Episode Transcript
Nina Huchthausen (00:05.56)
All right, welcome everybody to the Makers Business Tribe podcast. In this week's episode, I have one of our awesome tribe partners with us. His name is Angus, and he is an absolute gun when it comes to email marketing. And because there is, if you do it right, so much power, so much money, so much opportunity in...
the written word through a well -structured email, if done well, that I thought, let's bring on Anchors to debunk what the heck is really email marketing. Is it just like you or me writing random emails and sending it to people? Or what is the actual thinking and strategy and opportunity behind it, as well as how to get started?
how we could best capitalize on Christmas. And most importantly, and I mentioned this to Angus earlier, he did a really great post on all the emails that are pretty shit and useless and a waste of our time. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit because I think it's really important to not do what is not working because we don't need to, if the horse is already dead, keep writing it. Yeah. So.
We want to kind of like talk about some of those things today. So if that's interesting to you, keep on listening and yeah, let's get started. Welcome Angus. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to sit down and talk through all things email marketing as you just outlined. Awesome. And so first question, can you please just run us through your company? Because you recently rebranded
I didn't even know about this. So thanks for just letting me know last minute. Yeah, no, was a very quiet rebrand. I didn't want to make a big deal of it. I mean, lot of my company and my branding and my own marketing is, guess, based around me and not the business name itself. So I kind of just wanted to sweep it under the rug. But my name is Angus, as you said, I'm the founder of marketingemails .com, our new brand. We're an email marketing agency, primarily for e -commerce brands.
Nina Huchthausen (02:27.438)
worked with over 50 different brands in the last 18 months in nearly every industry you can think of. And we manage their email marketing for them. We help them come up with good email campaign strategies. We help them nurture their email database. We help them set up their email automations and their flows. And we essentially help them get them, make the most out of their email marketing, I guess, in an e -commerce landscape that is very noisy and very competitive. And I think
Also very important to distinguish and I mean, don't take my word for it. Look at Angus results. But I feel like there's so many people who claim we do email marketing, but then they do all these other marketing things and like, you don't really get any results. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, there's a few types of things that happen in the industry, right? Like you'll have your full stack digital marketing agencies who will sort of do everything. And then, you know, they are kind
Decent at everything. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of really good ones out there, but majority of them are sort of all right at all the services. And then you have, guess, like where everyone once was and people who were complete beginners in the industry and there's a lot of them running around. It's a very popular place to put people to be bringing their skills at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Because most people just really have no clue, right? What email marketing is. So I'm almost like, yeah, I can write some emails for you. And they're like, cool.
I can't. Yeah. But what, what did you, how did you get into email marketing? Yeah. Well, I mean, it wasn't something I seeked out, I guess, which is, which is different because I guess email marketing is becoming more popular or it's becoming more, I guess people are starting to realize the power of email marketing. mean, there's plenty of people like me who have had good results who run around and share that and post on social media. So I guess it's becoming more known.
So these days a lot of people seek it out, whereas I didn't seek it out. I was at university studying finance and I got a job at an e -commerce warehouse. They were a direct to consumer and a B2B e -commerce business. And I got a job there just managing social media. And over time they upskilled me into the email marketing with their direct to consumer database, which, you know, I was lucky enough to learn under probably the head of e -commerce there who
Nina Huchthausen (04:50.862)
very switched on and had a lot of experience and he upskilled me really well in email marketing and it became a big part of that business. And I was only like 19 or 20 years old at the time, I think. And I started freelancing with that because, you know, I didn't know much about the industry, but I knew that I was doing email marketing for one brand and I was doing it really well. So I offered to do it for a couple of other brands, which I'd seen on social media, very small brands at the time. And so they were happy to take me on and I worked with them for a while.
We all taught some case studies and I don't know, think I just naturally sort of kept going in the industry and it was a side hustle for a long time. And then I built up a bit of a name for myself with, you know, particular brands in Australia and was able to then make the leap, I guess, 18 months ago into going full time with, I guess, full time with my agency. Like I was freelancing with a lot of clients for a long time. And then 18 months ago I was like, well, I want to turn this into an agency that I can scale.
Here we are now in the last 18 months, we've worked with 50 or so brands and many more on the way. That's pretty cool. How big is your team now? Five. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's pretty good number in 18 months. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's growing quickly. think it's one of those things where it's like, it takes a bit of, I mean, as everyone, I guess, who's, who started the business would know it takes a bit of time to dive into hiring your first person. And then after that, it just starts to snowball. Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty exciting. But sorry, how did you get from accounting into social media? Like, did you fail the classes or something? No, no, I was actually self -proclaimed. I say this is a great insult. I was good at accounting and I was good at finance. was always my natural skills were in numbers. And like when I was in high school and stuff, so was natural for me to go down that route at university.
