Email Marketing, if done properly, will be able to generate you an extra 30-40% in monthly revenue with higher margins than paid ads

As well as this → you can turn one-time customers into lifelong loyal fans with good Email Marketing content and offers. Whereas you would’ve never had this chance before if you didn’t collect their email address

If you follow what I suggest in this guide, you can expect results like this 👇

Email Setup

Get a business email address with the same domain as your website. So for example, mine would be [email protected]

You need to make sure the email is setup properly with DKIM and SPF records set up. This is so your emails don’t get sent to spam automatically. I won’t get into too much here, but here’s a video that explains it more:

Then you need to choose a platform to send emails from. The 3 best are Klaviyo, Omnisend and SendLane - my personal favorite is Klaviyo.

Bonus tip:

Use a woman’s name in your email sender accounts. So for example [email protected]. They get more opens on average than plain company emails and emails from a guys name. It’s weird but it works

Growing your List

The main way you’re going to collect emails is by having some sort of email pop-up on your website that offers something to the customer in exchange for signing up with their email.

Here are different pop-ups you can test and see what works best:

• Gamified pop-ups

• Exit intent pop-ups

• Welcome pop-ups

• Content based pop-ups

• Scroll triggered pop-ups

The main way you see brands get more signups is by giving a ‘10% off’ discount or something like this. It does work but it’s also a pretty boring way of doing things and you can definitely test other offers to find better results.

Offers you can test:

• X% off your next order

• $X off your next order

• Free gift with your next order

• Buy 1 get 1 free

Test these offers and see what converts your website viewers into email subscribers the best.

Another offer that you can that we love to use is giving your customers early access to product launches. When launching a new product, release a limited quantity of it first and give the people on your email list early access to the product launch.

This can be a great way to get people on your email list as it incentivises them without damaging your margins - I’ll talk more about product drops later on in this guide.

Setting up your Email Flows

There are a few must-have flows for if you want to make the most from Email Marketing

They are:

1. Welcome series

This is the email flow someone will enter when they first sign up to your Email list. Your initial goal should be to tell them more about your brand and get them to make their first purchase on your store.

This flow should be 7-15 emails long.

1. Abandoned cart

This kicks in when someone adds a product to their cart on your site but then doesn’t complete the purchase. 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned so this flow is vital.

In these emails:

• Focus on the abandoned product

• Cover any objections

• Use 1 solid CTA

1. Browse Abandonment

This is when someone visits your site and doesn't buy, add a product to their cart or get to checkout. Treat these people as casual window shoppers + don't be too pushy with your emails. Just showcase your products (best-sellers usually work best) to them to gauge interest

1. Post-purchase

This email flow is triggered when someone purchases one of your products. The goal with this flow is to turn them from one-time customer into loyal fan of your brand.

In the first email of this flow just send them a thank you.

In the subsequent emails you should send them more content. Show them how to make the most out of the product they just purchased to boost customer satisfaction and make sure they come back.

1. Upsell / cross-sell

You can set up a separate flow for upsells or you can just add upsell emails to your post-purchase flow. The aim here is to showcase products that complement the product the customer has just bought and get them to purchase it - boosting your AOV in the process.

You can use tagging to group products together (e.g. if you’re sportswear shop a tag could be ‘basketball’ that you put all your basketball products under) to make it easier to promote products that go well with what they’ve just bought.

1. Winback

To run this flow you need to find out your average customer buying cycle. For example, your customers may purchase from you every 10 months on average.

Once a customer goes past this ‘average buying cycle’ date, the flow will be triggered and they’ll be sent emails trying to win them back. Make the emails personalized, let them know what they're missing out on and add a limited time discount for more urgency.

1. Sunset

This is similar to the winback flow, except it’s based on their lack of engagement with your emails (so if they’re not opening them). Send them an email with a slightly clickbaity subject line to make them click.

In the email give them an option to stay subscribed or opt out of your emails. In the email you should also be re-stating your value proposition and hinting towards why they should stay opted-in and be reading your emails.

If they engage with the email, remove them from your 'disengaged' segment and put them back on your active list. If they don’t engage with the email - stop sending emails to them for now.

These are all of the Email flows you should have set up from the start. After this point you should be optimizing your flows and adding / removing flows when needed (more on this later).

Setting up your Email Campaigns

You should be sending anywhere from 7-12 email campaigns every month - you can see success by sending more or less than this, but we’ve found that 7-12 a month is the sweet spot for email campaigns.

1. Email campaigns around public holidays

The first thing you should do when setting up Email Campaigns is list down all of the relevant public holidays to your brand and plan campaigns for around those dates.

You should do the obvious ones - like Easter, Christmas, St Patricks day, etc

Then look up more obscure holidays that are in your niche. For example, if your audience is women - utilize holidays like ‘Women Rock day’ (3rd Jan), ‘Womens healthy weight day’ (16th Jan), etc

There are tons more holidays to create emails around too → You can send campaigns and run special offers on these dates to boost your email revenue

2. Content campaigns

Not all of your Email Campaigns should be sales based - you should also be creating and sharing content to your Email list.

The main reason being that if all you’re doing is sales emails then people will eventually stop reading your emails. But if you share valuable content in them then people will look forward to opening and reading your emails every week.

