Essential Emails Every Business Should Be Sending with Emily Farrell

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is essential emails every business should be sending. Today's guest is an email expert with a knack for driving growth and engagement for e commerce startups. With over five years of experience with multiple brands, she has honed her skills in crafting compelling email campaigns that not only capture attention, but also prospects into loyal customers. In addition, she is make each click count University's newest instructor. A big welcome to Emily Farrell. Hi Emily.

Emily Farrell:

Hey Andy, thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, you're welcome. Hey, let's get right into it. Your new masterclass three essential email flows every business needs goes over essential emails that every business should be sending to their customers. What are those emails and what makes them essential?

Emily Farrell:

Well, the three emails that I cover in my masterclass or the email flows are the welcome flow, abandoned cart flow, and the post purchase flow. And of course, these aren't the only emails. All the email automations that you need, you might need more. But I think that these emails really cover essential or crucial points along the marketing funnel that kind of comprehensively nurture your customers, take them along that customer journey, recover lost sales and encourage more sales. So I feel like for ecommerce brands specifically, these three flows really cover those foundational points that you need.

Andy Splichal:

How many emails are involved in each flow?

Emily Farrell:

So it depends. I change it up depending on the brands that I'm working with. But in general, I think for your welcome flow I would do like four to five emails. I like to include a founder story because I really like to personalize the brand as much as possible. So if there is a founder story to be told, I add that in as an email for your abandoned carts. If there's an opportunity to add an incentive to recover lost sales, then the flow will be a little bit longer. So again, three to four emails and then post purchase, probably four emails. If the ecommerce brand has an affiliate program or like some kind of referral program at play, I'll include those emails too, so that we can encourage word of mouth referrals.

Andy Splichal:

Now, I sometimes hear people say that email is dead and you should spend your time in business focusing on other marketing channels. Why have you decided to focus so much on email?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, well, I mean, email, I think if you have to look at it holistically, email is definitely not the only channel that you should be looking at. It is primarily a retention channel. So you do need to be working with other channels on top of funnel acquisition. But I think the kind of stat that overcomes this misconception is that I think it's, for every $1 you spend on email, you get a $36 return.

Andy Splichal:

Wow.

Emily Farrell:

So it still is the, like, significantly. It still is a significantly higher return on investment. But, yeah, like I said, I think, yeah, you need to look at it holistically. As social media becomes more and more saturated, there's an opportunity with email to really create a community and to take your customers on a journey and to build relationships. I believe that email is the channel to do that. So that's why I still believe it's got legs.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how important do you believe that the email service provider, the ESP, is for business marketing emails?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, I mean, it is important. I think it's quite an easy decision for me. I use Klaviyo for most of my ecommerce brands that I work with. I've also used omnisend and mailchimp a little bit, but I prefer klaviyo. You need to choose an ESP that kind of goes or meets all the technical requirements for good deliverability of your emails. Because if it's not doing the domain authentication, you're going to struggle with spam emails landing in people's spam folders. And this is something to become more aware of now because I know that, like, Gmail is locking down on spam and domain sender and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, so like I said, for me it's an easy decision.

Emily Farrell:

Klaviyo works very well. It's got very good analytics, the automations are intuitive, and yeah, it works very well for me.

Andy Splichal:

Now, how important is segmenting your email list when it comes to sending emails?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, well, this goes in line with personalizing your content to really meet your different, little different groups of your audience. Um, so, yeah, I think you, the most basic level of this is that you want to segment your engaged versus unengaged subscribers probably send more emails to your engaged subscribers. And depending on the products that you have and the, the variation that you have, you can look at like segmenting based on interest and then sending out targeted emails to, to these different interest groups. There's a lot of. Yeah, it is a very important thing, I think, because personalizing. Because you can personalize emails, you should.

Andy Splichal:

Be doing that now without giving away too many of the secrets of your masterclass. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of email design and finding your business voice when it comes to email marketing? Yeah.