It was through a family friend. just got offered a job because I had been interested in e -commerce. Like when I was 16, I tried starting my own e -commerce stores. I was always sort of, I was very interested in the whole selling things online. And I tried my hand at a few things by myself. And one of my family friends who owned this business just knew of my interests and knew of my passion and sort of said, well, do you want to just come and work for us? Like as a part -time job while you're at uni. And I was like, yeah,
Nina Huchthausen (07:11.786)
awesome, sounds great. So was kind of like, I got in through knowing someone, I guess, and then from there, it just kept snowballing. That's super cool. Because I mean, not many people just like run into the perfect mentor, that then sets them up to build a business out of that. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think it was ever the plan for me either. Like even after my first marketing job, I took a job at an accounting firm and then
It wasn't until I really started to get traction with my freelancing that I decided that, hang on, there might be something in this long term. That's a super cool story. I mean, it also to me, I always feel like when someone really just like follows their passion, was kind of like, no, no, this isn't my path. I just feel like I'm going to do this. That's when like the...
the quality of the craft normally really shines through versus someone, well, I studied this, this is what I'm doing. And I've worked in it for a long time. And I just do it by myself. Oftentimes I don't like, and I've worked with, because I've worked with so many different people in different industries. feel like whenever I hear a story like that, yeah, we're just kind of like, it was a natural currency that occurred and I flew, I just went with it.
Cause I think that's how also always art gets created. It doesn't get created when one plus one equals two. And this was a natural occurring stepping stone, but more when things kind of lesser, you know, MacGyver style fall into place. Like how did this even happen? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't think it was like, I mean, it's weird. Cause I would have never have said like email marketing is a passion. And it wasn't like when I first started doing it, I was like, wow, I love writing emails. Like it was more so
enjoyed learning new things and I think I enjoyed the challenge. didn't, I saw at some point, I don't know, I can't remember when it was, but at some point, like I saw a pretty clear pathway for me where I could take things based on what I was doing with my freelancing. And to me, it was like an exciting challenge going out on my own as opposed to sort of taking that, like you said, that direct easy path, I guess of, yeah, okay, well I've done uni, okay, I'm in an accounting firm, okay, well that's what's next. It was the challenge in the sort of going left of field, which
Nina Huchthausen (09:34.496)
excited me as opposed to the particular thing I was doing at the time, guess. Cool. but, you just, you just kind of like mentioned it, like email marketing. What is that? Is it like, do you just literally just like write random emails? No, no. Can you, can you just like unpack this, this beast? Yeah. Okay. Well there's, there's email marketing, I guess in a dictionary definition
I guess, tell you it's the act of sending mass marketing emails to your database. that like in the simplest form, that's what it is in a sentence. It's your sending an email, a marketing email to a database of customers that you have to a list of email addresses that you have. When it comes to practically like, well, what does that even mean? There's two facets to email marketing. There's helping you get new customers from your database.
and then helping you retain your current customers that are on your database. So it's about putting together a strategy, which I guess when you look at it from a funnel point of view, putting together a strategy which is going to help you collect email addresses from people who come to your website, convert those people into customers, because you know, they've just come to your website, they've just given you their email address, they're now on your database, but they might not have necessarily purchased anything yet. We want to convert those people into customers.
And then once people have become customers, we want to send emails that are going to help retain those people and keep them shopping with us into the future. At the core of e -commerce, a profitable store has traffic, that traffic turns into customers. And then the goal is to, how high can we make that lifetime value? How much money can we extract from each customer? So email marketing is, I guess, the art
Helping you convert as much traffic as possible, which doesn't convert from your ads or your social media or directly from your website. And then keeping people coming
Nina Huchthausen (11:36.692)
Awesome. Yes, and I would assume from a strategy point of view that you use really those two pillars of conversion and retention as sort of like the key things that you then ladder your steps back, your activities, your conversations back to either say, okay, how do, where do, like, do we need to convert or do we need to retain? then what I'm
What are the conversations we need to have in either the space of driving conversion or driving retention? Yeah. Well, I think when you get to, in a way, when you, there's within email marketing, there's like two technical aspects of activities that you perform. There's your email campaigns, which are the manual emails that you create, you know, two or three times a week. That's what you should be doing at
two or three times a week getting on and creating a campaign to communicate something to your subscribers. They're your email campaigns. Then there's your email flows. They're the automated flows that abandon checkout when someone leaves a product at their checkout. We want to send them an automated email reminding them to go and get that item or incentivizing them to go and get that item. And then there's your... So when it comes to the flows, have your... There's two splits. So there's your pre -purchase flows, which would be on the conversion side. These are designed
nurture more people to make that purchase in the first place. So that's like your abandoned carts, your abandoned checkouts, your welcome email flow, like welcoming people to the brand. Then there's your post purchase flows. So they're the flows that people receive after they've made a purchase, which are designed for retention purposes. So for majority of stores, I guess the conversation between should we be focusing on conversion or retention is going to come on the email flow side. You you're to handle that with your email
When it comes to your email campaigns, a lot of the strategy that you're going to implement into a good email campaign strategy is going to satisfy what you need to do for both conversion and retention techniques. It's probably not until you get into like the eight figure level of revenue where your database is hundreds of thousands of people, where you really need to think of how do we split our campaigns between
Nina Huchthausen (13:56.674)
you know, these ones are designed to convert and these ones are designed to retain. And that will be different for all stores. And there will be other email marketers who have different opinions of that. And even depending on the business model, your strategy is going to be different. But I, a lot of the time don't spend too much mental capacity, I guess, thinking about whether our strategy is designed to convert or retain. It's just designed to drive the best possible results, I guess. It's like, as long as everything's going
we're on the right track. If we spend too much time trying to perfect our retention as opposed to our conversion or our conversion as opposed to our retention, we end up just directing too much energy into, I guess, the wrong thing instead of just focusing on making sales. Okay. Okay.
