Pop Ups Annoy Customers (And Other Stupid Things Ecom Brands Believe)

JOSHUA CHIN

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Joshua Chin

Josh Chin runs Chronos Agency, a lifecycle marketing agency helping eCommerce brands scale profits with email and SMS while doubling your return on adspend. Chronos has generated over $220m in high-margin revenue for hundreds of brands across the globe.

Want to know the secret behind the HIGHEST EVER CONVERTING Klaviyo pop up? You’re going to find out EVERYTHING that went into building it.

Joshua and I went into this episode with the plan to talk about lifecycle marketing. We got there, but not before he casually mentioned that one of the pop ups he created was the highest ever converting.

Um, wait a minute. Stop right there. Let’s dig into this more…

** There are 9 strategies I use when helping retail/e-comm businesses move their stock fast so they can reinvest that money into new business. Head over to https://salenaknight.com/stock to know exactly what those 9 strategies are and how I use them.

Summary/Abstract

Selena Knight is the host of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, where she provides strategies, tools, and insight to help people scale their retail or ecommerce businesses. On today’s episode, Joshua Chin is the guest to discuss lifecycle marketing. Joshua has been on the other side of the table for a long time, so he is not used to being a guest. Selena and Joshua discuss how they both go through phases of wanting to be on the other side of the microphone, and how it can be nerve-wracking not knowing what to talk about. They joke about how it may be because they like to be in control. Joshua then explains how he created a high-converting pop up form for one of Australia’s fastest growing BBC brands. The form was based off of data found on Google Analytics and timed right before an average of 1 minute and 15 seconds of people leaving the site. They also added a person wearing a hoodie to capture more attention. This episode of Bringing Business to Retail provides insight on lifecycle marketing with pointers from Joshua’s experience. The speaker is 27 years old and started their business in 2017. Prior to this, they were selling products on eBay through retail arbitrage. In 2018, they incorporated the business and it took off. They took all the money they had and invested it in courses and books to teach themselves copywriting, shopify, ecommerce, and digital marketing. They got hooked on these skills and saw how they could be improved over time, leading to increasing revenue. The speaker, a university student in Singapore, started Kronos Agency in their third year of university with an idea to serve the market and improve their own copywriting skills. They convinced their childhood friend to become the co-founder and COO and the company quickly grew to a full-time team of 30 people. Before starting his business, the speaker was drop-shipping products using retail arbitrage. He looked for products with a significant number of Average Order Value (AOV) as this allowed him to make a profit from the sales. He also took advantage of the price discrepancies between different marketplaces and tried to source products before people realized the differences. The speaker’s experience with retail arbitrage taught him the importance of taking advantage of short-term imbalances and imperfect information. Selena and the speaker discussed the analytical and creative aspects of copywriting and email marketing. The speaker believes that he is an analytical creative, finding a balance between the two. He believes that copywriting is an art form, but there is also a science to it with metrics and data guiding decisions. The speaker works for a company with over 80 employees and they are obsessed with making the right decisions based on data. Ultimately, the speaker believes that copywriting is an important part of their company, as it dictates how they capture attention.

Highlights

What’s the favorite scent in our collection? That could lead to a conversation that could lead to a sale if done correctly. So you could either automate that process by giving fixed answers, ADC kind of a situation, or open up a conversation that redirects people to your CS team, which is something that we’ve seen brands do, especially if an integration is gorgeous or CS platform like that. It’s fairly easy to do as long as you have the capacity and manpower.
Well, it’s often a revenue based one. The revenue driving SMS is an email that go into a system. The same thing with email. We start with the pre purchase journey, the pop ups, the lead capture, because that’s top of funnel that opens up the floodgates. And then we start looking into the high converting flows like card abandonment, browse abandonment, and then finally post purchase because that’s what keeps customers happy, retains them for the long term, makes customers come back to buy again. And then we start looking at the rest of the journey. And then on top of that, we look at campaigns.
Email gives you a lot of data and a lot of information to work with. For instance, you have behaviors, preferences, sign up forms that allow you to acquire information on clavio. But if you’re treating SMS as a standalone channel, you’re not going to be able to leverage all that information and knowledge about your customers and prospects. But when you combine the two you’re able to create unique personalized journeys through email and SMS that’s timed perfectly, that doesn’t clash against one another.
It’s huge. And I would take it a step further and not think about urge people, not think about SMS as a standalone channel, but as an integrated strategy across email and SMS and ideally with push as well. The reason for that is when you think about SMS as a standalone channel, you often think about flows and triggers, card abandonment and campaigns and that’s as far as it goes. When you combine that with email you’re creating an experience that’s unique to every single subscriber, every single customer that comes through your door.
Yeah, I’m with you. We’re not an e commerce brand obviously when we sell courses, but we also sell consulting and we’ve used SMS for about the last seven or eight months. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s just like to communicate, we use it to send out people’s login details, but sometimes we use it for like a flash sale on a workbook or something. And as long as you don’t abuse it then I think it’s almost the only one where you get almost 100% deliverability and everybody looks at their phone even if they don’t open the text message, you’re there, your offer is there, they have a choice. But email people just delete it. And not to say that I don’t love email marketing like I am preaching to the converter when it comes to email marketing but the difference I have seen using SMS is just remarkably different.

