0:00:03 SALENA KNIGHT: Hey there, and welcome to the bringing business to retail podcast. If you’re looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing, and ultimately take control of your retail or e commerce business, then you’re in the right place. I’m Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level.
0:00:33 SALENA KNIGHT: I’ll provide you with the strategies, the tools, and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started?
0:00:52 SALENA KNIGHT: Yesterday, when I opened my emails, I did what I do most days. I opened up my work email and I quickly scanned through to see if there was anything important. And then I bulk deleted, I don’t know, somewhere from 50 to 100 emails. And then I headed over to my personal email, which I generally use to subscribe to things of a personal nature, things like newsletters or to get family updates. And again, I scanned through.
0:01:19 SALENA KNIGHT: I think I highlighted three emails and then just bulk deleted all the rest. Now, if you’re anything like me, there’s a pretty good chance that you do exactly the same thing. I mean, our inboxes are completely flooded these days and so it’s really easy to see why some people think that email is dead. Am I right? But fast forward to this morning. And I was on the lookout for a really specific item for Lana’s upcoming birthday.
0:01:49 SALENA KNIGHT: Now, if you have ever had to buy a present for a 16 year old girl, you know that you have to start assessing the landscape really early. You might think that you have the perfect gift and you casually mention it in a conversation, and then you look at them and they roll their eyes. Trends change so quickly. And what I find is any of the books that are on my list generally have been bought by the time it’s the birthday.
0:02:17 SALENA KNIGHT: And if you ask a teenager what they want, unless it is something extravagant, they usually just shrug their shoulders. I mean, this happens for us every birthday and every Christmas. Now, my life at 16 was very different to my child’s. I didn’t have my family asking me what I wanted for my birthday. My focus. I wasn’t living at home. My focus was earning enough money to be able to make sure I can pay my rent and pay my bills and buy food.
0:02:46 SALENA KNIGHT: So I do have to say that this buying for a teenager is a very new experience for me. Now, when you couple that with the fact that mind reading of my child seemed to have stopped, oh, I don’t know, when she became a teenager, it means for me, I have to start looking for birthday and Christmas presents right now. But this year, I think I have finally come up with the perfect gift. So as I scanned my emails, my personal emails, I checked to see if there were any emails that mentioned deals on this brand or this item that I wanted. I was kind of open to different brands, but I knew the specific item that I wanted.
0:03:29 SALENA KNIGHT: And sure enough, today was the day. There was one email from the company that I wanted to purchase from. So what did I do? I clicked, I browsed, I chose a color and I purchased. Now, despite deleting, I don’t know, dozens of their emails over the past few months, I was still on their waiting list. On their waiting list, I was still on their mailing list, and I was just waiting for the right offer to hit me at the right time.
0:04:01 SALENA KNIGHT: Now, here’s the thing. This product is not a product that you would buy very often. In fact, I’m going to go so far as to say you might buy one every five or ten years. And I won’t tell you what it is because I know that she can hear from the next room. If you are anything like me, bulk deleting emails is an everyday occurrence. In fact, I probably do it twice a day. But we are marketers, my friend. We are business owners. We buy things in a completely different way than other people do.
0:04:32 SALENA KNIGHT: We view the world of retail and e commerce through a vastly different lens to the one that our customers do. Now, as someone who gets to peek behind the scenes of retail and e commerce businesses all around the world doing six, seven and eight figures, I can safely tell you that there are stores that pay attention to their email marketing and they make it part of their marketing strategy rather than just an ad hoc task that they do when they have time to, or they do when they remember, or they do when they have a product launch, these people, the businesses that do email. Well, guess how much money comes from email marketing for these companies.
0:05:17 SALENA KNIGHT: Wanna have a guess? 20%? No. 25%? I thought it was around 20%, I have to be honest. But I did some deep diving and it is not 20%. Around one third of their total overall revenue comes from email marketing. Now, I don’t know about you, but that number was way more than I expected it to be. It was stunning for me. It was so out of my realm of consciousness that I actually went into several different accounts, email accounts, and checked that this was an across the board occurrence. And when I could see that there were multiple clients of ours hitting these numbers, I went and did some benchmarking. I went and did some research, and sure enough, companies that do email marketing, well, one freaking third of their revenue comes from email.