Nina Huchthausen (14:47.732)
You mentioned there's the whole side of surrounding our online store, the messages that are kind of automated. When things happen, there's a certain response and then we have our campaign emails. But how do I jump in and get all of this started? Which part do I start?
If I'm just thinking about all of the different flows that I could be setting up on my website or developing a campaign or making sure that anyone who's bought my product is super happy and it's given me a review and all of that stuff. What's, what's the best way to start when it comes to all of this? Yeah, that was a very overwhelming spiel I gave about email marketing, but, yeah, I mean, starting like whenever I give advice for people to start it's.
More often than not, just do what you can, I guess. And I'll dive into, I'll unpack that a bit further. understand that's fake, but it's more so like there's a million things you need to do when you're starting a store. And when email marketing comes to light, think a lot of people, the advice that I give to a lot of people, especially if they're in a new store, say they're in between the, they haven't made a sale yet and they're sort of making maybe 10 or $15 ,000 per month in sales. When you're in between that level.
there's a trillion different things you can do because nothing's firing yet, right? You're just starting everything from scratch. So there's going to be a million things you can do with social media, a million things you can do with ads, a million things you can do with email. And the unique thing about email is that email in isolation is never going to attract new customers. The art of email marketing is emailing your database. It's emailing the database you already have. So when I tell people,
How should you start email marketing? I say the first thing, whatever you do is don't neglect. Don't start email at a sacrifice of your traffic generating activities. So if you're someone who wants to get started in email marketing, make sure it's something that you have time to do or that you have the resources to do. And it's not going to take away resources or time from running good ads or posting well on social media because the traffic at the top of funnel is going to be the most important thing. So assuming you're
Nina Huchthausen (17:11.564)
making any drastic sacrifices. The best thing you can do in email marketing is, I I recommend making an account on something like Clavio to start with. Clavio is my favorite software, especially with Shopify stores and a variety of other e -commerce platforms. It's gonna be the easiest way to set things up from scratch. Once you've made an account, it's connected to your Shopify store. There's, like where you could go from there is I guess kind
where you're at. If you've got nothing at all and you've never done any email marketing, I would really focus on just trying to set up the most basic possible things to get the ball rolling. So Shopify, Claviyo, sorry, will have really easy templates for a beginner that they can use. So you can literally log into your Claviyo account and set up an abandoned checkout flow that is templated by Claviyo and that will work automatically with a few clicks. So that's the best thing you can do.
Set up a few flows at the bare minimum. That's probably step one. Just using Clavio templates. Don't spend too much time on it to start with. After that, I would focus on trying to grow your email list. So you might be getting traffic. Well, I need people to enter my email list, right? I can't email market if I have zero email addresses. We need to start getting some people onto our database. So I would be looking at how you can implement different signup forms on your website, whether it's a landing page that you're sending social media traffic to.
or more commonly and more preferably a pop -up form on your site that offers an incentive for first -time purchases or first -time customers to give you their email. Once you've got sort of a basic structure with your flows and you're starting to grow your list through a pop -up form or a sign -up form, then you at least have some traffic coming in, you're collecting the email, they're working their way through different email flows you set up and you're probably gonna start getting the first taste of your email marketing results.
without having to lift another finger. guess that would be like the very basic starting point for someone starting from scratch. And you're saying that just using the CloudView out of the box templates, branding it with your brand, do you feel like that's? Yeah, like then there's until you have the resources or the knowledge, I guess, to do them really well.