 

DATE: 2023-02-24
DURATION: 2158

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00:00 “Lifecycle Marketing Strategies with Joshua Chin: Exploring the Benefits of Pop-Ups and Other Tactics”

0:03:25 “Interview with Entrepreneur: How a 27-Year-Old Built a Successful Business in Just Two Years”

0:05:52 “Exploring the Journey of an Entrepreneur: A Conversation with [Name] on Retail Arbitrage and Building a Successful Agency”

0:08:39 Heading: Analytical Creative: Combining Creative Copywriting with Data-Driven Decision Making

0:11:00 “Data-Driven Decision Making: A Story of Pop-Ups and Baby Dresses”

0:12:40 Exploring Product-Market Fit: A Conversation with Clayview’s Natalie

0:18:57 Analyzing the Data to Optimize Pop-Up Timing and Offer

0:20:58 Heading: Increasing Conversions Through Lifecycle Marketing

0:24:27 Leveraging Lifecycle Marketing to Increase Profitability: A Conversation on Split Testing, Statistical Significance, and SMS Marketing

0:31:37 “Using SMS to Drive Revenue: Strategies for Pre-Purchase, Post-Purchase, and Campaigns”

0:33:30 Interview with Josh Chinn: Leveraging True Fans to Create a Compound Effect on Your Business

————————————————–

TRANSCRIPT:

0:00:00 Salena: So many people say, oh, I don’t want to put pop ups on my website because they annoy me. And I’m like, what does the data tell you? Because, like, the data shows they work.

0:00:09 Joshua: One of Australia’s fastest growing BBC brands called the Udi. We created the highest converting pop up form on Play video for, like for a specific year. Yeah, we we created the form based off the information that we found on Google Analytics. We found that after spending a certain amount of time, people started leaving the site. So an average call it a minute and 15 seconds. We timed our pop up right before the average mark.

0:00:45 Joshua: On top of that, we basically created a form where there was a person, a lady that was wearing a hoodie, like an OOTIE yeah. That was seemingly popping out of the the page. And that captures attention really, really well.

0:01:03 C: 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 ecommerce 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.

0:01:33 C: 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?

0:01:50 Salena: Hey there and welcome to today’s episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. When it comes to marketing, we’re always looking for ways to make it better to connect with our customers, to get our customers to come back. So today we have Joshua Chin on the show to talk all about lifecycle marketing. So. Hey, Joshua. Welcome.

0:02:12 Joshua: Sewina well, thank you. You know what? It’s funny because I’ve been on the other side of the table for such a long time that I don’t know what it’s like to be a guest anymore. But thank you so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

0:02:25 Salena: It does get like that, doesn’t it? I’ve just decided, I don’t know about you, but I go through these phases where it’s like, I really should get off from behind the microphone onto the other side and I just go and book a dozen podcasts. And then I’m like, but what am I going to talk about? I can literally talk about anything, but I’m like, the questions are, what would you like to talk? And I’m like, what do you want me to talk about?

0:02:52 Joshua: Yeah, can I be the one asking the questions?

0:02:56 Salena: Is that just because we love being in control? Is that what this boils down to?

0:03:01 Joshua: Maybe. I think it’s a neurotic thing. I don’t know.

0:03:06 Salena: It’s good to see that it’s not just me, though. It’s like from people who are regularly behind the microphone when the tables are turned.

