act on everything I say in this video directly within OmniSend. And you can check the link in the description below for a special offer from OmniSend. And it's your choice when you start whether you're optimizing for value, you're optimizing for as many features as you can, or you want something you already understand. But I do think there's no reason to overpay for one of the larger platforms when there's now a lot of smaller platforms that do the same thing. Like I mentioned, ManyChat is a software that allows people to comment on your Instagram posts and you can then DM them a link. This is a great way to DM them a landing page to get some sign-ups. I highly encourage, especially if you're giving away content like a free PDF or videos. In fact, many of you may have come to this video from me doing that exact same thing on short form. And then there are tools that specifically help with high pop-up rates. One of them that was really popular that is now being deprecated because they were acquired is called Amped. They actually got really high sign-ups by triggering pop-ups at the right time. There's a cottage economy of options that have now popped up to help replace where they were in the market. But next we're gonna talk about campaigns and campaign ideas. Campaigns are the emails that you send out regularly to people that are on your list to get them to purchase and educate them on your brand. And if you are a marketer or on a marketing team or have your own brand, you're always looking for ideas for this. I'm gonna walk through a bunch of my favorites. And first, if you wanna get inspiration for this, then you can use milled.com. It's a great place to see any brand's emails to see what they send. And also if you have a subscription to a service like Particle, they actually include in their event section emails from Milled in there so you can look in one place. So the first type of campaign we're gonna talk about is an announcement campaign when you're just releasing a product or putting something new out. Another great option is a behind-the-scenes. So for instance, with a fashion brand I work with, we'll have our announcement email with a lookbook. And then we'll actually have a behind-the-scenes with a bunch of the sketches and designs and process behind it that we'll send out afterwards. There's also a written email, basically a plain text email from a founder or a key team member. It is a great, great way to get some engagement in a campaign with something completely different. And I would recommend sending out a key moments in a company's timeline. There's content-driven emails. And I encourage highly you to put content, put social media content in all your emails. Don't have it just be selling. Show people how customers are engaging with it or you're engaging with it. Throw in TikToks, Instagrams, YouTubes, UGC reviews. Let people actually experience media as they want to. But you can also have emails that are just about content, your new YouTube series, your common support questions, things that are coming up that are happening in the world. You can be a source and a guide as a brand to be able to help people navigate your world and products. Then we have collections and themes. So if you have products, you can theme them by color, you can theme them by looks, you can put some of them together and style them no matter what we're talking about in any kind of industry and then help share people experiences you can use with your products. Same thing goes for the world outside of your products. If you have a beverage, for instance, or you have something that can be used in cooking and you want to curate a bunch of things in and around it or other ingredients or other products that go with it, you can begin to give that guided experience to the people that subscribe. And then we have collaboration, working with other brands or working with creators to get their picks or their selects or an interview or some kind of collaboration product or even just a collaboration content that will help stand out. You can take curation even farther than what I mentioned before where it's surrounding your product and actually make that a theme of your account, even developing a sub-newsletter. At a company I worked at previously in consumer electronics that was in the drone category, the camera drone category, we had a sub-list that people could opt into. It was specifically about industry news because we found so many people were just excited about the category that we could be a vehicle to educate them there that helped build brand resonance and we sent those emails out less frequently that helped us build a cultivated, passionate fan base. And then last, there's guidance, the ability to help people navigate through the things that are interesting in your world. If your brand is based in a place or doing certain things, you can actually talk people through it and share some of those experiences. And this leads me to the last section where we're gonna talk about best practices. So I will say, most brands are more successful when they send emails from a person. Instead of coming from info at, it comes from Carl at or Julie at or whoever it is, especially if it's a founder or someone with a presence online. That also makes those plain text emails and that guidance or that curation be more personable when it's from a person and you'll notice over time, those open rates will go higher and it helps connect to your brand story and your world building. One thing I'm not gonna dive into here because I'm a good email marketer, I'm not a great technical email person, is deliverability, things like spam and bounce rates and whatnot. You will wanna go dive into that on your own and dig a bit into it. As you grow, it's gonna be a big thing that comes up. Same thing with things like domain verification, tying in your domains, DKIM, SPF, there's all these records and things that will happen that are worth communicating with IT that I just wanna call out as something you can dive deeper into in other content outside of here. And then lastly, to make this easy on yourself, because this is a lot of emails, you're gonna be sending a lot of emails and I would recommend sending at least once a week, if not twice a week, and for some brands, it's even more, especially as your list gets larger, you're gonna need a way to keep things fresh. I imagine having several different styles of emails like your campaign announcements, your collections, your curation, a written letter, a behind the scenes, you can alternate is useful, but having a kit, whether you're doing that in Adobe or you have a brand kit in Adobe Express or whatever software you use. Actually having easy elements, buttons, styles, fonts, pictures that your team can work from to easily swap things in and out of the email templates you have is gonna make your life way easier. So anyway, that was the guide to getting started with email marketing, a bunch of campaign ideas and flow ideas for you to run for your brands. And I appreciate you watching. You can sign up to learn more about OmniSend and use them to kick off your email at the link in the description. Thanks.