0:06:18 SALENA KNIGHT: And let’s remember, email marketing does not cost anywhere near as much as paid ads. Not to say that I don’t think you should have paid ads in your strategy. Email marketing is a heck of a lot easier than social media marketing. And again, I’m not saying that you should have that in your marketing strategy. What I am saying is that one third of these companies revenues, and not just one, not just two, this was a benchmark, an industry benchmark that I went and got from several sources. I looked at Klaviyo, I looked at campaign Monitor, I look at Omnisend. I think I looked at five different email platforms to find out that that number is pretty consistent. And I don’t know about you, but I think that is a lot.
0:07:03 SALENA KNIGHT: So when I read this, I knew I had to put together this episode. And I’m going to be completely selfish here. This episode is not just for you, but it is for me too. Because I know that we have gaps in our marketing. Even though I know what our customer journey looks like, we have mapped it out. We have all the different mind maps that show us what the customer journey looks like for different people.
0:07:29 SALENA KNIGHT: But I also know where we are dropping the ball. And our email marketing, I am sad to say, is one of those areas where we are falling down, which means we are missing out on six or seven figures worth of revenue just because we are dropping the ball. But it also means that we are missing out on helping thousands of people who are looking to grow their retail e commerce businesses, people who need help, people who are drowning in overwhelm and confusion and work, people who have checked out of their business as we’ve been growing.
0:08:06 SALENA KNIGHT: I know I’ve dropped the email ball. It’s my job to make sure that this business works. It’s my job to make sure that this business brings in revenue. And I’m going to put my hand up and say email wasn’t my priority. I have been so focused on making sure our systems and processes are right and training my team and hiring people and moving to the next level that I, I haven’t been focusing on connecting with you and helping retail and ecommerce store owners just like you to move the needle forward. And so for that, I am deeply sorry.
0:08:43 SALENA KNIGHT: But let me make it up to you with this episode. Because in this episode, I want to distill everything that I unearthed in my research when I spent about a week really refining what is working for these companies when it comes to email marketing. So I want to give you the four key takeaways that I learned from looking at these businesses, from getting down and dirty. For these businesses that are getting 30% of their revenue from email marketing, what are they doing?
0:09:13 SALENA KNIGHT: So that you and I can leverage email marketing as well as they do, so that we can sell more and we can have happier customers. Let’s jump in. Number one, first and foremost is personalization. When I grab a chai from the little cafe at the gym, the barista, his name is Luca, he is always there. I don’t know if he ever takes holidays, but he always seems to be there, even though I go at all different times of the day and he always remembers my order.
0:09:44 SALENA KNIGHT: Now, that might not seem strange, but here’s the thing. I only order a chai maybe twice a month. I’m not talking. I’m not the regular every single day kind of person. And I like my chai to be a skim chai, extra hot. What is it with baristas that make lukewarm milk? I’m sorry, but not on my watch. In fact, Luca is so amazing. He makes these little heart shaped cookies. They are probably only, I might like the size of your thumbnail, but he makes them himself and he brings them into work.
0:10:17 SALENA KNIGHT: And every time he would put one on my coffee, and every time I would have to say, I’m sorry, I can’t eat that. Can you please take it back? And then I would have to wipe the lid to make sure there was no gluten on there. And he said to me one day, if I was to make these vegan and gluten free, would you take one? And im like, well, hell yeah. Dont worry about the vegan part. But yeah, I totally appreciate that. If you did that, I would like it. And he put one on my chai and he said, well, there you go.
0:10:44 SALENA KNIGHT: And that was amazing to me because I am not his highest spending customer like I am. Im like a dollar, nine a month customer. But here he was, he was listening to his customer and he was changing what he was doing to be able to meet as many people where they’re at as possible. Even though there is another cafe literally eleven steps away. I know because I counted for this episode. It is that feeling of, hey, he gets me.
0:11:17 SALENA KNIGHT: He was prepared to do something different to make me feel special. And of course, it means I will always go back, not just for the cookies, but because someone took the time to listen to what I wanted and was prepared to give it to me. We all like it when someone cares. It doesn’t matter how small the gesture is. In this case, it was like the size of my thumbnail and personalization in your emails does just that.