Nina Huchthausen (19:27.118)
It's like you end up just running around like a headless chalk. you didn't, I've spoken to brand owners who sit in Clavio for 10 hours on a day and they waste their whole day trying to perfect these email templates and their email flows, but they didn't know what they were doing in the first place. So they spent 10 hours on it. And it's like, without being worried, they're not even good. they've, you know, cause they're they're just trying to go with that gut feeling of like, you know, thinking
doing more to their templates and their flows is making them better. When you actually don't have the experience, sometimes doing more is like, you'd be better off just leaving them at their minimum and just getting some results and spending your time elsewhere. So, Clavio will have good templates that will get the ball rolling for you. And then when you have the resources, you can sort of double back and think about, how can we actually make these better? Awesome. Okay. So a very common question
I hear from product owners and I think when you were in the training as well, people were asking that, should I make an offer with every single email that I sent? No. When it comes to your email campaign, so I just touched on the flow and the list growth side of things. When it comes to actually sending your manual email campaign, so that's when you jump in manually and you're sending out your weekly or like I said, you should be sending three a week once you have a database,
So to start with, sending one weekly campaign out to your list. When you're trying to build that rapport, you don't want to be making an offer and you don't even necessarily want to be pushing sales in all of your email campaigns. The goal with email is to prime the customer for a purchase. So if you have a database, say of 1000 people that you've built, not all of those people,
Well, there's going to be a very tiny, tiny percentage of those people, like one or 2 % of those people who are ready to buy your product right now. So if all we're ever doing is sending offers and sending emails about our products, we're going to be appealing to the one or 2 % of people who want to buy and maybe the other small percentage of people who are a natural bargain hunter and just love the fact that we're running a sale and they're to be like, oh, I can get a bargain here. Sounds good. Whereas everyone else on your list
Nina Huchthausen (21:40.504)
doesn't necessarily, they might not necessarily know much about your brand. You know, they might've be sitting on your list for a while and have kind of forgotten about you, or they've gone and shopped at a competitor or they've, you know, it's not payday until two weeks time. All these people, they have no interest in buying your product right now. So the goal is to just keep them engaged and keep them primed for when it comes time to purchase. The metaphor I like to give is in a lot of marketing, no matter how good your marketing
In a lot of you can't influence when someone is ready to place an order. Say, for example, your Nike is selling shoes. Someone has just bought a pair of Nikes. No matter how good you are at marketing, there's a fat chance they're to go back and buy another pair of Nikes until the current ones break or they get old. How many people are going to justify going back and spending the money? They already have a pair of shoes. I don't care how good your marketing videos are. I'm not going to buy them
So Nike invests in tons of branding and engagement campaigns that keep people in love with the brand. So when it comes time to buy those shoes in six months time, one year's time, they're going to go back and shop. It should be the same with your emails. You have a list of people who, you know, they haven't told you they want to buy right now. And the reality is not many people are going to be ready to buy right now. We want to keep those people engaged by, you know, sending valuable content that they can resonate with and they can read and enjoy regardless of if they want to purchase.
So when it comes time for them wanting to purchase or maybe once they've learned more about that brand, we become the choice for them. Okay. I think that like really resonated with me because if I can play that back in, in my words is,
Nina Huchthausen (23:26.174)
Really, it's not just about sending stuff out, right? Because energetically just like, okay, I'm sitting in my computer and what am I sending out today? What am I sending out today to like knock on people's doors, but actually energetically keeping them with you, surrounded by you and to kind of, it's like, keep fostering a friendship, you know, like, because we're not just like most people can't hang out with you every single day.
But it's probably a good idea to keep checking in with your friends because that way they also keep your top of mind. If you never talk to them until you happen to have time, you know, we all got, you know, busy jobs and busy lives to live. You know, the friendship is not going to stay as strong as if you're like, Hey, happy Tuesday. Just was, was just thinking about you. know? Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's a relationship. It's a, it's a French, it is a friendship. it's.
Yeah, it's one thing that I think is like a massive benefit. It is probably like the primary benefit of email marketing nearly is just touch points. Like it's just staying top of mind with a customer. If like in today's world where people are rammed with information and, and, know, entertainment and marketing from all different angles, you know, it's on Instagram, it's on Tik Tok, it's on the TV, it's on billboards, it's in their emails, like everywhere they go, there's, there's marketing and just staying forefront of mind and staying at the top of that person's mind.
is that's going to be the key in the long term. Whoever can have the most touch points without being annoying is going to be the person who wins that person's business. Yeah, exactly. Touch points without being annoying. I guess also in the emails that I like opening is where someone somehow talks to me in a kind way versus throws things at me. That's probably,
a personal thing, but I'm like, you know, whenever I receive an email, there's but there's also something like, I don't know, it makes me feel good. And it's different for all brands. know, for example, some like supplement companies or companies where it is an extremely competitive space. Sometimes you do need to be really aggressive and sometimes you do need to just like, you know, heavily discount or be very product centric
Nina Huchthausen (25:47.862)
It's always going to depend on your target audience and the way people respond. for a lot of people, you just need to focus on engagement and value and winning the heart of the customer before you ask for that money. Yeah. Awesome. Can we almost roll up our sleeves so you can share? What are some three examples of right now that someone could do to create value?
How could they unpack that? Well, yeah, I mean, if you want to give, there's two ways to look at it as well. Like when you're giving value to a customer, mean, the first thing is it has to be somewhat relevant to your product. Otherwise, yes, like we can be the nicest people in the world and we can give value, but if it doesn't relate somewhat back to our products, we're sort of wasting our own time. Like, you know, if you're a fitness, if you're selling a fitness supplement,
and you start giving people advice on like how to change the oil in their car. It's like, yeah, look, you might've given someone like valuable information, but they're never going to buy your fitness supplement. so first thing it needs to be like industry specific and industry relevant. So the way that I look at it is like, what does someone need to believe to buy our products down the track and how can we educate them on those topics? So for example, if you're selling a grains powder,
you know, it's high in fiber, it's got a source of vitamins, it, you know, is your daily green intake, which is obviously like the main value of them. And so for someone to buy that, they need to believe that they need more fiber. They need to believe that they're not getting enough vitamins and they need to believe that, you know, getting their daily greens is good for them. So you can sort of craft valuable campaigns that educate someone on these topics.
