Boost Your Store’s Revenue with Simple Email Marketing Strategies

Welcome to the e-commerce coffee break podcast. In today’s episode, we talk about how to boost your store’s revenue with simple email marketing strategies. Joining me on the show is Sagi Shanik, co-owner at Bedford Marketing. So let’s dive right into it.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the e-commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to talk about email marketing strategies and simple strategies to help you boost your revenue. Joining me on the show today is Sagi Shanik. He is the current co-owner of Bedford Marketing and he also founded two successful e-commerce brands: Society Socks and Pearly Drinks. Sagi specializes in helping brands grow through email marketing, especially in today’s challenging landscape with platforms like Meta Ads and TikTok Shops. He’s here today to share actionable tips that you can use right away to improve your email marketing and grow your business. So, let’s dive in and welcome to the show!

Common Challenges and Mistakes in Email Marketing for DTC Brands

Hi Sagi, how are you today?

Great, great! The loud applause is crazy; it’s really loud. Hopefully, people in the car listening to this podcast are clapping along as well.

I hope so too. So, let’s dive right into email marketing. I’m a big fan of email marketing for 20 plus years and specifically with DTC brands, it’s always a big opportunity there, but it’s not always easy. What’s your take on what are the biggest challenges and the biggest mistakes that you see when it comes to email marketing for DTC brands?

Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. So for some context, I send some call it 80 million plus emails a year, so I’ve seen all types of emails. You know, I’m heavily entrenched in the space and I still see so much opportunity. I mean, email’s been around for decades now and there’s still a long way to go. I think there’s a lot of money being left on the table by DTC brands. So I’m going to go through a list, in no particular order, of where I would focus on if I was a DTC brand.

First and foremost, I would say just making your emails more visual, easy to read, and so on just goes such a long way. Just thinking about the basics, you know, as they say, KISS – keep it simple stupid. Frankly, it is something that a lot of brands should be following. Now, in terms of tactical changes in that area that I would focus on, first and foremost, mobile responsiveness. I mean, most people, just like you and I, open their emails on phones. You know, as high as 70-80% of emails that I send, depending on the brand, are opened on phones. So just make sure that you’re building emails for that. I mean, a lot of brands send an email, you can’t really read what’s going on on the phone, and the person just closes the email. So just being very clear from that standpoint and beyond that, just making sure that the hierarchy that you’re following in your email is basically following basic UI/UX principles. You’re going from a headline, transitioning to a sub-headline, having clear call-to-actions, and so on and so forth so that the eye follows what story you’re trying to tell me. And then finally, I would say avoiding extremely long paragraphs because if you’re a DTC brand, you know, no one really cares about the massive paragraph you’re going to send me. People are visual creatures; they just want the pants, the underwear, the makeup that you’re selling, and typically unless you have something amazing to say, I would stay away from longer paragraphs. So that’s the first bucket: being more visual, simpler, and just easier to read.

Optimizing Emails for Mobile

I just want to dive a little bit deeper into the email, the mobile view of an email. I think that’s particularly important. You said that 78% are opening on mobile devices, and you said there’s sometimes problems that people just cannot read it. It’s either too long, or they put text on graphics or whatever. What would be a structure from your side for mobile first to get it right from scratch?

Yeah, certainly. So to get it right from scratch, I guess two directions you could take it. So first, I see a lot of DTC brands, the way they send emails is they just insert like JPEGs or PNGs into an email, and a lot of the more sophisticated email clients or email software like Klaviyo, for example, allow you to upload mobile and desktop-specific images. So if you’re the brand that sends blocks like that, I would just make sure you have mobile images with bigger text. Now, if you’re a brand that sends actual almost like plain text or HTML emails, I would just bump up the size and don’t worry about fonts looking too big on desktop. A lot of these builders are also dynamic when it comes to desktop versus mobile, so just make sure that you’re bumping up that size and ultimately, what I suggest everyone always does is send yourself a preview. You will instantly be able to see if this is too small or too big or not, and you’ll be able to suss that out.

Yeah, I think that’s a great tip. I know you should never send anything out before you haven’t tested it and maybe also give it to your colleagues to proofread for typos and different devices, not only your phone, other devices as well, and then only then hit the send button. I have probably made every mistake there is in the book over the years, and I have been very, very particular on testing before I hit the send button.

Clear and Effective Call to Actions

Cool, dive into the structure and let me know a little bit more about it.