0:11:45 SALENA KNIGHT: Think about it. Is Rachel really going to feel valued when you’re giving 10% off to every new customer? But meanwhile, she has spent $1,000 with you in the last month, yet every time she goes to your website, bam. In the face, you stick and opt in for people to get 10% off? Probably not. I mean, it is really like a slap in the face for your really good customers. So whether it is a different new product campaign based on previous purchase history, or an abandoned cart, email flow for existing customers versus new customers, or if their cart contains more than your free shipping threshold or less, spending that little bit of extra time looking at the customer journey and crafting those different offers can literally make you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
0:12:39 SALENA KNIGHT: Now, honestly, with platforms like Klaviyo making it so easily to personalize emails, I would have thought the vast majority of retail and e commerce store marketers would be using this function. But no, the stats say less than 40% of retail and ecommerce stores actually use personalization. So simply implementing personalization is going to put you ahead of 60% of other brands who don’t personalize their email marketing. So we are one step closer to increasing our revenue through the power of email marketing with personalization, what’s next?
0:13:19 SALENA KNIGHT: Number two is separating and segmenting your email list. Now you might not know this, but I have terrible allergies. I do not go anywhere without a tissue in my pocket and a hay fever tablet on hand. I have them stashed everywhere. I don’t use a handbag, but I have them in my car glove box. I have them in Ed’s glove box. I have them in my gym bag. I have a hay fever tablet pretty much everywhere. If I’m not taking them every day because it is hay fever season, I always have one on hand.
0:13:49 SALENA KNIGHT: So it probably wouldn’t surprise you when I said, as much as I would love to be, I don’t buy perfume anymore. What’s the point if I put it on? Even just walking through the beauty aisle in a department store can literally send me into a sneezing fit, which can then bring on an asthma attack. So I’m not interested in perfume, but I am interested in foundation. Especially now that my skin is changing.
0:14:16 SALENA KNIGHT: Now take that into consideration. What do you think is going to happen if you sell perfume and foundation but you send me an email all about perfume? Well, it is likely that I am just going to delete it and move on. And not only is it just noise in my inbox, something that I don’t want to read, but what is going to happen? I’m just going to delete your email just like I said I did yesterday when I bulk deleted a whole bunch of stuff that there was no, I wasn’t in the market to purchase, so I just bulk deleted.
0:14:53 SALENA KNIGHT: And when that happens, your deliverability of your emails actually drops. And deliverability is how the algorithm decides whether you end up in someone’s inbox, in their promotions tab, in Gmail or even in their spam. Or it could just disappear into the email ether and never get delivered. Deliverability is determined by how many people open and click your emails. So the more people who open and click, the more inboxes you will end up in moving forward.
0:15:27 SALENA KNIGHT: So sending me irrelevant perfume emails also increases your unsubscribe list. Like if you send me so many of them that I just think you don’t know what I want, they will get to a point where I just unsubscribe. Now that is not what you want. That is the opposite of what you want. Because every person on your database has cost you money. So the minute they leave their database, you are losing money.
0:15:53 SALENA KNIGHT: Whereas when you start to segment your list, now that could be something like one of my favorites is vip’s versus bargain hunters. You need both. They serve different purposes in your business, but the campaigns that you will send to your vip’s would be very different to the campaigns you would send to your bargain hunters. The other thing I like to do is category types like beauty versus fragrances or even a customer’s geographical location.
0:16:22 SALENA KNIGHT: The other one I really, really like is people who have visited your website and browsed more frequently. Or you could just have people who have purchased more frequently. You will get more people opening and clicking your emails and your conversion rate will go up as a result if you segment your email list, which means you are going to be moving closer to that 30% of revenue from email. Okay, each one of these tips builds on the last. So so far we have personalization and then we had separating and segmenting our email list. So what are we going to do next?
0:17:01 SALENA KNIGHT: Action. Item number three is all about you making money while you sleep. That is my favorite way to make money. So what do I mean by that? Well, automated emails and flows. When I was looking up the stats between how much money campaigns and promotions make, those are the emails that you would be creating fresh every time you send an email. So they’re not on autopilot, versus those automated emails, the ones that are on autopilot, like your welcome sequence or your abandoned cart sequence, the revenue from those was about 50 50, according to Klaviyo. So 50 50% of revenue coming from those promotional emails and 50% coming from automated flows.
