Email Marketing What You Need To Know During The Holidays with Scott Cohen

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to have this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is email marketing what you need to know during the holidays. Today's guest is a VP of Strategy and Marketing at InboxArmy, a full service email marketing agency that works with clients to provide all of their email marketing needs from strategy to development, to execution. A big welcome to Scott Cohen. Hi, Scott.

Scott Cohen:

Hey, Andy, thanks for having me. Always a big topic this time.

Andy Splichal:

Now, many of the listeners you may or may not know, but to this podcast are e commerce store owners and marketing professionals. And a lot of them are working on a shoestring budget. So let me start with this question. Does the ROI of hiring an email marketing agency pencil out versus doing it themselves? I guess, is it worth it? When should they decide to use an email marketing agency?

Scott Cohen:

The famous two word answer in email is, it depends. Right? So when I always think about it when I get on calls with potential clients, it's, what's the problem you're trying to solve for? Right? Is it a strategy problem? A lot of times with ecommerce owners, they're likely doing everything right. They just don't have the time. So most of the time, it is an execution play. Look, I just need somebody to help me get emails out the door. And if I'm thinking about it from their perspective, it's what is the dollar value of your time? Right? How much time do you have? How much time should you have? Ecommerce and email go together like peanut butter and jelly, right? What's the old forest gum thing like peas and carrots, right? And it becomes a point of what is your budget? Do you have the cash to invest some agencies, you may be in the I just need a single sort of consultant. Or you may need full blown email marketing. Right? And it becomes a cost consideration.

Scott Cohen:

There oftentimes for us, we're not the cheapest guy out there, but we're certainly not the most expensive guy out there. So it really becomes, what problem are you solving for? And obviously, as a full service agency, we can solve for the strategic, but our bread and butter is really that execution side. We have a deep bench for that execution piece, whatever platforms you might be on, et cetera. So that's what I would go into is, is the ROI there to save your time? And with the email program growth, it would pay for itself over time, usually pretty quickly.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how important do you believe that a good email strategy is for the growth of an ecommerce company?

Scott Cohen:

It's absolutely crucial, right? I mean, frankly, in ecommerce, it's table stakes to have the foundations in place, a welcome series for new subscribers to your site with pop ups or order and shipping confirmation emails right? You need that paper trail anytime. If you order from someone that you've never heard of before, maybe you've seen Instagram ad and then you don't get that order confirmation email. You start freaking out like, oh my god, did my order go through? Am I going to get scammed? Whatever it might be, those touch points establish trust and if you don't do it right, it diminishes trust, right? And then there's also the cart and checkout abandoned emails. They're slightly different kind of in the same mean. Andy, I'm sure you've abandoned carts all the time, right? You get those emails. Sometimes they have offers, sometimes they, you know, those are the pieces that really power the foundational elements of an e commerce business and you just have to have them. And then from there it becomes scale crawl. Walk around is our philosophy.

Scott Cohen:

So what is your product lifecycle? What's your service lifecycle? Are you a single product business? In which case maybe you shift over into once they've purchased. It becomes more of an education of how to use the product right, or the benefits and features of the product make them feel good about their purchase. If you sell multiple products then it becomes is there that next logical product? I always go back to printer and ink, right? Do you need ink or you bought a laptop? Maybe you need a keyboard and mouse. Maybe you do need a printer. I mean, I feel old having one but that's where you get into it. But don't feel like you have to boil the ocean at once. You can't boil the ocean. So think of get those foundational pieces in place that can make you money.

Scott Cohen:

Like your welcome series is going to be your highest engaged program, your biggest money maker and then maybe it's that and you're ordering shipping confirmations. You add cart down the line and then you get into your broadcast emails which can keep the traffic flowing. But to answer your long winded answer to say yes, absolutely important.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, let's jump into those broadcast emails. How often should you be sending them and should you be increasing those this.

Scott Cohen:

Time of year during mean I think we're just past obviously the biggest time of year, black Friday, Cyber Monday. But anytime you have a big sale holiday for sure, if you've got promotions for the rest of the year, this is the time that one. People are looking for the deals. And if they haven't necessarily, maybe they spent some of their budget on Black Friday's ever Monday, but not for you. And they're ready to come back and purchase again. People expect the increased cadence this time of year. I would always say with our clients kind of a minimum is twice a month, right? We're far gone from the days of the monthly newsletter being enough. If you think about your own inboxes just the sheer volume of messaging you get even from the companies that you sign up for, if you're doing once a month, you lose that brand value just being in the inbox.