0:03:13 Joshua: It does it doesn’t not that it.

0:03:15 Salena: Feels uncomfortable, it’s just like where do I start?

0:03:19 Joshua: Yeah, it takes a little bit of getting used to but we’re going to be good.

0:03:25 Salena: Okay, so talking about where we started, if people are watching the video, you look like you’re about twelve. I know you’re not but you look very young so kudos to you. You have amazing skin, you have done some amazing things and I haven’t actually asked how old you are but in what is very obviously a very short time tell us all about it because I was gobsmacked when you told me.

0:03:50 Joshua: So I’m turning 27 this year. I hope that stays the same in in ten years time. I started the business back in 2017 and in 2018 became Real. We incorporated the business. It was is the first time ever that a project that I started took off into selling Meaningful. Before that I was selling stuff on ebay and it wasn’t really much, it was retail arbitrage more than anything. I was buying stuff of cheap from Amazon and Walmart and some of these sites and selling it off ebay on full price. Selling things like vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers. I didn’t even know what a lawn mower is because we don’t really have many of those back, like here in Singapore.

0:04:45 Joshua: I was just trying to make as much money as I could, which wasn’t a lot. And at that time, when I made a $1,000 in profit, I felt like a king. I thought that was the most incredible thing ever. I thought I was on top of the world because I was a student back then. That was when I was in my second year of university and I took all the money that I had at the point in time, invested that into courses and books and education and taught myself copywriting and I got hooked.

0:05:18 Joshua: I learned copywriting, I learned about the shopify ecosystem, I learned about ecommerce and digital marketing and that was incredibly interesting because these were skill sets that I could be better at incrementally over time and see gradual improvements in my outcome and that meant revenue. So in the third year of university here in Singapore I started Kronos Agency and we started out by we I mean I started out with just an idea.

0:05:52 Joshua: I felt that there was a market to serve and it was also at the same time, email and copywriting was a set of skills that I could be better at and develop over time, and that soon grew into six clients because of referrals and the good work that I was doing. Six clients on top of an internship, on top of school and everything else was a lot of work. So I called up my childhood friend Lewis and convinced him to become my co founder and COO and the rest is history. And when we left and graduated university in 2019 we had a full time team of 30 people from all around the world, Millsie based drone, my part of the world in Asia, serving clients from the US.

0:06:49 Joshua: Europe and Singapore and other countries and Australia.

0:06:54 Salena: I like the way you just glossed over going from six clients to 30 staff. We’ll come back to that, but I want to skip all the way back to the beginning, which was when you were doing retail arbitrage. I have to know, you said that you didn’t really even know what a lawmaker is. How were you even choosing the products? Or were you just buying bulk lots and were you doing this in Singapore or were you doing this off site somewhere else, like in America?

0:07:20 Joshua: I was drop shipping.

0:07:21 Salena: You’re drop shipping? Yeah.

0:07:22 Joshua: So I was drop shipping products off these retail sites I was identifying. There were a couple of criteria that I kept my eyes on. Aov was a big one. Without a significant enough aov, without a significant enough price point, the margins just didn’t make sense because it was quite a fair bit of work and it would be a waste to sell a product just to make a dollar or even lose money. And what I learned was in that process, it was a really short term window that I had because these things kind of I was just taking advantage of the imbalances and the imperfect information between marketplace.

0:08:14 Joshua: Effectively, if there was a discount on Amazon, there weren’t a discount on ebay. You might have a couple of buyers on ebay, but eventually people are going to find out and go to Amazon. So that’s a tiny arbitrage opportunity there for a couple of sales. So I was doing a lot of that across a wide range of products and I wasn’t, you know, attached or romantic to any single one of these products. And that’s the reason why it’s funny.

0:08:39 Salena: Because what you’re saying sounds very analytical and very kind of left brain. But generally speaking, all these creative things that you’re talking about, like copywriting and email marketing are not analytical things. They’re very creative instead. So right brain. So which way do you think that you lean?

0:08:59 Joshua: You know, Selena, it’s interesting that you asked the question. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that idea of having a that’s probably not what you mean, but I don’t like the idea of having a strict inclination towards a certain tendency in how we think about work and what we do. I think that I am an analytical creative. I love it in a sense where copywriting is creative. It’s an art form. But at the same time, there’s science behind what we do with copywriting.