0:17:47 SALENA KNIGHT: In fact, for most retailers, the abandoned cart email flow is the highest generating automated workflow. So let me ask you this, how much time and effort have you spent on that abandoned cart flow? Yes, one of the first things that you can do after listening to this episode. But how do you know if an automated flow is actually working? And this is where I believe it is really important for you to know industry averages and benchmarks.
0:18:18 SALENA KNIGHT: So, for example, an abandoned cart email sent within an hour can see a 20.3% conversion rate. So a 20% conversion rate? Oh my gosh, who doesn’t want a 20% conversion rate? If you send an email within an hour? Now, when you compare that to an email that you might send 24 hours later. So if you don’t send that first email, if you’re going to wait a day to see if the person really wants the product, your conversion rate is going to drop to around 12%.
0:18:50 SALENA KNIGHT: That’s just a little less, a little bit more than half. So, for example, as simple as that, could increase, what will increase your revenue? If I can just Sidebar here. When it comes to email automations, when it comes to those automated workflows, what we have found in our organization to be really helpful. Now, this may not work for you, but I just wanted to say that this is something that has really worked for us and that is for these automated sequences.
0:19:20 SALENA KNIGHT: And in fact, you could do this even for your campaigns, is actually creating the email sequence inside of a Google Doc. So putting all of the copy and the creators into a Google Doc, so it is really simple to go back and revise them. Once you are testing and measuring, I find it’s just easier to look at the Google Doc and you can scroll down and see one after the other versus having to go into the system, into the workflow, open up every single individual email.
0:19:48 SALENA KNIGHT: So I will then make any changes in a different color in the Google Docs and maybe it’s a strike through or we do it in a different color usually. And once those are implemented into the workflow, so I won’t go and do those. But I might be tweaking the copy based on something that I’ve said recently or something new that I’ve learned. The new document is then updated. So we’ll take the once the edit is done, the color comes out and it all goes back to black text.
0:20:18 SALENA KNIGHT: Plus, on top of that, using a mind mapping tool, we’ve used mirror and whimsical. This helps you map out the customer journey and actually create a picture for it. So we’ve actually started embedding the mind map, the image of the mind map, which is the customer journey and where in the customer journey these sequences fit in at the top of every one of those Google documents. So every campaign, every automated flow, we have the image because some people are very visual, so the image really helps them.
0:20:57 SALENA KNIGHT: And what I’ve also found is it’s a really useful tool. This is something we’ve just gone through recently. When you bring on somebody new and they can see at a glance where in the customer journey this sequence fits in, rather than having to untangle a dozen different automations and work out. Does this go first or does this go next? And it’s just so much simpler if you can see a picture and say this is what it looks like and this is this part. So if you wanted to go to the next part, we actually link the next set of documents into that as well. If we are saying that 30% of revenue in total can come from email and 50% of that email is from automations, those automated workflows that make money while you sleep, you start to see how quickly how much money is being left on the table. Am I right? Spending a little bit of time building out those automated flows not only brings in the sales, but it also keeps your store top of mind.
0:21:58 SALENA KNIGHT: If they have looked at an item, put it in their car and then gone off to see if they can get it cheaper, and they forgotten the first store that they looked at it. Something as simple as that email being sent out, that abandoned car email within 1 hour means when they’re ready to purchase, bam, you are in their inbox. Remember, so many retail and ecommerce store owners don’t do this. So you implementing something as simple as an automated flow that brings your customers back, that you have tested and measured, that doesn’t have to be a discount. Let me just say that it doesn’t have to be a discount. But when you’re looking at what brings people back, then you can see that if you spent a little bit of time and effort that you could be bringing in a heck of a lot more money.
0:22:45 SALENA KNIGHT: Okay, so far we have had personalization, separating and segmenting your email list and then just looking at those automated flows because they’re going to bring in 50% of your revenue. That is going to bring me to action item number four, which, dare I say it is, send more emails, people. According to marketing Sherpa, nearly 50% of consumers say that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite retailers on a weekly basis.