Scott Cohen:

Right. You ramp up for big sales. When I was brand side, we had the big five, right, where you have President's Day, Memorial Day, July 4 for the US. President's Day, memorial Day, july 4, Labor Day. And then holiday. And during those times when you have your biggest offers, you can be the most aggressive. There's always that balance of if you send too much or your offers aren't good, people are going to unsubscribe. If you go really crazy, you can get into some deliverability problems.

Andy Splichal:

But what do you consider sending too much?

Scott Cohen:

That depends on the brand. Right. There are some brands that could get away with mailing every single day. It's all about relevance, right. And do you have enough content, do you have enough products and people engaged in those pieces that could there's no hard and fast rule. There's no hard and fast number, right. In terms of a maximum, and your customers will tell you. Right.

Scott Cohen:

I mean, if you start mailing every single day, I think for a little while you might make some money, but long term it might hurt if you don't maintain that engagement. You also have to be aware of the people that you could send twice in a month. And there's going to be somebody on your list that will, if they're vocal enough, will go, hey, that's too much. Don't listen to the one person. Look at your data and get those numbers and determine it from there.

Andy Splichal:

When you're working with a client, how do you set up the strategy as far I mean, beyond the transactional emails, winback emails, card abandonment emails, but those broadcast emails, how do you work the strategy? Do you set it up for by quarter by year? How does that work?

Scott Cohen:

We establish the goals first. Right. And we really do think about it on a three 6912 month. Because if you're thinking about a year, that doesn't give you the flexibility to change. I think that there's too much volatility in the world right now. Right. I mean, if you think about COVID for example yeah, we're three years past three and a half, four years past it even though we're kind of not in some ways, it kind of just turned everything on its head. And if you have a twelve month plan that's set in stone, you can't adjust for something that would be a quarter of a COVID level engagement, right.

Scott Cohen:

A quarter of a COVID disruption, especially now. And it'll be interesting as we look back at the numbers that we get in from our clients to see how Black Friday Cyber Monday really does. Because credit card debt is at an all time high in the US. Right now. We've got this recession, not recession thing going on. Interest rates are at an all time high. Well, not an all time high, but certainly high for the last 1015 years. It's a different ballgame than we were even 1218 months ago.

Scott Cohen:

So I think that when we go into it's like, what are your three month goals? What are your longer term six month goals that could be adjusted and then we build that content calendar, usually on a 60 to 90 day basis. And it could be depending on the client, could be a combination of promotional emails. Typically with Ecommerce, you see a lot of promotion, right? You see seasonality. So like, as you're gearing up for 2024, look at if you have at least twelve months to 24 months of data, go see what your seasonality looks like. Because what people are buying now are not necessarily what they're going to be buying three months from now. And it could be that if you have 24 months of data that shows every February, for example, people buy these products from you generally. Do you promote them or do you say, that's our benchmark, and we promote other things. It's really a give and take with our clients of, okay, let's get this content calendar in place, let's test things.

Scott Cohen:

Maybe it's subject clients, maybe it's the segmentation of, okay, these people bought these things, so send them content specific to what's logical for them next, versus how do we get these new subscribers to get that first purchase. So there's no keep coming back to it depends. There's no one size fits all because.

Andy Splichal:

You made a great point there. Just quick, before we move on the segmenting, how much do you segment for your clients and how important is that?

Scott Cohen:

Segments make sense when you have enough people on your list, right? I always say at a minimum, know what your customers have done and segment that way. So, like, if you have an Ecommerce business that has 1000 people on your list and you have 200 of those people that have purchased from you, start treating those 200 differently than you do the other 800, right? When you get into we really say, like for testing and for true segmentation, you got to get to at least to where you can see some statistical significance in difference of content. You really need to get at least 50, 00, 10,000 people. Because if one person acts differently and it changes the numbers drastically, then you aren't really learning anything. So we have some clients that literally have 100 segments and we have clients that have two. It just depends on the size and what they're selling and everything else.

Andy Splichal:

One of the objections but hesitations with somebody outsourcing their email marketing is how are you able to adapt the company's voice to the emails you're creating?

Scott Cohen:

That is the challenge, right? I mean, that is a big challenge. Of course, oftentimes we'll help. We have clients that sort of are across the board. Like they give us content and then we go, okay, that'll fit an email this way, but they're maintaining their voice. Other clients, we do the writing for them, but we are still running it. I mean, like any good agency would, you're making sure you've got the brand guidelines, you've got the voice down, you're getting approvals, you're doing all that stuff to make sure that the voice is established. The hardest ones are clients that don't know their voice, right. And there are plenty of people who don't know what their market.