Yeah, for sure. So beyond that, what I typically like to focus on and fix with a lot of brands that I start working with is just having cleaner and clearer call-to-actions. So first and foremost, making your CTAs look like actual buttons goes a long way. Consumers are such quick, distracted animals at this point; we have messages firing at us from all angles. Just having a button that looks like a button goes a long way, making sure it’s big and easy to find in the email. Now, beyond that, a kind of a pro-level tip that I would give is making sure that the story that you’re telling in your email leads into the button. So the example that I always love to share is just naturally guide the person. So if you’re selling, let’s say a hair loss product and you’re talking about the problem, “Oh, you’re losing hair. We know you want your hair to grow back.” I would make a call to action that says something like “Grow back your hair now” or “Here’s how to grow back your hair.” Whatever it is, tie it to the story, and I can guarantee you, your click-through rate is going to go through the roof.

Email Frequency and Consistency

Great tip there. So you said sending emails and people get far too many emails, and as a brand, obviously, you want to communicate as much as possible with your client. What’s the frequency of emails that you’re sending out? Is there any kind of guideline there? What’s your experience?

Yeah, definitely. So Claus, you probably have a variety of business builders from different run rates listening to the podcast, so I’ll talk about the different tiers and how I think about it. So if your business is doing, let’s say, under $100,000 a month in run rate, I would say at minimum aim to have at least one email every single week. So even if your business is doing $5,000 or $10,000 a month and you’re just starting out, make sure you’re nurturing that list because the last thing that you want to do is for people to forget about you and for you to come back in a year when you’re doing $200,000 a month, and for your email list to just not care. I see that happen very, very often. Now, don’t take the list for granted, but also make sure you’re nurturing these people right away. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You know, I said previously, don’t send massive paragraphs in an email. It’s okay to send a simple email with a couple of sentences and just a simple image that you designed in Canva. That’s totally fine. Just follow the basic principles and tell a nice story.

Now, if you’re above $100,000 in run rate up to maybe $200,000 to $400,000 a month, I would say at minimum, you should be sending two emails a week. If you’re not sending that many emails, you are probably leaving a lot of run rate on the table. Then, if you’re above the threshold of, let’s say, roughly $500,000 a month in revenue, I would say send at least five emails a week, if not more. When your business is that big already, when you’re getting into the $5 to $10 million a year revenue scale, your list is probably super big. You could start segmenting and getting more complex and figuring out where the opportunity lies that way. So that’s kind of the sliding scale for me: at minimum, try to send one email every week or every two weeks up to five to seven emails a week.

Building Your Email List

I want to dive a little bit into how to collect email addresses. Obviously, an email address is the best database you can have. It’s owned marketing, it’s not based on someone else, and obviously, yes, you get an order in, and then you have an email to fulfill the order. And then you start your marketing. What are other ways to build your email list?

Yeah, massive, massive opportunity. You’re spot on. Honestly, in the email world, this is the most valuable asset that we have. And honestly, as Meta and Google and all these paid advertising platforms get harder and harder every single year, your own email list, your own media, becomes increasingly important. So it’s such a valuable asset that you know you got to plant that seed now, and you’ll start seeing results years down the line. So pop-ups are the biggest way for you to leverage getting new opt-ins and new emails into your e-commerce brand. A massive stat that I love to share is just an example of, let’s say, you have 100,000 monthly visitors to your website, and the difference between a 1% opt-in rate and a 10% opt-in rate on your pop-up is the equivalent of half a million dollars in a year, half a million dollars and call it 120,000 people on your email list. So huge, huge, huge difference, and you can see how that compounds over time.

Now, the beautiful part about collecting emails and opt-ins is it’s really, really easy to test. Frankly, the pop-up, typically, you get so much data and so quickly, especially if you’re getting a lot of traffic, that you can test things very, very fast. Now, what I would suggest brands do is they follow a really simple hierarchy of what they’re testing in their pop-ups. Typically, I like to test, first and foremost, what the offer and messaging is—so no % off, 10% off, 20% off, a gift, whatever. I would test that, then I would test the copy, and then finally the creative and how you’re communicating your brand in the pop-up. Frankly, I would just start running these tests right away because if you’re not running tests right now, you’re leaving money on the table. One quick tip here for brands is unlike Meta ads, where a lot of the time you see brands that you think perform, but you don’t really know what performs, with pop-ups, you know what performs because you can look at the best-in-class brands, the True Classics, Ridge Wallets, Somersaults, and you could see what pop-ups they’re running on the website. More likely than not, that’s a great starting point for you, especially if you’re a smaller brand.