Content ideas for email campaigns:

• How your product works

• Stories of people who’ve used your product for cool things

• Current news of what’s going on in the company / personally

• Tips on your niche

• Discussing current news that’s going on in your niche

Between these campaigns and product drop campaigns - this should be enough for you to be able to reach 7-12 high quality email campaigns being sent every single month. But more on product drops later, that needs a whole section in itself.

Improving your Email Marketing

Your job isn’t over when you set up your flows and campaigns - now it’s time to check your KPIs and see where you can improve

There are 5 major metrics that you should be focusing on:

• Open rate

• Click through rate

• Bounce rate

• Unsubscribe rate

• List growth rate

Let’s go more in-depth on each of them:

Open rate

Aim for → 40-50%+

If it’s below this:

• Send emails only to your engaged segment

• Set up global unsubscribes (this means someone will get taken off all of your lists when they unsubscribe)

• Split-test subject lines

• Use first name tags in your subject lines

Click through rate

Aim for → 5%+

If it’s below this:

• Make sure it’s relevant to the audience you’re sending the email to

• Use CTAs with actionable words like “show now”, “save now” etc

• Use good offers (mentioned previously in this doc)

• Personalise emails with the first name tag

Bounce rate

Aim for → under 2%

If it’s above this:

• Verify emails before sending them any flows / campaigns

• Remove invalid / unresponsive emails from your list

Unsubscribe rate

Aim for → under 0.2%

If it’s above this:

• Create more content emails and less sales-based emails (people will unsubscribe if you’re just selling them and not providing value)

• Segment your audience properly

• Send welcome series emails and set expectations

List growth rate

Aim for → 1.5-3% monthly growth

Talked more about this earlier in the doc

To actually find out what works and what doesn’t you need to split-test…

Split-testing

The only way to find out what works and what doesn’t in order to hit your KPIs you need to run split-test campaigns

Here’s how you do this:

1. Split your active audience into 4 random segments

2. Focus on one metric (e.g. open rate) and split-test 1 aspect (e.g. subject lines)

Don’t split-test more than 1 thing (subject line, cta, etc) at a time or else you won’t know for sure what worked and what didn’t.

Just split-test on every email until you reach the KPIs I mentioned above

Product Drops

Product drops are limited quantity product launches that you can to build a ton of hype around your brand and get people rushing to buy your product due to scarcity.

Any brand can run this - we’ve even done this with a printer company and it worked haha. As long as you have a good reputation and a decent sized active email list you can make this work really well.

Building hype

There are 2 possible stores to do drops with, each have a different way of operating:

Evergreen stores

• Sell multiple different products, website is open all year round

• For these stores, upload your product / products and label them as ‘sold out’

• Send people to the product page and get them to sign up to your email list with a ‘back in stock’ opt in form

Drop-only stores

• Only do product drops, e.g. streetwear clothing brands that only open their site when a drop is live

• For these stores, close your site and just have an an email form on it. You can also include a countdown timer if you want

Example:

Getting emails to build hype

Hype will be built both on social media and in your email marketing campaigns

Your brand should be pushing traffic to your website to collect emails before your drop. You can also find an influencer who aligns with your brand and get them to promote it too - we have found great success doing this in the past

You don’t need to over complicate the opt-in form. We got 41k emails with a form submit rate of 52% with this simple embedded form on our client’s site. This took 3 days (they had 2 million followers and we used an influencer to push it too)

We invite them to join our VIP list to get early access and so they feel more special. Joining our VIP list sounds better than joining our email list, this will help more people convert.

Segmenting emails

There are 2 main segments to make:

1. Internal traffic (past buyers or people on our mailing list)

2. Cold traffic (first-time visitors coming from ads)

Break it up into VIP + non-VIP

VIP = people who have opened an email in last 30 days and people who have just signed up to our email list for the drop

Setting a date

Now you have your VIP customers

Create 2 dates and mention them publicly on social media:

1. The early access release

2. The public launch

Preparing for early access

• Promote it on social media

• Put a timer on your site

• Send an Email + SMS telling people of the date of the early access

You should start promoting the early access drop 5 days before it happens:

When to send emails:

• 5 days before

• 72 hours before

• 48 hours before

• 24 hours before

• 1 hour before

• On the drop

When to send SMS:

• 3 hours left

• On the drop

Don’t overcomplicate these emails. In the build up to the drop focus on building hype, scarcity, limited time and putting out good content

Example product drop release email template for clothing:

Super simple.

Only have the early access live for a few hours and remind people in your email + sms that there is a limited quantity → promote scarcity and FOMO to get people to buy

Send your emails to people who have opened your email in the last 30 days and exclude people who have bounced before:

Post early access release

Once the early access has been up for a couple of hours, close it

Send out an email to your whole list thanking everyone who participated and say you look forward to the next one. Congratulate people who managed to get something. Also post this to social media

This will create FOMO for people. Make the people who bought seem like they’re a part of a ‘club’. It’s basic human psychology to want to be a part of communities or groups and we HATE feeling left out. Use this to your advantage

Launch day

Launch the product to the public a few days later

Build hype to it again on social media and emails, similar to what we did with the early access just not as many emails.

Once the product is launched you should start running ads to it and promoting it as you usually would with a product

Want us to do this all for you?

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