0:09:43 Joshua: It’s not just about writing words that look good. We’re not writing a novel.

0:09:46 Salena: No, especially during a response type copywriting. There is a formula and you’re basically just I’m not saying you’re basically just filling in the blanks, but there is a specific formula that you follow.

0:09:57 Joshua: There’s a formula for success and there are metrics for success as well. So the metrics and the data that comes out of the work that we do guide our decision making and how we position a landing page or an email and how copy is written out and the tone of voice and what we do at Kronos. And we have a relatively big team now of 80 over employees.

0:10:22 Salena: Congratulations.

0:10:24 Joshua: We’re obsessed with making the right decisions based on data, both internally and both for our clients. And I think that spirit carries on to copyrighting as well, which is a very important department in our company because it dictates what goes into the minds of our consumers and how we capture attention. At the end of the day, we make decisions based off what data is telling us and not necessarily what we feel good about.

0:11:00 Joshua: So it’s a really kind of bottom, or rather end the funnel, looking at the data and making decisions at the front.

0:11:08 Salena: I think I have all like, I learnt my lesson really young and I don’t know if I told you this story about how we used to manufacture products and we had these little baby dresses that we got manufactured and I used to source the fabric and when the fabric came, they looked beautiful. I loved the fabric, but when they came back as dresses, I hated them and I threw them into the back of the storeroom, only to be found months later by one of the staffs who put them out. And I was like, Get them off the shelves. And she’s like, These are the most beautiful dresses we’ve ever made.

0:11:39 Salena: And, like, you would just say, by the time I’d come into the store, she’d already sold three of them that morning. And so that whole concept of, like, not what you feel good about, like, it is going by the data, whether it is your product decision making, whether it’s your copywriting, whether it’s pop ups. Like, so many people say, oh, I don’t want to put pop ups on my website because they annoy me. And I’m like, what does the data tell you? Because customers expect them as long as they haven’t got six of them popping up over and over again and they’re trying to just get to the website, but the data shows they work.

0:12:15 Joshua: I have a fun story with pop ups. We created the highest converting pop up form on play video for a specific year, I think one of Australia’s fastest growing DDC brands called the Udi.

0:12:40 Salena: Yes, my daughter has an ODI and I was actually just hanging I’ll let you tell you a story in a minute, but for those who don’t listen, I think the Americans have snuggie. It’s kind of like a blanket that you wear and I was hanging it out on the clothesline because getting it off her is extremely difficult and it stanks. So I stuck it in the washing machine and as I was hanging it out. I was like, this has had the best this is how we think, right? As marketers. This piece of clothing has the best ROI of anything I’ve ever bought.

0:13:13 Salena: The cost per wear on this thing is like the lowest ever.

0:13:20 Joshua: Tell us about this form that’s product market fit. So we created the form based off the information that we found on Google Analytics. We found that at a certain point in time, after spending a certain certain amount of time, people started leaving the site. So on average, I don’t recall what, what the exact number is, but call it a minute and 15 seconds.

0:13:53 Salena: Right.

0:13:53 Joshua: So about 75 seconds, and on average, people start leaving. So we timed our, our pop up right before the average mark, like by about like 510 percent before that. On top of that, we also had an exit intent trigger. So if people start leaving before that, the 65 seconds or so yeah, the 65 seconds, yeah. They would see the pop up. We also had a pop up.

0:14:23 Salena: The same. Okay.

0:14:25 Joshua: Yeah, the same. And I’ll get to that in a little bit, because we actually split tested a bunch. We also did a scroll based trigger. So if people scroll 30% or so down the page and haven’t clicked on anything, and they’ve spent X amount of time on a page, pop up shows. So that was the kind of the analytics behind the timing of the pop up. The behavior, the nature of the popup is really interesting. And this is how the marketing person, Natalie at Clayview, describes it.

0:15:02 Joshua: We maximize the features of the form in clavio by introducing a transparent background on the image that we created for the pop up. So I’m not sure if I have an example I can show you, but we basically created the form where there was a person, a lady that was wearing an udi that was seemingly popping out of the page by virtue of how we design the pop up. And that captures attention really, really well.