0:23:16 SALENA KNIGHT: If you are sending out an email once a week, well, that’s a really good start because I just said, stats say 49% of consumers say that they want to receive a promotional email from their favorite retailer on a weekly basis. But you have already learned from today’s episode that those consumers are not all the same now, are they? Those customers are at different points in their customer journey. Those customers are big spenders.
0:23:44 SALENA KNIGHT: Some of them are bargain hunters. For some of these customers, there might be automated emails going out. But for a customer to receive one email a week, it does not mean that you only have to send one email a week. Because remember, we are personalizing, we are segmenting. We have those automated workflows. So you might be sending out an email to your vip list, you might be sending out an email to the bargain hunters and you might have those email automated emails going out. That is three emails a week that you need to be sending to be able to make sure that you are making the most amount of money. So when I say customers need to receive one email a week, that does not mean you only have to send one email a week because we are not doing the blast and batch anymore, right? We are personalizing these emails.
0:24:34 SALENA KNIGHT: Once your email list is segmented and you have invested that time into personalization, it is likely that you’re probably going to need to send around about three emails a week. And this is of course excluding things like if you’re having a product launch, that’s a very different scenario. I’m talking your generic bog standard. Let’s just do this thing. Make sure that we are hitting our customers every single week. We are in their inboxes and they are opening. We are crafting the right offers at the right time.
0:25:05 SALENA KNIGHT: So remember, some of those emails are going to be automated emails. You’ve already written those. They’re going to make you money while you sleep. Now, I know that sending three emails a week sounds like a lot, but think about what your business would look like if you had up to 45% more revenue at the end of the year. Now, some of you might be thinking, well, hold on, sal, you said 30% of total revenue. How did you get to 45%?
0:25:33 SALENA KNIGHT: Well, because 35% of total revenue is 35% of that new higher number, that higher revenue that you will be generating with your email marketing, rather than just 30% more than what you’re doing right now. But heck, who’s not going to be happy with 30% more revenue than what you’re doing? But you can stretch that if you do this. Well, if you implement these systems, you can get that up to potentially 40, 45%.
0:26:03 SALENA KNIGHT: So let’s just recap. Here are your action items. First of all, I want you to work out your overall revenue that currently comes from email. Now then, do a bit of reverse engineering. I love reverse engineering. What would it look like if you increased that to be 30% of total revenue? You’re going to have to do a little bit of math here. It’s not just add 30%, although that’s a really good place to start. Right.
0:26:29 SALENA KNIGHT: The next thing I want you to do is benchmark your business, because different verticals, different niches, different products, different industries have different open rates, they have different conversion rates. So I want you to benchmark where you fit in, which vertical you’re in against the other people in your industry. Now, I know that Klaviyo releases benchmarks, and I’m pretty sure pretty much every email service provider releases benchmarks every single year, sometimes even every quarter. Some of those stats come out every quarter. So if you haven’t done that, I want you to go ahead and do that now.
0:27:01 SALENA KNIGHT: And if you haven’t already, I want you to map out your customer journey. I mean, this is something that we do inside of scale, your store and our five x framework. And it is always eye opening to everyone that the offers that they’re sending are not matching up to where their customers are at. And something as simple as matching those offers to the right person at the right time can make a huge difference to your revenue.
0:27:26 SALENA KNIGHT: So find out where are those key areas where you know customers are likely to buy. And then I want you to implement my four action steps. So once you’ve done the background work, once you’ve, you know, you’ve got to put the effort in, because there’s no point putting the effort in if you’ve got the wrong data moving forward. So then we’re going to personalize. You’re going to separate and segment your email list. You’re going to put those automated flows into practice, and you’re going to send more emails.
0:27:54 SALENA KNIGHT: And action step number five is please, please, please always track and measure your results. Because if your abandoned cart flow is not hitting industry benchmark, you can’t just set and forget. You have to be tweaking it. You have to get it to at least what the benchmark is or above. A word of caution here, because I keep saying new from someone who has made this mistake way too many times, email marketing is one of the easiest roles to set.