without necessarily having to sell your product. It almost sells itself while you're being valuable. So you could break down like here are five ways that you can improve the vitamin D in your life. Like if you're finding that you're a bit deficient and it can be tips like go get some sunlight, like eat these particular foods or don't do this. And then as a bonus, like obviously we sell a daily greens powder which is going to help you enhance your vitamin D intake. So it is a little bit like cheeky in that regard where
Nina Huchthausen (28:12.364)
giving value with a bit of an ulterior motive, but at the same time, if someone doesn't purchase, they've still learned a lot by reading your email. So I would think about what are you selling? What does someone need to believe to buy that product? But what is also some problems in your industry that someone is facing? So like I said, with the fitness supplement company, we can make some topics that answer maybe some frequently asked questions about our daily greens powder, like how can someone get more vitamins? How can someone get more fiber?
But then we can also look at what other problems someone may be facing in our industry in fitness. might be, you know, they're not getting enough sleep. They want some recipe tips for their fitness journey. They want some exercise tips for keeping a routine. These are all things. These are all problems that someone in our industry may be facing. And these are problems that we can tackle in our email campaigns, as well as providing some value that is related to our products in some way. I love this because
What comes to mind is like one of the key things that we do with all of our tribe members when we start is we really focus and hone in on the customer that they're serving, right? Who are they and what are like the key challenges and what are they searching for? What are they needing? What are they wanting? Right? And we do a fair bit of customer interviews even with them to really create a big database of the words that they're using so that we can then see,
These are the challenges that they are now, okay, sharing with stockers when they go to stockers and kind of say, Hey, I got arthritis, I got anxiety, I got this, I got this, I get that, or, you know, I got X, Y, Z symptoms, right? Yeah. Facing heartbeat. If that's the thing that we're hearing from our people all the time, then what you're saying is you can literally like use that cloud of challenges that you know, but your customers that exist that your problem can solve.
Yeah. And you can, you can talk about these, right? Yeah. Yeah, certainly. And I do think there is even like broader value. Like I think there's a, there is an element of mixing in broader value that is still related. Like I said, so if you are selling a supplement that helps with XYZ problem, if it is a fitness supplement, you can still infer that people on your database are interested in fitness. So they're going to care about things like their sleep, their nutrition, their diet, their, you know, their water intake, their
Nina Huchthausen (30:36.32)
how much sun they're getting, how much exercise they're doing. Like they're all things that your typical customer would be interested in. So not only do we need to understand how we can help them with their particular problems with our product, but we do need to understand how we can potentially help them in their daily lives because that's going to be really good for just general engagement and keeping people opening our emails. that like resonates a lot with me. I'd like a few months ago, I,
got randomly given a mouth tape. Yeah. I was thinking about for years and then I signed up with someone and get it delivered and my gosh, the email marketing is so good. Like I've learned so much, not just about that sleep, but then breathing and how that ties to my life. And like they're going down some rabbit hole and kind of like creating broader value for me to actually really understand how it can impact.
Yeah. Breathing my sleep, my brain power. Yeah. Well, we do email marketing for a mouth taping brand is a client of ours and, like something that, yeah, we're really big on is just like, you know, how taping your mouth can improve your sleep, but also, you know, here are five other tips for improving your sleep that aren't mouth tape related. You know what I mean? Cause everyone who wants, everyone who's mouth taping wants to know why mouth taping can solve their problem.
but they're also obviously interested in improving their sleep. So we can help them with that too by giving some tips that they're to read and go, wow, okay, that's fantastic. I really like this company. Yeah. And again, like I, you know, I'm not going to buy that mouth tape every time, but through like that continuous education, I keep that brand in my mind versus all the other brands that I also see on social media popping up because I bought. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I say it all the time. Like I guarantee you
most people, if you say a handful of products, they're going to have a brand that comes to mind. that's the power of it. That's what emails can help. And that's what good emails can really help you do. And it's also an inexpensive way to do this. You can achieve a similar result if you were running a trillion ads and they were always seeing your ads. But the thing with ads is that they're not value -based. They're designed to get conversions. the reason that they're designed to get conversions
Nina Huchthausen (32:56.302)
because they cost money. So you need to be recouping that ROI. So like you're in this rabbit hole of we need to run an ad to make sales, this costs money. you can't get that effect and you can't build that relationship through the exposure you get from ads. Whereas the exposure you get from emails, sending like, yes, you need to pay the email marketing software, but it's a really cost effective way. Like, but per email you send, it's like a negligible expense. wouldn't even be a cent. So per email you send, it's like
you don't need to be recouping that cost. You can afford to provide the value and give those touch points that are engaging. Awesome. Hey, so I'm just like, we had a Christmas planning session with our TRIP members a couple of days ago. And one of the key things that I know they will need to look at is the B2C email marketing.