0:15:35 Joshua: The second thing was the contrast of the pop up against the the color of the page. And we made sure that it stood out so that the moment it pops up, it captures attention, and it kind of breaks a pattern. When you’re kind of mindlessly browsing through a site, you’re just kind of looking through absorbing information as quickly as you can. And when everything looks similar or the same, especially when it comes to color schemes and kind of look and feel of the site, you’re in autopilot mode, effectively.

0:16:10 Joshua: So when a pop up comes about that seemingly popping out of the screen with a significant contrast to the background of the site, that’s timed perfectly to the moment that you’re about to leave. Conversions skyrocket. I don’t recall what the exact number is, but it was really, really high.

0:16:27 Salena: The average that you had, like what was the, like what I want to know, is the alpha super simple? The thing was, it the actual picture.

0:16:40 Joshua: The offer is great. Don’t get me wrong. It was like a discount. It was a really steep discount that we were running at a point in time. But what we found was that the discount was great. But that’s the same thing that everybody else in Ecommerce is offering.

0:17:00 Salena: And let’s be honest, Audi runs a lot of them. If you don’t know them, they run a lot of discounts. Their margin is built into the discount that is their biggest way of attracting customers is I mean, a 30% discount is not unusual from them. And so they’ve worked out the margins, they know what their profit is and they can get 100%. That’s great. But if they know that that’s 30% off, they’re still making money. So the offer was good. And I don’t know about you just as a sidebar here, but I have read a lot of stats and the stats say that the difference between someone buying and not buying, like the reason why you don’t offer 10% off is simply because it is not enough to make someone buy.

0:17:43 Salena: It’s just like a well, you’re giving it to me anyway, but it’s at around 30% to 35% that someone who maybe wasn’t going to buy will actually switch to buying. So that 30% discount, for example, would be enough to get those so combined with your person popping out. And I’ve got some questions around that. It’s like you said, it’s like the perfect storm of all the things coming together to push people over the edge to buy.

0:18:11 Salena: So I have a question for you about like, I can kind of picture what you’re talking about. And you said it was a transparent background with the person kind of popping out with the offer. And you said one of the biggest things was the contrast. So how do you make something transparent contrast against a background? Like, was it size?

0:18:34 Joshua: Yeah, let me clarify. The photo of the person isn’t transparent, that’s opaque. But the borders around that person’s kind of photo is cut out and everything else is transparent. So it looks like there’s a person on top of the form that’s coming up to hug you. That’s basically what it looks like.

0:18:57 Salena: Right.

0:18:58 Joshua: And the contrast comes in the form of the color of the form and the color of the CTA button.

0:19:06 Salena: Right, okay. And how many tests did you have to do to find that color?

0:19:11 Joshua: Frankly, I’m not sure. I really don’t know. I really don’t know. But when it comes to testing, here’s what I can say for people listening. You have to be mindful about what you test because you can end up in an overwhelming rabbit hole of things to test and you end up in a situation where everything seems important and everything seems like it’s affecting conversions. So there are two things to pay attention to. Number one, what’s most important, the most important thing for a pop up is most likely the timing. And that’s why I start the story with timing.

0:19:54 Joshua: The timing of the pop up and the offer. Right, sorry, let me retrace. So offer and then timing of the pop up. And then you go into the details of the color, the CTA, the copy of the CTA and all that fun stuff. But you don’t get into testing colors and sizing of the CTA button until you get the timing right. Until you get the offer right. And the bigger parts of the pop up?

0:20:26 Salena: No, I was going to say, I think a lot of people don’t stop and do. Like what you’re talking about is just analyzing the data on your site and seeing how long people spend on there. That is bog standard data you get off your analytics. But most people never think about that. They just default to 13 seconds or 30 seconds, whatever the pop up is. But like you’re saying, this one tiny little incremental change can skyrocket your conversions.

0:20:58 Salena: It’s worth the 90 seconds it takes for you to open analytics and see.

0:21:03 Joshua: Yeah. And Selena, it’s huge because this is top of funnel. This is literally going out to almost every single visitor customer prospect that you have on your site. So it’s important.

0:21:18 Salena: Before you go to number two, can I ask you, was that same offer available for all customers or was it just new customers?