0:28:25 SALENA KNIGHT: KPI’s for. KPI’s are goals and targets. Like this is what I’m going to measure your success against. And because of that, it can be really easy to outsource. It can be easier than pretty much any other role in your business because you have those clear parameters, you have those goals. You know what this person needs to be bringing you in and you can benchmark it against other industry standards. Now what I have mistakenly done in the past, and I don’t want you to do, is to just allocate emails to a team member without KPI’s.
0:28:59 SALENA KNIGHT: I have also taken on the role of email marketing myself. Now, at the same time, it kind of seemed like a no brainer and I, I regret doing it. Not to say that there’s not a role for me to play in email marketing, but it is not my highest performing role in this business. In fact, our email marketers are better than I am at it. I am not going to necessarily take the time to test and measure, to send out different subject lines, to try different colored buttons.
0:29:33 SALENA KNIGHT: The other thing that I’ve seen people do is just allocate this to someone on their team and that sort of seemed like a no brainer. Well, I’m paying someone $30 an hour instead of just standing around when the store’s not busy or there’s no orders to pack, they can just write me some emails. Now, an experienced email marketer who’s on retainer might be 90 or $100 an hour, and you might think that that is too much to pay.
0:29:59 SALENA KNIGHT: But here’s the thing. An experienced email marketer is in the software all day long. They know the tweaks, they know the shortcuts. If they are Ecom specific, they know what is working across different accounts and they can leverage that. They can see that, oh, I’m working with this jewelry brand over here, and we tried this. We could try this with your beauty brand. They have the time to test campaigns. They have the time to build out product launches to recents, to segment those lists, to personalize.
0:30:33 SALENA KNIGHT: And if you are going to take on that role when you don’t have the time to truly dedicate the result to getting the results that you want, or if you are going to just give this to someone who isn’t experienced in this area because it just seems like easier and cheaper and you really don’t want to do it. My word of caution here is when that happens, you are starting from a base level of knowledge that either is how much knowledge you have or how much knowledge your team has and it takes maybe months but I’m going to say years to get the level of knowledge to do this well where you are bringing in 30% of your total revenue from email. So think about it.
0:31:15 SALENA KNIGHT: Are you prepared for the opportunity cost, the lost sales and the lost revenue that comes with a knowledge debt? And likewise, if you think that you are experienced and you decide to train someone in house, then the cap of your campaigns is always going to be you. Easier how much you know and it is unlikely that you are truly spending the time to analyze what’s working, tweaking buttons, tweaking copy segmenting down to really small niches and personalizing it to make sure you get the best results and analyzing those results easy. You can pay someone $30 to knock up an email and check a box because Sal said you should be doing email marketing and maybe you might make a few hundred dollars. Maybe you might make a couple of thousands of dollars easy. Or you can pay three times more and get a ten x return.
0:32:10 SALENA KNIGHT: Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying forgo email marketing if you can’t afford to hand this to someone experienced. This is one of those times when something is better than nothing and with the action steps that you’ve gotten from all of the research that I’ve done, you can seriously lift your email game and revenue. But please put a plan in place to have that role fulfilled by someone who does have the time and the knowledge and the resources to get you the return on investment that you want to get you the amount of money that you need to get you that 30% of total revenue from email marketing.
0:32:50 SALENA KNIGHT: Easy. There you have it my friends. This is the strategy that I will be putting in place in our business in the next couple of weeks and I hope that it has helped you as well. Before I go, can I just say, if you have listened to more than three episodes of this podcast and you have not left me a review, can I please, please, please ask you to take 30 seconds out of your day just to click that button, leave me a review because the more reviews that we get, the more retailers that we can help.
0:33:20 SALENA KNIGHT: Don’t let me be the best kept secret. Alrighty, thank you so much again for joining me here today. I would love it if you could send me a DM if you put any of these strategies in place and let me know the results. Alrighty. I’ll catch you next week. So that’s a wrap.
0:33:39 Salena Knight: I’d love to hear what insight you’ve gotten from this episode and how you’re going to put it into action. If you’re a social kind of person, follow me, Heselena Knight, and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice.
0:34:08 Salena Knight: Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e commerce stores just like yours that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it’s a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. I’ll see you on the next episode.