Scott Cohen:

I'm an old copywriter, so it's easy for me to say, oh, I can mimic your voice. I was brand side as Copywriter, did ad agency work in my super early career. So you just kind of fold in. But it's important to have consistency across your channels. Right. So if your voice is extremely different in social outside of like you're doing some testing. Of course, I mean sometimes you can test and try different things if you're trying to move the voice. But that consistency piece and that's really where for us, the client comes in and says this is our voice, this is how it needs to sound.

Scott Cohen:

And as an agency we adopt that at the individual level.

Andy Splichal:

Do you have a preferred ESP that you use for sending the emails?

Scott Cohen:

No. Well, let's put it this way. We at inbox army, we have clients across 40 different platforms.

Andy Splichal:

Wow.

Scott Cohen:

And we just plug into whatever our clients are using. So we've got clients on Klavio, we've got clients on MailChimp, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, the whole host of others. Right. If you were to ask me individually which platforms I like and which platforms I hate, I'd give you an answer. I'm not going to say them, but that's also focus group of one. I've been a user myself on plenty of platforms and I go like for example, Salesforce, Marketing, Cloud is great provided you can support it with a full dev team because it's very complicated. Klaviyo is great and it's much simpler for e commerce people for know if they're on Shopify and they don't have a platform, klavi is probably a great place to start. Their integration is really good.

Scott Cohen:

Right. But Shopify also integrates into a bunch of other I would never if you're on a platform right now and you don't have a reason to leave, don't look for one. Because even in the best case scenario, a migration, which we do, migration work for several clients as well, where they go, hey, we're moving from HubSpot to whatever to whatever. We can help with that. But it is a hassle because if you have all those automations built on one place, you got to rebuild them in another. You got to set up all the audiences, you got to redo the forms. No ESP is perfect.

Andy Splichal:

I was going to say, is there an ESP that delivers better than others?

Scott Cohen:

Like for deliverability.

Andy Splichal:

Deliverability, yeah, most of them are.

Scott Cohen:

Especially if your volume is big enough that you are on what's called a dedicated IP. So you have full control over your IP. It really is your practices that determine how you get delivered, not so much the ESP. If you're on MailChimp and you're using a shared IP, you're sharing the reputation across you and all the other brands that are on those IPS. So like the Mailchimps of the world, they're very protective of their shared IPS because if somebody has a bad actor, they don't just bring themselves down, they bring ten other companies down with them. Most of them are pretty good.

Andy Splichal:

Which ones are you sharing an IP and how do you know?

Scott Cohen:

I know for a fact that if you are brand new on MailChimp and I'd have to check with the team, I'm not fully plugged in on that anymore on the platform side because I haven't needed to be. I've been on dedicated IPS for a long time on the brand side, on my brand experience. But MailChimp chip typically starts with shared. I think some of the other ones like Constant Contact Do, some of the smaller players, they'll start you there and then as you get into the more again, it's a volume play, right? If you're sending 1000 emails a month, it actually hurts you to be on a dedicated IP because your volume is so low. Whereas when you get a lot of because it's a volume play and a consistency and reputation play that comes in for deliverability. And if we needed to talk about that, I would get somebody from my deliverability team in because they know a heck of a lot more about that than I do.

Andy Splichal:

So when you guys first start with a new client, what are you looking for? I mean, we talked about maybe some of the automated sequences. Is that generally the starting place? And then you look at what kind of broadcast they want as far as setting up a marketing calendar, how's that process go?

Scott Cohen:

Yeah, when we take on what we call a managed services client and that's where we're taking on those broadcast emails, right. We do an initial audit of the program. So we take a look at the last three to six months of what they've been sending out. Because our goal initially always is to get to parity as quickly as possible, like take on the process, get these out, then we focus on improvement from there. Because getting to parity when you're getting into, okay, we want to do some new designs and the early months are always the hardest. But we look at those broadcast emails, we look at their automations, and we start taking notes of this is what they have, this is the performance, here's where we think we can make improvements. Then we also look at their mailing lists, right? We look at how they've built them out. Are they building it out through their website and sort of that organic growth piece or are they trying to take shortcuts, like buying lists, which we never recommend.

Scott Cohen:

In fact, we rarely, if ever, work with companies who that's how they've built their list is they've gone out and bought email addresses. Just not a good idea. It doesn't work anymore, or so rarely works that it's usually an empty bill of goods. We look at unsub rates, we look at bounce rates, all those things, and usually that's where we look and go, okay, their bounce rates are really high. Their unsub rates are really high. I'm guessing that what's an unsupperate like the unsubscribes, right? Yeah, sorry. So unsubscribes. We look at those, we look at the bounce rates, and if those are high, we go.

