275: Email Marketing Takeaways From Klaviyo Boston Day 1 With Toni Anderson

275: Key Takeaways From Klaviyo Boston Day 1 With Toni Anderson

Today, I’m with my partner Toni Anderson and we’re reporting live at the Klaviyo conference in Boston. Unlike other company sponsored events, what sets Klaviyo-con apart from the rest is the insane employee to attendee ratio.

At Klaviyo-con, there’s literally 1 employee to answer questions for every 2 attendees which is crazy. In this episode, Toni and I share our key email marketing takeaways from Klaviyo Boston Day 1.

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What You’ll Learn

  • An overview of Klaviyo Boston
  • New flow features that you have to use now to improve your email conversions
  • Small tweaks you can make to drastically improve your open rate
  • How to use data science to improve your email marketing revenue

Other Resources And Books

Sponsors

Klaviyo.com – Klaviyo is the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store. Created specifically for ecommerce, it is the best email marketing provider that I’ve used to date. Click here and try Klaviyo for FREE.
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Privy.com – Privy is my tool of choice when it comes to gathering email subscribers for my ecommerce store. They offer easy to use email capture, exit intent, and website targeting tools that turn more visitors into email subscribers and buyers. With both free and paid versions, Privy fits into any budget. Click here and get 15% OFF towards your account.
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EmergeCounsel.com – EmergeCounsel is the service I use for trademarks and to get advice on any issue related to intellectual property protection. Click here and get $100 OFF by mentioning the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast.
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SellersSummit.com – The ultimate ecommerce learning conference! Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, the Sellers Summit is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an ecommerce business. Click here and get your ticket now before it sells out.

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Transcript

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now, I just got back from Klaviyo annual conference in Boston and I came back with a bunch of email marketing takeaways that I’m going to share with you in this episode along with my partner, Toni Anderson. Now, I thought that I was doing everything possible with my email marketing but there are some new features that I now have to implement with my e-commerce store.

But before we begin, I want to give quick shout out to Privy who’s a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store and right now I’m using Privy Display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop-up basically user gives your email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store and customers love the gamification aspect of this and when implemented this form email signups increased by a hundred thirty one percent. Now, you can also use Privy to reduce car abandoned with cart saver pop-ups and abandoned cart email sequences as well one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full-blown email marketing solution. So bottom line Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales so head on over to privy.com/steve and try it for free if you decide you need to the more advanced features use coupon code MWQHJ for fifteen percent off once again that’s privy.com/steve.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast we will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so can spend more time with your family focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. My partner, Toni Anderson and I are live in Boston at Klaviyo Con number 2. Now, what’s funny is Toni and I we were at this event last year and it was only 300 people, right?

Toni: Yeah way bigger this year.

Steve: Way bigger, I would say it’s more than double the size.

Toni: Absolutely. But what I think is amazing in Klaviyo Con and if you haven’t been you have to go is that they have one Klaviyo person for every two attendees at the event.

Steve: That is correct. Every single person at the company comes. I think what they’re 300 people there. And so yeah two to one ratio. So what’s great about this event, which is unlike any other company based event that I’ve been to is that they offer like free consulting services for Klaviyo. So they have dedicated time where you can just pull any Klaviyo person side and get personalized help on your email marketing campaigns.

Toni: And everywhere you go in the convention center. There are tables with people with their Klaviyo jackets on with open laptop. To ready to help you like I don’t think there was one point the entire day when you and I walked around where there wasn’t opportunity to talk to somebody from Klaviyo.

Steve: What’s funny is we run an event together and this is not a low-budget Affair.

Toni: No.

Steve: I was walking down they offer breakfast coffee all day the stage looked amazing.

Toni: It did, beautiful

Steve: And I was like Toni, you know, what do we get that stage for Seller Summit? And then you told me you gave me a number and I was shocked by how much they are spending on this event. I’m pretty sure they’re not making a profit on the event.

Toni: No, I mean it’s all the money that I think your ticket goes to is to create an atmosphere where you can learn as much as possible about all the amazing tools and features that Klaviyo has.

Steve: Yes, it is all about the community and the fact that every single employee is there. I’m just wondering who’s running the company

Toni: the actually was wondering that we were sitting in the session this morning. I thought well, what if there’s like a problem?

Steve: Yeah.

Toni: Who are you talking to?

Steve: Maybe the engineers stayed behind?

Toni: No, there were there were some engineer looking dude. I saw the Asians.

Steve: Engineer looking dudes, please clarify when engineering looking Dude Looks Like please Man

Toni: I, we don’t have to do that.