not since starting to talk about it in July, maybe a little bit early, but it's going to come up for them. So how should anyone think about email marketing in relation to like a big season and event like Christmas and course underlying summer and for Australians also taking time off? Yeah, I think one thing that with Black Friday and Christmas coming up that I'm saying to a lot of people
Right now, we don't want to think too far ahead, obviously, but we need to be focusing on engagement. We need to be getting as much engagement and building as much rapport as we can. So when it comes to Black Friday and Christmas, we have relationships with as many subscribers as possible. So they're to be more likely to open our emails as opposed to a competitor. We can win that battle early by building the rapport with people now. So there's an increased importance of building good engagement
When it comes to the actual period of Black Friday and Christmas, what everyone's going to do is they're going to try get ahead of each other. Everyone's going to launch those days early and try to be first to the curve and first to get people to spend their money with them. I think you can still try to focus on value style or as valuable campaigns as you can be. The consumers want sales. During Black Friday and Christmas, they want to save money. They want to know what's on offer because they've got money to spend and they need to spend it.
Nina Huchthausen (35:19.31)
We don't necessarily during that period want to be like super valuable. We do want to be pretty direct, but you can do it in ways like, you know, purchasing guides, bundles, showing what other customers are buying. Perhaps like, you know, if you're a store that sells clothes, you could send a email out saying like, here are the best gifts for dad. Here are the best gifts for mom. Like here's the best gift for, you know, your kids.
or here's the best gift for your teenagers. you can sort of the thing that you want to try doing that period, I guess, is make things the least overwhelming as possible because everyone's overwhelmed. Everyone's getting rammed with marketing and they have no idea what to do. Like when it comes time for me buying gifts for someone, I don't even know where to start. Like I walk around headless in the shops until like something catches my eye where the brands who make it really easy for me just send me some marketing where I don't need to think like,
they do the thinking for me, that's the most effective marketing during that time. You're essentially just telling people where to click. So I think you've really got to break it down in terms of, you know, making it relevant for your customer base. try to relate it back to potentially the reason why they're buying a gift. Like I said, is it for mom? Is it for dad? Something like that. Give guides, make things really clear. Don't clutter too much, but you've also just got to be prepared to ride the wave. Like it's going to be a competitive time and...
you just need to be consistent, guess. Okay. And what are like the things that you're like, just don't do that or don't spend your time and energy on this. think a lot of people like being deceiving. I don't know if it's because I've been in the industry and I can see through it really well, but when I see brands do stuff like, you know, our stock's about to run
to try create some urgency, for example, and then the next day they're just sending like a routine marketing. Like they clearly have a lot of stock. It's like, I don't know, creating like false sense of urgency or using deceiving marketing tactics in that period is very common and I don't like it. It's like, you know, where, like I said, people try to pretend they're running out of stock or people pretend the sales closing early or, you know, people even sometimes mark up prices and then do the discount. So, you know, it looks like they're not doing too much of a discount.
Nina Huchthausen (37:40.95)
Or there's like really tricky things you can do with the email subject lines where like people will send an email and say like, you know, internal only to try and get people to open their emails thinking they've made a mistake and like sent an internal email to their database. Like all that stuff is like very tricky, but it's consumers are smart and consumers are pretty clued on. And I don't think you want to try like deceive people into interacting with your emails. Cause in the long run, like it just doesn't, it's not worth it. Yeah. And I mean,
once you've pissed off some people and you've kind of eroded that trust, think bad words always go around quicker than good words. The other thing is if you're going to send a high volume of sales in that period, I would not send to people who have bought recently. I would exclude, and you can do that through the software is pretty easy, but I would exclude anyone who sort of has purchased in the last seven days because
If you're hammering Black Friday sales, the goal is to get as many sales as possible. But if someone buys during Black Friday, you don't necessarily want to hammer that person with all the follow -up emails too. if they've purchased, you can let them leap a little bit. I think it's, your segments right as well, because you definitely don't want to be overwhelming people that you've already secured the sale from, as it's a good way to potentially annoy them and ensure they don't come back. Okay.
What are your thoughts on discounts leading up to Christmas, like Friday, Cyber Monday, and then probably all the way to Christmas versus like a buy three, pay two or like larger value bundle? I think you need to get creative.
If you have the margin for it, like I know a lot of people are adverse to running discounts, but unfortunately consumers have been bred to expect discounts. So if you're the one brand not discounting, like it can really impact you, but it's more about the offer than the discount. if people, the perceived value of the offer, like if you were going to run 20 % off or, but the alternative is a buy one, get one free, like that might actually be perceived better in the eyes of the consumer.