Scott Cohen:

We probably either have a deliverability issue, which could be just from sending practices that aren't great, or it's usually a combination of things, but those are the things we look at and we go, okay, this is what's going to sound bad, but what we're up against, right? Okay, this is the current state of the program. Where can we start making improvements?

Andy Splichal:

What about AI? Have you guys looked at how to incorporate AI in your offerings?

Scott Cohen:

AI, because we don't resell anybody. We're not a software company. It's more learning about the platforms that are using AI. So we get clients that go, yeah, I've been doing some writing through Chat, GPT and things of that sort, and we have an understanding of where that falls in. Some platforms are launching, I believe Marketo is one of them that they're launching. AI built automation journeys now. So based on what they know from customer engagement and everything, they'll build out journeys. I haven't seen it in action yet, but I know that I think it's starting to roll out in beta.

Scott Cohen:

So those are the things we're keeping track of and just seeing what the true effects are. I think AI is still very much I mean, I think for everybody, nobody's fully sure what it's supposed to do yet.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you have a favorite success story of a client you could share?

Scott Cohen:

I'll give you one, but I think it's important to it's actually more from my brand side, but we see these types of stories all the time, but really big wins are really rare. I've been doing this for 15 years, and that sort of astronomical win is rare. So I think everyone thinks, especially when they sign up with an agency, that it's going to be, oh, I'm going to sign up with you, and I'll go from a two X to a 20 X overnight. And in some cases that's happened, but in most cases it's about that sustained incremental growth. But sort of a nice little short success story would be I was working with a mattress retailer and they had this pillow that they added in a little riser, right, to make it a taller pillow. And they wanted to send it to everybody like, hey, promote this new riser. And I went, It doesn't really make sense because if they go and buy the pillow new, they get the riser. Now, why don't we target everyone who bought the pillow before and say, hey, for a small cost, you can get this riser and make it taller.

Scott Cohen:

You've been asking for it. Here it is. We sent that out to the previous buyers group, and like I said, one of those rare just absolutely crushed it. A conversion rate you don't see on true broadcast emails, right? Like 510 X better in terms of conversion rate for orders. And the people didn't just order those. It was a $15 product, and the average order value was like $60, right? So it didn't just drive the orders of what we were promoting, but other things. So those are the types of things those are the types of strategies we employ when it makes sense of, oh, you have this new product, who's it for? Who should buy on both new customer side and existing customer side, who does this fit for? And we really try to push email in that direction. That relevance piece you had mentioned, conversion.

Andy Splichal:

Rate, I'm curious, on average, what kind of open rate do you see on broadcast emails and what kind of conversion rates?

Scott Cohen:

So Opens are directional at best, is how I would describe them. So particularly when iOS 15, and I think that was two years ago now, went live, they implemented mail privacy protection on the Apple Mail piece. So what you would find is that your Opens and Opens vary by brand. They vary by industry, of course, right. But they're inflated now. So what, you had your benchmarks before, let's say you were getting 15% open rate, about six to twelve months after iOS 15 went live and people adopted no privacy protection. You were talking about 25% open rate, 30% open rate. And I found, for example, sometimes it depends on which, when I was working on the brand side, I had sometimes where, for no apparent reason, the promotional email would end up in Gmail Updates.

Scott Cohen:

And people are more likely to open an Updates email than a promotions email because people compartmentalize and go, I'll come to promotions when I'm ready. And so whenever we would have this big uptick in Open, we would go, oh, we must have hit the Updates folder, because a large percentage of the audience was Gmail. And that's true for everybody. Everybody in Ecom, you're at least 50% Gmail.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how do you get into that folder?

Scott Cohen:

How do you get into updates?

Andy Splichal:

How do you get into updates?

Scott Cohen:

You have no control over that. Anybody who comes to you and says, you can get into the primary folder in Gmail, they're lying to you. It's just Gmail's algorithm continues to get better to where promotions doesn't really hurt you. Because if we hit Updates, our conversion rate didn't go up, right? We just had an influx of opens, but they weren't purchasing. So I always go with opens are directional, particularly if you're testing subject lines, because you can go, okay, here's my benchmark of, yeah, they might be inflated, but we usually see 35%, maybe it's 40%. Whatever it might be, whatever your benchmark is, if it starts dropping off, we do know, I believe that mail privacy protection, if you hit spam, it doesn't auto open. Essentially what mail privacy protection did was just auto open something, but you wouldn't know if it was actually opened because it's a pixel, right? It's a pixel in the email. If you drop off, suddenly, you go, okay, I'm having some deliverability issues, but you could go, oh, if we did get a raise over our normal types of subject lines, you can take with a grain of salt and go, well, maybe the actual Opens aren't that great, but directionally, this type of subject line is working better.