Steve: Get you on the podcast and insult me. So what was also amazing about Klaviyo was last year when we were here. They said they had like ten thousand brand signed on and this year, they said they had 20,000 Brands.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: 2x increase and 2x increase in the number of employees and they also decided this one statistic which was about Black Friday and I think what was it like five billion dollars were made over Black Friday weekend and they went through their statistics in Klaviyo and Klaviyo was responsible for 40 million of that which is almost a percent.

Toni: Yeah, that’s phenomenal

Steve: Which is crazy. I didn’t even realize so many people were so many larger companies were using Klaviyo. So the event was packed. We actually had some problems getting in some sessions, but the few that we did go to work good.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: So what I thought we would do is kind of do a little breakdown of the sessions that we went to. Do you have any comments about the keynote per se?

Toni: I always think it’s interesting to listen to a brand keynote just to hear about their growth and their strategies for growing their business what I like about what they’re doing is it feels like all their growth is centered around helping the consumer being the users of Klaviyo grow their businesses. So I just think that that all the statistics they shared this morning, were pretty I don’t know if we can get a copy that they had the slide where it showed all their users. So klaviyo customers connected to those customer’s customers.

Steve: Yes and of just covering the entire world.

Toni: Yes, like the entire Globe had like these connections, which I thought was if you could I’m sure they’ll give that to you could add it to the show notes, but that was pretty phenomenal think about like how many people are touched on a daily basis just by email marketing

Steve: What I actually liked was instead of making people come to an event. They actually went around and put events all across the country for their customers.

Toni: Yeah, right.

Steve: I don’t know of any other company that does that but I guess the fact that they’re doing really well they can do this and it just shows that they’re the care that they have for the customer makes them loyal customers in the more people just sign on.

Toni: I think there was even a comment. One of the Keynotes this afternoon where it said everything is so integrated into the date of the klaviyo provides that you can’t switch email service providers.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like I’m on klaviyo you’re on klaviyo and once you once you’re pregnant, I want to say pregnant with their service like you can’t you can’t get out of there because all of your data is just in there and all the data is necessary to create all these segments that you can use to to increase revenue for like your best sellers.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: All right. So let’s switch gears and talk about the first session that we went to it was from Alexandra Edelstein who spoke at seller Summit at the seller Summit. She was talking about segmentation, but this time around she was talking about flows and just to be clear flows and klaviyo land are autoresponder sequences that pretty much generate revenue for your store on autopilot. And if you followed my blog for quite some time, I have an article in there. About all the email autoresponders that I use but klaviyo over the years have introduced additional features into their flow Builder that allow you to dig a lot deeper into these flows. And I know after listening to Alex’s talk. I’m going to be making some significant changes to my flows to take advantage of these features and let’s go over some of these features you want to start?

So the first feature that’s been in there for quite some time is and this is really hard. You’re not actually using the tool but it’s the ability to Branch your autoresponder sequences based on customer data. So for example, let’s say someone abandons the cart right? Right now, the way I have it is I send out a generic abandoned cart email after 4 hours and if they still haven’t made a purchase I send them another abandoned cart email after day and then finally another one after two days, but what you can do in klaviyo now is you can Branch based on new and old customers. So let’s say I have a customer who is never purchased from us and we want them to just spend money and we want them to make a purchase because we know that someone who has purchased as 60% more likely to make another purchase.

You just want to get them to spend any amount of money in that abandoned cart sequence. I’m not giving out a coupon but what I might want to do is for a brand new customer give them a coupon just so they become a customer whereas if it’s an old customer has already purchased before chances are those people might not need a coupon and I wouldn’t want to present a coupon to them because I know they’re going to buy no matter what.

Toni: Yeah, and I thought it was interesting to she talked about basing doing a split based on the product like that was in the band and cart hmm where you can change the subject line based on product, which I thought was pretty cool.

Steve: Yes, actually I think one of her examples was based on the value of the items in the cart.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: So someone only has like 5 bucks in their cart, you’re not going to offer them a coupon right? They’re low value customer but let’s say there were way old, let’s say they’re spending like $500 in their cart you want to do like you have more wiggle room to provide a discount in that case since you might want to Discount 10 or 20% in there.

Toni: Right. So the fact that you can like completely customize the customer experience based on the value of the items in the cart what’s in the cart likes pretty amazing because it’s true like the $5 customer or the $20 customer you’re going to treat very differently than the customer that’s going to spend $500. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is they talked about you can send automations based on the expected date of the next order.

Steve: Yes.

Toni: Which first of all just like mind-blowing.