Nina Huchthausen (40:02.71)
It is something you need to test. Like offers is a very contentious discussion point with e -comm stores every year, but it is something you need to test. The way I would recommend doing things is maybe like an overall markdown on the site, but then creating a bunch of bundles, which are very clear and very interesting, but also having like tiered benefits, like maybe spend X dollars, get free shipping, spend Y dollars and get a free gift with your purchase.
spend even more money and get a better gift sort of thing. Like the way I did it last year was like a blanket discount, maybe like 20 % offsite wide, but you spend 150, you get free shipping, you spend 250 and you get this free gift, you spend 350 and you get this free gift. it's, there's already a discount for most people, but then there's incentives to keep bumping that average order value because that's obviously where the profit comes from in a lot of stores in times like that. Awesome. I think that's really good tip because
Like for most people, if you're selling direct 20 % might be super fine to do. Hopefully that isn't too crazy, but I would like really focus myself as my recommendation to see, okay, well, what would be, what would people really want to get to, be like, okay, I keep shoveling into my basket. So I get this thing that I could not get without it, you know?
So, but I've also seen that like shitty gifts and I think you really want to stay away from shitty gifts. a hundred percent. Spend $200 and you get this like plastic shaker. Like everybody needs protein shakes. Like I already got a shaker. It's ridiculous. Yeah. It's a cop out as well. Like it needs to be a, needs to be a genuine incentive. Like, and I think avoid selfish incentives. Like a lot of stores
Okay, what can we push? Like, what can we get rid of to, you know, that's going to help us? And it's like, if you're thinking about what you can get rid of, the reason you're thinking you can get rid of it is because no one wants it. Like, you know, that's not, it's not a good incentive. So you need to be thinking like, you've got to be willing to play ball. Like you, it's a negotiation at the end of the day. Like it's an offer. It's a deal. Like it's a win. has to be a win -win situation. Like it's not going to be, you're not going to have the world's best margins during Black Friday and Christmas. You're going to have to give
Nina Huchthausen (42:27.508)
give something away, but you're doing it in exchange for probably better sales during the period and to make good relationships with your customers. Yeah, and I think that's really important to think about whilst at the same time, I think in, I don't know with how many e -com brands you have seen that, but also making sure that you're not educating your people through these periods to just keep waiting for that amazing deal.
that you're going to throw in. Yeah. You know, cause I think that's like a bit of a danger that I've seen with a lot of econ brands that they only make sales when there's a sale, when there's a discount. I think you to be important to, if you ever do do a sale, it has to be themed. Like do your black Friday sale, you know, do your boxing day sale, do your cyber Monday. That's fine. But if you're to do sales and the other times of the year,
make it themed. Don't just do it like, this week we're doing a flash sale for the fun of it, because that's when people are going to become accustomed to running flash sales. It needs to be themed. It's a stock clearance sale, it's a new season sale, it's a dead stock sale, it's last year's styles or something. Make it very clear that you only run sales for a particular purpose on particular products and then that way you can still sort
retain that brand image. I still think the opposite is like a lot of brands go too hard on it. They're like, we never ever want a discount and that's going to be our value proposition. And I think you're shooting yourself in the foot a little bit because like I said, consumers are, they're brought up in a society where there's discounts everywhere. So if you're not ever going to discount, you need to have a very, very good reason that isn't selfish as to why you think you can never run a sale for your customers. But yeah, otherwise just sort of do it
Yeah, cool. Awesome. OK, so if I now end of July, if I'm like, I've listened to this, I'm like, OK, I got a website and yet got no funnels. I don't really I haven't really started on this, but I actually do have a little bit of capacity to get started to build, as you said, value and connection with.
Nina Huchthausen (44:51.04)
with my audience, like what are like the first three to five steps for me to do that I could actually do right now? I'm going to assume you have a Clavio account in this scenario. I'm going to assume you have an account set up. So that's, that's not a step. Step one is make sure that you have your two or three flows set up. That's the basic thing I said, but step two. Sorry, which ones are you the key flows? If you like keys are the most important flows.
Key three flows. you were to set up three flows, it would be a welcome flow for new customers or for new traffic that hasn't purchased yet, like a welcome flow introducing a brand and abandoned checkout flows so you can recover some sales and a post purchase flow. So once someone has purchased, you're thanking them for their order. You may be giving them like a, you know, incentive to shop with you again or something, but you want to build a bit of a relationship on the post purchase side. So that's the three flows I would set up as step one. Step
I would craft some time to send one email a week. If you're not doing anything, block some time in your calendar where it's a non -negotiable, you need to sit down and send one email a week and you actually spend some time on it. Block out like one hour where you can just sit down, try to think of a valuable topic and write something to your list. So that's step two. And that's probably the most important step honestly. Like if you're doing nothing, like just making time to create some valuable content is going to be really important. Step three, I would say
ensure that you're growing your list. So, you know, have a pop -up form on your site that you can build in Clavio and test this weekly. Like, you know, you want to be shooting for about 5%, at least 5 % of people who come to your site are giving you their email. So if you're not getting 5%, get in there each week, you know, make the pop -up form look different, test the new offer, you know, just, just test anything that you can on the pop -up form that you think is going to make more people want to give you their email.