Andy Splichal:

So what is a piece of actionable advice you'd give listeners on how they could see quick results on their email marketing here in the holidays.

Scott Cohen:

If you don't have it, get your cart abandoned up running right away, because especially during holiday, you have more shoppers on the site, you have more traffic on the site. Get a cart abandoned in place, get a checkout abandoned in place. Maybe further down the line, but not right now. Get a browse abandoned in place. If you have a ton of people on your list and a ton of traffic, but cart and checkout abandon, especially during holly, when people are unsure, they're looking at a bunch of things, but they're unsure of where to pull the trigger. That's one of the low hanging fruit pieces. The number of people that we work with that don't have a welcome in place, that don't have a card abandoned in place. Get those foundational pieces in play.

Scott Cohen:

It's not a huge lift in terms of work, and it pays dividends almost immediately.

Andy Splichal:

Now, over the next year, what changes do you foresee coming in the email marketing industry?

Scott Cohen:

I think AI is going to it still remains to be determined what's going to happen there. But you have AI for content building, the automation building. Like I said, those are the pieces. I think it's worth continuing to watch and seeing how those grow and be implemented into the day to day. Know with mail privacy protection, it's a continued uphill battle to get know there's this push for the the cookie is going away right here in the know. I think at the beginning of the year, they're going to start rolling out google claims they're going to start rolling out the cookie. I think they're going to do a small, I think it's like 1%, and they're going to see how much impact it has on their business. And I'm going to guess they're going to roll back the rollback or I don't know.

Scott Cohen:

But with iOS 17, they started implementing some tracking parameter blocking. So some platforms that have unique think like HubSpot and Marketo and a few others can't think off the top of my head there, but they have some specific you think about UTM parameters, but they have some specific appends on links that are going to get blocked by Apple, right? Like stripped out for tracking. So make sure you have your UTM tracking that's rock solid with Google and everything else so you can get as good of Attribution as you can. But I think that 2024 is going to continue that push into marketers. Don't need visibility, it's going to become an increased challenge to track everything.

Andy Splichal:

So who is your ideal client at inbox army? Who are you working with?

Scott Cohen:

Again? We have clients across 40 different platforms. We have clients across all industries. Given that we are really strong on that production type play, we do really well with obviously ecommerce and retailers. If you're an email marketing agency, that's what you do. But we also support clients in finance and travel and hospitality. And across the board, I would say there's no perfect single client. We view everyone that there's opportunity to grow everybody's program. And so we like to I mean, a perfect client is someone who comes in and they're happy and we can keep them happy and make them grow.

Andy Splichal:

And how does your guys'fee structure work right now?

Scott Cohen:

It's either sort of a project based or we do retainer based. So sometimes we can do managed services on like a three month agreement that goes month to month where, hey, we're going to send four campaigns, four messages a month for you guys, right? And then we can build an automation of, oh, you want a three message automation? We'll do that as a project and build it out for you. We do have some several clients that go on retainer with us and then we have teams that just support them for up to certain hours and we do everything right. That's where that flexibility comes in of, hey, if you just need someone to be your email team, we can do that too and then build whatever you want to build or whatever. We agree, we'll make recommendations and go, hey, you need a welcome series, or hey, let's add you have two emails in your car to bin and let's add one more for now, then add another one later. Or in some cases they have very long drawn out customer lifecycles and decision. That consideration period can be a much longer time, especially for the larger purchases. We can support that as well.

Andy Splichal:

And what kind of budget should they be expecting to run this?

Scott Cohen:

You're talking probably a minimum engagement of $1,500 a month at least. And like I said, we're not the cheapest out there, but we're certainly not the most expensive. And we provide flexibility.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you. Guys?

Scott Cohen:

Pretty simple. Go to inboxarmy.com. You can see our list of services there. Fill out a form, schedule a call, let us know that you heard me here and if you want to come find me directly. I'm on LinkedIn? Of course. So LinkedIn.com in Scottcohen 13. Great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been a lot of fun, Scott. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Scott Cohen:

No, I think it's been great to chat and email is such a I like to say email is kind of like the offensive lineman of marketing, right? Like, a lot of times eyes aren't on us unless something goes wrong, but we really pave the way for everything else to work. So don't overlook email, especially your e commerce. You need email, get email. Get your email ducks in a row as soon as you can.

Andy Splichal:

I like that analogy. All right, well, thank you for joining us today, Scott.

Scott Cohen:

Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Scott or InboxArmy, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and include each of their contact information. In case you would like more information, any of the services I have discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.