Emily Farrell:

Well, you know, the design of an email plays a role in how your message is received. You want to capture attention. You want people to actually read the content that you've put out there. So you need to put it out there in a compelling way. Yeah, I think you want to pay attention to things like fonts and colors and images. You want the design of your email to have some kind of consistency so that people are having, like, a consistent brand experience across different channels. And then finding your business voice is equally important. This is just like the personality and tone of your brand.

Emily Farrell:

I think the one thing to remember is that it's still people. Even if you have an idea about who your business is and, like, the tone that you have, it's still real customers reading that content at the end of the day. So you really need to tailor your copy and your voice to what your customers want to hear because people are just not going to read things that don't interest them. So, yeah, I think, yeah, that's an important thing to think about when you're writing copy.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that's a great tip. Now, when you're working with your private clients, do you design just based on a template in Klaviyo or do you go a step further with the design? Are you testing how, how does that all work?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. I've. I've been doing quite a bit of testing because there's, like, a way up between building within Klaviyo's, like block builder, versus building on an external platform, like, like a design tool like Figma, and then just importing images. So I've been testing between the two. I find that, like, image based emails do work quite well if you focus predominantly on images and then include some text, too, just because with the image based emails you can actually design something pretty beautiful and that pulls people in. The one thing to keep in mind that you have is that you have to compress your image based emails and make sure that the file size isn't too big else you're going to land in spam. But I tend to do a few different things.

Emily Farrell:

So for some flows I'll do a test between an image and text base and then only image based. But like I said, what I'm finding is that the image based stuff works quite well.

Andy Splichal:

You know, I know that one thing that business owners sometimes worry about is sending too many emails. How many is too many? Is there too many, I guess is the first. And how many is too many?

Emily Farrell:

I think it, I think it really depends on the, on the brand. You know, I think a small brand with a small audience or email list is going to reach that like saturation point quite quickly. I guess the answer to that, which isn't really an answer, is that you just have to test and see when your metrics start to deteriorate. So yeah, it depends.

Andy Splichal:

Now, what would be a piece of actionable advice that you would give someone thinking about expanding their email marketing efforts?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, again, it probably depends. And the first thing I would do is try and diagnose where the potential is within your email marketing strategy. So if you're a very early stage brand with a very small email list, maybe you've got that top of funnel traffic, but you're not driving people anywhere or you're not capturing emails, then what I would do is definitely look at setting up a lead magnet and setting up a welcome flow that just nurtures customers and introduces them to the brand. If you're a little bit further along, then I would look at segmenting and kind of testing different types of content, whether that's case studies or educational content or promotional content, and then slowly increasing the number of emails, like we were just saying, until you reach that, that saturation point, you know, the.

Andy Splichal:

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Emily Farrell:

No, I just, just one, one thing I wanted to mention is that I know for when people get started, they like just sometimes don't know what to do or what email to write. And there are tools out there, like websites like really good. What's it really good? Emails.com that collect email campaigns from brands and automations that you can then go and look and see what other brands are doing and get some inspiration. So that's also a nice, I guess an actionable tip of like somewhere to start if you're not sure.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, that's a, that's great. Really good emails.com.

Emily Farrell:

Yes.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, I haven't heard of that. You know, I interrupted before I got all excited. You started talking about lead magnets. I know a lot of companies, you know, Shopify stores, etcetera, they'll just put the box, subscribe to my newsletter, which seems to, you know, nobody really wants more emails and nobody typically ever subscribes to those. How, what kind of lead maintenance do you suggest people do to try to grow their subscriber base?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, so again, it, it will depend on the brand, but like for any e commerce brand, you definitely want to have a first order discount. So some kind of like monetary incentive that will get people to give you their email address. That's like the, the most basic one. I think it's, it's like that law of reciprocity where you, you know, you do something for them, they do something for you. You don't just want to be sending them emails. No one, like you said, no one wants more emails in there inbox. But then depending on the brand and the product, I really think that brands can get more creative with the types of lead magnets that they're creating. So whether that's like ebooks, like supplement brands that are helping people do x, you could create ebooks or guides that really support people on their journey to whatever transformation the brand is promising.