So you've, what have we done? We've built our flows. We're sending one email a week. We're growing our list. I would probably spend some time crafting a content calendar as step four. I would sit down and plan the next 30 days of content. So, you know, when you're going to send your one email a week, you're not just sitting there, go and spend in the first 30 minutes going, geez, what am going to write about? Like you sit down for two hours now and plan your next 30 days of content. Once you get in the flow of it, like ideas will
Nina Huchthausen (47:15.598)
they'll just start rattling off. you know, sit down, plan out 30 days of content, whether it's one email a week or two emails a week, or if you have a database, you know, that's, that's solid and you're already doing a bit of email marketing, like we want to be trying to shoot for three emails a week. What would step five be the fifth most important thing with your email marketing? think I would then make time. If we've, if we've built the basic flows, we're growing our lists, we're sending one campaign and we've, and we've sat down and planned out our next 30 days of content.
I would sit down as well once a week and add one thing to my email flows each week or watch one piece of content that's going to help me be a better email marketer or something like that. it's like my fifth point would be dedicate a little bit of time each week to improving, whether that's actually technically sitting in the account and building out a new flow email or trying different things, or it's getting on YouTube and watching a tutorial
how to build out like a flow that I haven't done yet, like a replenishment flow or a cross -sell flow, like make some time to improving. I know it sounds cliche, like with point two being, ah, with point three, sorry, being sit down and make time for your campaigns. If you can make just a little bit of additional time in a week to sit down and actually dedicate some focused time to improving your email marketing, whether it's your own skills or the results in your account, that will go a long way to improving your results. Like you only need to get 1 % better each month.
to improve your results by 10 % by the end of the year or 12 % by the end of the year. it goes a long way in terms of compounding. So build your basic flows, grow your list, send you one campaign a week, plan your content 30 days ahead of time, and then sit down and dedicate a little bit of time each week to improving. Awesome. Cool. I think that's very actionable, Yeah. And I mean, who doesn't love a good YouTube?
Google on like some topic that you can't figure out. It can be that easy. know, just, just, just, just, just YouTube. What should I learn this week? Well, there's plenty of content on YouTube about Clavier stuff. mean, I have all my own stuff on YouTube too. It's like every, a lot of good email marketers are now on YouTube posting tons of free resources and free content. So if you ever, ever struggling, Google anything about Clavier on YouTube, and I guarantee someone will have a video there. Awesome. Well, you sent me your YouTube.
Nina Huchthausen (49:37.102)
channel link. I can put in the notes. Yeah. That could be a good shortcut. I don't know if it's any good. I would assume it's pretty good. know, have a full course there now so anyone can get on and have a look. that's awesome. That's awesome. So then very last question, because let's say, cool, I'll do these steps and I'm starting now. What results should I kind of expect so that because I don't want anyone to have false expectations.
Yeah. Yeah. I think in, inside your Clavio, if you are using Clavio, well, most softwares will help you track your results, but you should be bringing in like a really healthy Clavio account and no beginner will be able to do this. Don't get me wrong, but a really healthy Clavio account that's run by someone who semi knows what they're doing, at least we'll be able to bring in 25 to 30 % of a company's total revenue. So as a beginner,
If you can sort of get to a point where you're bringing in 10 to 15 % of your revenue from Clavio, like you've made a good start and you're making progress in the right direction. But look at that percentage. Like use 30 % as like an all -star benchmark, as like a goal. Like if I can bring in 30 % of my revenue from email marketing, I'm doing a really good job. You're not going to get there overnight. You're not going to get there in your first month. But if each month you can build up that percentage where you're just making a little bit of extra sales from your email marketing each month, you know, first month it's 5%, second month it's 10%.
and you're just slowly creeping up towards that 30 % mark, that's going to be the best thing to judge your results by. Open rates, click rates, they're all good metrics to judge each campaign on. But if we're looking at like driving tangible results for our business, we need to be looking at how it's impacting our revenue. So use that sort of overall revenue coming from your email marketing, your clavier or your software will tell you that. There'll be a big dashboard where it'll break that all down for you, but track that closely and that'll be a good indicator of your results. Awesome. Cool. Okay.
I think that's like, that's probably a really tangible and actionable thing for people to do. And if anyone doesn't have a cloud view account, you probably want to set that up and connect to your account as that's step zero. Yeah. But if anyone's like, man, yeah, that sounds all like amazing, but I don't have the time, but I actually need to do this. How can they reach out to you or do you have no capacity for new clients? I have capacity. mean, like I'm growing, we're growing our team as we spoke about before the call. So we certainly have capacity.
Nina Huchthausen (52:02.89)
you can, you can email me or I'll actually, I'll get Nina to put my, put my YouTube and my Instagram in the footnotes and that'll be the best place to find me. and you can shoot me a message. there'll be links all over my YouTube to, you know, head to my website, a call once, once you, once you hit one of those links, you, won't be able to stop seeing my content. Maybe a word of warning. You're like sucked in, sucked in like first thing in the morning is Angus. Hello.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Angus. It was really great conversation and thank you for sharing so much value. because for me, at least you really broke that down. I took a ton of notes on the key different steps because I like a good something that's actionable and it's not too fluffy. And I really appreciate you took the time to bring it down to us. No worries. Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it.