Avoiding Annoying Pop-ups

Good point there. Just looking at what others do doesn’t give you any kind of insight because they’re trying to figure it out as well. So it’s not that they have all the wisdom out there. Now, when it comes to pop-ups, one thing that comes to mind is how can I avoid that I annoy my customers with too many pop-ups? So how often do I show pop-ups and where in the customer journey do I show them?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So it really depends on the brand and the audience, but a couple of rules of thumb that I would say. First, make sure that if you have random upsell apps that you’re leveraging on your website, that those upsell apps are not layering on random pop-ups throughout the consumer journey that you’re not accounting for. Because what I see with a lot of brands is they have the initial pop-up when you get to the website, then there’s a pop-up when you get to the product page with some sort of offer, then there’s a pop-up at the cart, and then when you click checkout, there’s another pop-up. So just don’t overload them. You can audit that very quickly yourself. Beyond that, what I would say is typically, I avoid showing a pop-up right away to the consumer with no delay. It’s just too annoying. You’re spot on, Claus. No one likes that. No one wants to give you their information. You have to show me why I should give you my email address. But a sweet spot, I would say, is between a 10 and 40-second delay is fine. 40 seconds is probably the upper end of where you want to be, but I would play around and test what works best.

And then the final tip that I would share is depending on the types of paid media funnels that you’re running, sometimes I play around with actually not showing pop-ups on the landing page when someone clicks from Meta because sometimes it’s just a little bit too intrusive. You can get a little more complicated and test revenue per user with and without a pop-up, but that’s probably expert level. So probably as a starting point, you could just exclude people that go to a landing page because ultimately, we are optimizing for revenue right away. And then the email, maybe that person doesn’t convert, but we have an opportunity to sell them in the future, but that’s a second-order benefit.

Setting Opt-In Rate Goals

Now, maybe our listeners might be interested in an opt-in rate. So obviously do A/B testing, but what’s kind of an opt-in rate goal to work towards?

Yeah, definitely. So what I would say is two tiers. I think about it in two different ways. If you’re not running a promo on your pop-up, so you don’t have 10%, 20%, 30% off, and it’s just “join our email list” type of messaging, obviously, you need to get crafty and creative there and communicate why there’s value in joining your email list. But holding that aside, I would say a healthy opt-in rate is between 3% and almost 10%. It really depends on the brand. Sometimes online, you see 10%, that’s best in class, and that’s where you need to be. A lot of the time, that’s just not the reality. If you’re in the range of 3% to 10%, that’s probably a great place to be. You could probably push it up a little bit more with testing. Now, if you do have a promotional offer, 10% is very healthy on the email pop-up. I have a brand that’s as high as 15%, although that’s really an exception, not the rule. But aim to be in those ranges, and beyond that, also just don’t listen to me at all and just keep testing until you keep improving. When you don’t see any more improvement, pause on testing for a few months and come back to it in the future because marketing constantly changes.

Results and Case Studies

That’s true. Now, obviously, you’re working with a lot of DTC brands at Bedford Marketing. Can you give me an example of what kind of results? You don’t need to name a brand, but what kind of results your clients saw after the right structure?

Yeah, definitely. Honestly, it varies, and it really varies on the brand that I work with, but I have this one example of a brand that I took over sending emails for, call it just half a year ago now. And really the big difference maker for them was just sending more consistent emails. To my previous point of what the biggest opportunities are, I mean, this was a brand doing $200,000 a month in revenue, and just by increasing their frequency of emails and SMS, by the way, to two to three and sometimes four a week versus one to two, we took them from call it $200,000 a month to $300,000 a month. There was additional opportunity also for them to start scaling their paid media because we were activating the retention side more effectively. There was more profit to be had and more profit to be sent to the Meta side. But that’s a massive result, I would say, and it really just came from, again, the basics: keep it simple, stupid. Send a few emails a month or sorry, send a few emails every single week, make sure your messaging is clear, concise, to the point, and that the consumer actually has a reason to open and read your email.

Target Audience and Ideal Clients

Now, you’re one of the agency owners, one of the very few who actually built DTC brands by yourself. So you have built two successful DTC brands, and then now you’re focusing on email marketing, helping others in the market. Who’s your perfect customer?

What I’ve learned is you mentioned, Claus, I was running a sock business. It was called Society Socks, still running it. But I would say learning number one for me was generally it is so much harder to sell things to men on the internet than women. I also have past experience in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) space, working at Proctor and Gamble, a best-in-class brand, and the mantra there would always be we’re selling to Mom. She is the lead consumer of the household, and really that’s true for the majority of categories on the internet, not on the internet. That is just the simple truth.

So I would say the sweet spot for me has been working with brands that are selling products to probably women that are in the age range of like 30 to 60. It’s hard to narrow it down specifically, but selling to consumers where they have a little bit more disposable income, they have wants and needs that they want to fulfill, is just so much easier. Sometimes it is a little bit trickier selling to younger audiences, the Gen Z’s of the world, especially given they’re on such new and trendy platforms like TikTok and so on and so forth. I mean, to them, you got to market completely differently. So I would say that’s a