Emily Farrell:

I think there's a lot of different ways to add value. Could be videos, could be long form content that is just accessed through a sign up form or some kind of landing page. So I think a lot of brands miss that opportunity because they maybe just have that first order discount pop up, but they don't realize they could be adding more value to people and building that relationship and building trust. So yeah, I like to get a bit creative with the lead magnets that I do.

Andy Splichal:

You know, I had mentioned in the intro that you're the newest contributor to make each click count University with your masterclass, three essential email flows every business needs. Can you take us through the master class? I know you did a little bit, but what somebody could expect to learn by taking that class.

Emily Farrell:

Yeah. So I think it's kind of a comprehensive foundation to email marketing. Like I said, it's your welcome abandoned carton post purchase. So it's just covering the basics so that you're starting to nurture customers, encourage sales, and then also encourage retention through the post purchase flow. And I don't just talk about like what emails I think you should be sending. I actually like walk you through the backend setup. So setting up Klaviyo, setting up that first order lead magnet. Like we were just speaking about the specific settings you need to have in place what that automation actually looks like.

Emily Farrell:

So it's very much like a step by step tutorial.

Andy Splichal:

And why these three pieces? Why these three flows?

Emily Farrell:

I think, like I said, these flows cover like three crucial steps along the customer journey. So when people become aware of your brand, the welcome flow will kind of bring them into your initial community, educate them more, add some more value, and also drive that first purchase through that first order discount. With the abandoned cart flow, what you're able to do is think about what are the objections that someone may have? What's preventing them from making this purchase? And you're able to just remind people, I mean, people are busy, so maybe they forgot, so it's just a reminder. But it's also thinking, how do I overcome whatever friction this person has towards buying? And then post purchase is holding your customer's hand once they've made a purchase. So not just leaving them to figure out the product on their own, it's really creating like a positive brand experience from the point of purchase and beyond. And as I mentioned earlier, you can bring in, you can build in review requests, UGC requests. So this kind of feeds into your other marketing efforts. You can get social proof from them, you can get word of mouth referrals.

Emily Farrell:

So that post purchase flow is really about creating loyal customers and getting them to spread the word, because that's your, ultimately your most powerful form of marketing is people telling people about brands that they love.

Andy Splichal:

Now, who's the ideal person who should take this masterclass?

Emily Farrell:

So it's definitely designed for absolute beginners, as in like if you know nothing, you'd be able to set everything up and have it executed pretty quickly. But I also think that this would be valuable for anyone wanting to give these three flows a nice refresh in terms of design copy, because I run through every single one of the emails and I think about what is the purpose behind this email and what is the message that we want to convey. So I think you can get a lot of ideas of different things that you can do for your automations.

Andy Splichal:

So I'm curious, how did you get involved with email marketing originally?

Emily Farrell:

Yeah, it's been a nice journey. I've been working with e commerce brands for the last five years and I've always enjoyed copywriting and content writing and writing in general. And on the side I was writing b, two b sales funnels for some other clients. So that was kind of my intro into the world of email and I wanted to bring it across for my ecommerce brands that I work with. And then the other nice piece of the puzzle was that I work with a lot of different agencies, like an Amazon agency, Pinterest agency, meta ads agency. So me like stepping up to fill this role of email and retention was a really nice addition to this ecosystem that we have. So that's kind of how I made my way into what I'm doing now.

Andy Splichal:

Now, if somebody listening out there would like to have more information on working with you directly, how could they do that?

Emily Farrell:

So I have actually just done a website refresh, so I'm excited to share that with people. You can find me at the owl agency, as in the Bird Theowl agency, or you can check me out on LinkedIn. It's Emily Farrell, two rs, two ls and yeah, I also have a YouTube channel where I do email marketing and digital marketing tutorials. So that's another way to find me or to learn more about what I do. And that's also under my name, Emily Farrell.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Emily. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap it up today?

Emily Farrell:

I think that's all. Thanks so much for having me.

Andy Splichal:

Well, thank you for joining us. 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 Emily, you will find the link she mentioned in the show notes below. In addition, if you are interested in her masterclass, visit make each click count University where you can currently access her masterclass and all other content for just $19 a month. 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.