0:21:28 Joshua: Only new customers. That’s a great question. Only new customers that are not on our email list. So here’s a cool one. If they have made a purchase and they’re definitely going to be on our list, they’re not going to be shown the offer. But if they have made a purchase and have opted out of marketing, we would still show them the offer in order to have them opt in to marketing again. Because that’s just how important an email subscriber was to us. And you’d be surprised at how much revenue per email subscriber is actually worth to your business if you really looked into the stats. And the best way to look into that is there’s a really sophisticated way of going about it with segmentation and everything.

0:22:28 Joshua: But the easiest way to think about it is if you look at Google Analytics and how much money you’re making over the course of a year from email alone. And if you looked at the size of your list and you make a simple division, you’ll see the revenue and the worth, the value of each subscriber. And that’s going to give you a good sense of how much you’re supposed to be spending to acquire a single subscriber.

0:22:56 Salena: And I can say the ODI send out so many emails, like I would say almost one a day, if not more than one a day, until the point you get so worn down you either unsubscribe or you just buy something big.

0:23:20 Joshua: It also comes down to testing. What’s the extreme that you can go to? What’s the extreme of in terms of how many emails you can send before you start seeing is quite overtaking. It’s definitely a lot and a good formula to kind of think about, a good framework to wrap your mind around this is how many subscribers am I getting versus how many am I losing and is my program growing net and how much revenue am I making through that process? Right, so input versus output and between the two is the revenue and the cost of doing things. So the cost of creating an email, whether it’s with an agency like us, or with a team, or with a freelancer, and the revenue that you’re generating and if that equation makes sense, you should still, you should keep sending more emails.

0:24:15 Salena: Yes. I love it. And so how do you, how does all of this fit into your lifecycle marketing system?

0:24:23 Joshua: Okay, before I get into that, that was the second point I want to get to.

0:24:26 Salena: Oh, sorry, yes.

0:24:27 Joshua: With Popups. Something that most people don’t realize is with split testing, you have to be mindful about statistical significance because it’s so easy to start seeing some results and make a decision prematurely when you may not have achieved statistical significance. Which just tells you that more likely than not, the results that you’re seeing is not due to random variation and it’s most likely due to the change that you’ve made.

0:25:00 Joshua: The only way that you can be kind of certain that the optimizations that you’re making are actually leading to results would be through a calculator like this. So I would go into Google search, statistical significance calculator and you find a bunch of them. Survey Monkey is one of them. I think Neil Patel.com has one as well. It’s easy and it’s something that I strongly urge everyone to do before making a drawing conclusion from any of the tests that you’re connecting right now.

0:25:39 Joshua: Playview has that built in, so that’s easy, but if you’re doing a B testing of any kind anywhere else, it’s going to be a little bit harder, especially if it’s multichannel across channel.

0:25:51 Salena: Great words of wisdom. Thank you. So back to your lifecycle marketing ecosystem. Tell me more about that.

0:25:59 Joshua: Okay, so lifecycle marketing extends beyond retention. That’s the first thing I’d say. People think about email marketing and SMS marketing as a retention channel, but it really isn’t. It’s lifecycle precisely for the reason that you are managing and maintaining a relationship throughout the life cycle of a prospect customer and in all cases subscriber from pre purchase all the way to post purchase to end with life.

0:26:38 Joshua: And the three channels that we use in lifecycle marketing are email, SMS and push. Now, push comes in two different forms. There’s mobile push and web push or desktop. So that gives you effectively four different channels to work with. And the reason why we have these four that these are own channels. Channels that you can control and fully own without the influence or with minimal influence from platforms and tech companies.

0:27:16 Joshua: And it’s super important to have this dialed in because this determines more often than not profitability. This is one of the biggest these channels are some of the biggest levers they can pull to influence profitability of a company. We’ve had businesses that started out in the red before working with us and as a result of driving more revenue through email and SMS and push came through into the green and started making money as a result and that allowed them to scale even quicker without funding, without external debt and it’s way more sustainable that way. So profitability is the biggest reason why and these are three channels that people have to pay attention to when it.

0:28:09 Salena: Comes to that whole ecosystem. Which one do you think is the one that people neglect but is the one that can make the biggest impact?

0:28:21 Joshua: SMS marketing.

