How To Stop Leaving Money on the Table – An Email Marketing Convo w/Dylan Kelley

Email marketing revenue can account for 25%-35% of an ecommerce brand’s revenue. Yet it still remains an untapped resources for many companies. 

Dylan Kelley is founder of Wavebreak, an agency that helps 8 figure ecommerce brands turn email marketing into a top revenue driver.

The reason that brands leave money on the table?

As Dylan sees it, it comes down to strategy: frequency, segmentation, creative, copywriting, abandoned cart.

 Here are some of the highlights of my conversation with him recently: 

Question: How do you audit and create your email marketing strategy for new accounts? 

DYLAN KELLEY: Most of our clients are on Shopify Plus, and most are using Klaviyo. So they have those initial flow set up there: sending emails, the emails might even look really good. But what we found is that most brands are just doing enough to get by. So they get caught in the weeds.

There are three key areas that brands get caught up to operate at full capacity:

1. Strategy: So there’s just not a lot of strategic development around how email actually fit into the picture. And what does that look like? There’s sometimes not a lot of in-house expertise on email, which is where the strategy of understanding the shoppers mentality and needs are. So really reverse engineering people’s actual customer journey and why do people buy and why they don’t and then building and then just add SMS where it makes sense to accelerate the process.
2. Leverage the software to its full potential: So knowing to get the most out of Klaviyo’s features is key, but how do you actually set it up? This is about knowing how the tool can help drive the strategy. 
3. Execute: How do you actually execute and send out great campaigns. Creative is really hard. It’s time consuming, challenging, and ongoing.

What does segmentation of account look like?

DYLAN KELLEY: First you need to make sure you have a list that’s big enough to be segmented because if you end up creating a segment and there’s only 200 people in it, it’s a waste of time.
It takes a lot of time and energy to create an email campaign. You want to make sure it’s going to a list that’s big enough. So the bigger your list, the more segmented you can get.

First you want to look at who your buyers are and who’s buying and who’s on the list.

We’ll look at number one is engagement. So who’s engaging with email opens, clicking, buying. that’s a super important statement.

That’s kind of like your bread and butter.

the next piece is like separating customers and non-customers. Who’s the bigger segment who should we tailor content to more frequently on a personalized basis?
If you have a lot of non customers who have opted in, but not bought should probably focus on those people.
The next piece is repeat purchases. For one brand, we found 80% of their list is first time buyers. They’ve never bought a second time. So our first thought is, okay, how do we create targeted sequences to automatically target these people, to get them to their second purchase?

What is the Ideal email frequency?
DYLAN KELLEY: What we tell people is it’s just whatever you can be consistent with. Because consistency trumps everything. You can’t leave your email list dormant for 3-6 months.
Ideally, we like to be in the inbox multiple times per week. And then as things kick up into Q4, I mean, it’s, it’s a good time to be in daily, just because the volume is like getting up there and ultimately like your open rates are going to go down and you’re going to have to send more just to stay top of mind.
so that is something we think about, but for most brands if you can manage weekly, then I think that’s a good spot. And if you balance it with the right strategy that adds value and is not annoying, not overly promotional—those emails that customers will actually be thrilled to hear from you.
And as your list gets bigger, you can send more too. Cause you can do more segmentation.

How do you like to approach abandoned cart emails?

DYLAN KELLEY:Companies can tend to leave a lot of money on the table with abandoned carts.
We recommend to strike while the iron’s hot.
Many brands also will just give a discount right away. However what we like to do is think about strategy. Why do people buy, why do they not buy?
if we know this, then we’re addressing those objections on upfront and just addressing those upfront.
And then now obviously, being omni-channel like if you have a mobile app, if you have SMS as channel. What I like to do is like what we’re calling now, like double or triple touch, which is when you can hit like a few things at the same time, it was just kind of cool that we’re testing.
Cause if somebody gets two notifications, like they’re going to check their phone to increase the odds of somebody looking and then, and then buying again. Cause they probably just forgot or, you know, they had some objections or questions and it’s like, you just got to answer it and you’re set.

What’s your approach and recommendation for list growth?
So I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, don’t offer a discount exchange for an email. It’s not good. It’s not scalable. It cheapens the brand.” However, I think it depends on the brand.
We work with some luxury brands where we don’t offer any discounts.
But think that most brands only have 98 or 99% of shoppers that don’t purchase. And if you think about the paid traffic that doesn’t convert as a percentage of that, it’s a lot of wasted ad spend. If you’re spending $10k, $20k every day, it’s a lot of money! I think that it’s a lot cheaper to give up 10% capture a lot more leads onsite from those people.
And then remarket to them over time. Most people aren’t going to buy on the spot, especially expensive products like mattresses or luxury watches.
So I think for the right brand, it can be very successful, but you also, you definitely do have the balance and you don’t want to get overly promotional. you don’t want it to eat into your margins too much, but when done right, it can be very successful.

Dylan from Wavebreak.co and host of the Wavebreak Podcast