0:28:23 Salena: Yeah, I’m with you. We’re not an e commerce brand obviously when we sell courses, but we also sell consulting and we’ve used SMS for about the last seven or eight months. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s just like to communicate, we use it to send out people’s login details, but sometimes we use it for like a flash sale on a workbook or something. And as long as you don’t abuse it then I think it’s almost the only one where you get almost 100% deliverability and everybody looks at their phone even if they don’t open the text message, you’re there, your offer is there, they have a choice. But email people just delete it. And not to say that I don’t love email marketing like I am preaching to the converter when it comes to email marketing but the difference I have seen using SMS is just remarkably different.

0:29:25 Joshua: It’s huge. And I would take it a step further and not think about urge people, not think about SMS as a standalone channel, but as an integrated strategy across email and SMS and ideally with push as well. The reason for that is when you think about SMS as a standalone channel, you often think about flows and triggers, card abandonment and campaigns and that’s as far as it goes. When you combine that with email you’re creating an experience that’s unique to every single subscriber, every single customer that comes through your door.

0:30:05 Joshua: Email gives you a lot of data and a lot of information to work with. For instance, you have behaviors, preferences, sign up forms that allow you to acquire information on clavio. But if you’re treating SMS as a standalone channel, you’re not going to be able to leverage all that information and knowledge about your customers and prospects. But when you combine the two you’re able to create unique personalized journeys through email and SMS that’s timed perfectly, that doesn’t clash against one another.

0:30:43 Joshua: That creates an experience that’s seamless and unique to every single one, every single person that comes through.

0:30:49 Salena: What’s the first SMS that you put in place when you work with a client?

0:30:54 Joshua: Well, it’s often a revenue based one. The revenue driving SMS is an email that go into a system. The same thing with email. We start with the pre purchase journey, the pop ups, the lead capture, because that’s top of funnel that opens up the floodgates. And then we start looking into the high converting flows like card abandonment, browse abandonment, and then finally post purchase because that’s what keeps customers happy, retains them for the long term, makes customers come back to buy again. And then we start looking at the rest of the journey. And then on top of that, we look at campaigns.

0:31:37 Joshua: So same sequence goes for SMS as well. One of the added benefits of SMS that most people don’t think about is that it’s a conversation channel. It’s a channel that people use for conversations, for communication. If you treat it as such, especially with campaigns, because it’s so easy to do right, instead of sending out a campaign, an SMS campaign that says, hey, check out our latest blog post, here’s the link, why not ask a question?

0:32:11 Joshua: What’s the favorite scent in our collection? That could lead to a conversation that could lead to a sale if done correctly. So you could either automate that process by giving fixed answers, ADC kind of a situation, or open up a conversation that redirects people to your CS team, which is something that we’ve seen brands do, especially if an integration is gorgeous or CS platform like that. It’s fairly easy to do as long as you have the capacity and manpower.

0:32:45 Joshua: Or if you’re running a small business, you could even redirect those messages into your inbox and answer them. And it’s often a nice little touch when you get a text or a message from the founder of the company or executive at the company. And that’s the secret to building long lasting fans that love your brand, that evangelize your brand. And when you reach a kind of critical mass of your true fans, there’s a book that talks about the 100 true friends, true fans, and you start creating a compound effect on your business that you always would not be able to.

0:33:30 Salena: I think that is like, I could talk to you forever. I had about 17 different questions, but I feel like that was the perfect point at which we can pause this conversation and maybe get you back on another time to talk about how we leverage all those things that we were just talking about. So if people are thinking, you know what, this guy knows his stuff, I want to chat to him more, where can they get in contact with you?

0:33:55 Joshua: The best place to get in touch with me would be Instagram. I’m trying to grow my following on. Instagram and I’m putting up a lot of good content, good insights up there. So it’s at Joshin. That’s J-O-S-H-C-H-I-N-N I’d respond to almost all DMs. The following you can go to our site to check us out. It’s Cronus Agency at Chronos Agency.

0:34:24 Salena: Fabulous. Well, thank you so much. I love the story. The biggest takeaway for me, I mean, there was lots of takeaways, but the biggest one is that simple thing of going in and checking out not your bounce rate, but your time to leave and changing your pop up. So that, like you said, just that you’re activating these things and just different ways to get people to interact rather than just been trying to close the bloody pop up.

0:34:52 Joshua: Absolutely.

0:34:54 Salena: Thank you so much.

0:34:56 Joshua: Thank you.

0:34:59 C: So that’s a wrap. 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 at the Selena night 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.

0:35:28 C: On your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and ecommerce 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.

 

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