Steve: So that opens a whole can of worms, right? So klaviyo, I think last year they introduced all these data science features. So there’s lifetime value. Acted date of next order they even have a predicted gender.

Toni: Yes.

Steve: Feature where I think based on the name of the customer they can infer whether it’s a male or female and you can dynamically change your emails imagery. So for example, let’s say we know it’s a female we’d want to show them pictures of women’s clothes as opposed to men’s clothes. Whereas if it was Steve they’d want to show me like guys clothing right so you can customize dynamically on that level.

Toni: I think you can even I think for me like just thinking about how I would use that in my own business is just changing even the verbiage like in the subject line of an email or in the email body and

Steve: To make it more girly.

Toni: Yeah or to make it more like direct and to-the-point. I mean hate to be stereotypical here, but..

Steve: Well no, for a guy be direct to the point.

Toni: Exactly.

Steve: Okay, what’s an example of like a female subject like?

Toni: Like more emojis in the subject line, like over-the-top verbiage, you know, lots of, lots of punctuation. I think I would be testing that if I was dividing it by gender.

Steve: Which brings me to the next feature that everyone should be using which is AB testing. What’s cool about klaviyo is like I’ve used five email marketing tools over the years and typically the way you set up an a/b test is you literally write two different emails. Then you send it out twice and you figure out who wins within Klaviyo, you can do it within a flow and this is if you’re not using the tool it’s really hard to visualize this but they have this email autoresponder Builder. That’s like drag and drop and what you can do is you can actually drag this A/B test lock in there and then write two emails and then instantly it just automatically A/B test within the flow and as soon as you pick a winner, you literally just delete the email that lost and that way you have the most optimal email autoresponder in there.

Toni: That’s actually one of my favorite features that they have. That makes it so much

Steve: Yeah, it makes it more convenient like other tools have this feature, but it’s much easier to use with klaviyo.

Toni: And then I like the fact that they talk about and this is something that I’m not doing but that you can tag profiles inflows to update them in the flow. Once you talked about. So once someone does it creates a certain action at tags them so then it it changes where they are in the flow. And remember when she was talking with that is towards the end.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, I have that right?

Toni: I think it’s newer. It’s a newer feature. She said I think they rolled out in the past couple months.

Steve: That’s right. If someone is made their first order, what you do is you can tag them and time stamp that so that maybe after one year, for example, we sell wedding handkerchiefs. We’d want to stamp them in after a year. Wish them a happy anniversary and maybe after the second anniversary, which is the Cotton anniversary entice them to get hankies again.

Toni: And in seven years they get

Steve: Seven years to get well, yeah, seven years the running joke between Toni and I is that after seven years, that’s like the typical divorce period so after seven years send them another email automatically see, hey, sorry it didn’t work out. But

Toni: Here’s a hankie to dry your tears.

Steve: Here’s a hankie to dry your tears.

Toni: One thing I was going to actually ask you about I was just curious because we heard this several times today. Do you use emojis in any of your email? So

Steve: I do not.

Toni: Okay, I’ve started testing it and it’s actually works really well, but I wonder if it’s because my audience is primarily female. Although yours is probably to for

Steve: It actually is.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Well, no actually for the blog too the readers are mostly women over the age of 35. So

Toni: We love emojis

Steve: I was just going to say as a woman over the age of

Toni: 27

Steve: 27

Toni: right

Steve: You like emojis or

Toni: I’ve noticed in my open rates have increased since I’ve started adding them.

Steve: That’s not what I was asking you. Are you more likely to open and email

Toni: Yeah

Steve: Because of an emoji?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Are there any specific emojis that work better than others?

Toni: The ones that I the ones that I personally relate to the laughing, crying one, big eye. You know, what the heck’s going on, but I think it also can correlate to your email subject. Right? Like I sent an email out the other day and I said something about something being on life support,.

Steve: Friyay?

Toni: Friyay, that’s, I love Friyay, I sent out about being on life support and I added a little ambulance and then like the shocked face and the open rate was pretty good. And I feel like is it correlated to my topic but I’ve been testing it for probably six weeks now and my open rates are increasing and that’s really the only thing I’ve changed in the email so

Steve: I know for me emojis are a big turn-off.

Toni: Yes. I know that’s why I was curious about you using them.

Steve: I probably I mean if I don’t like them, I probably won’t use them

Toni: Right

Steve: Although like because you can do gender-based split.

Toni: That’s what I was thinking.

Steve: Right. Perhaps I would do Emojis for women over the age of 27 like yourself.

Toni: Yes. Absolutely.

Steve: And for guys to be like yo

Toni: you could do like the fist bump emoji.

Steve: Oh Yeah the fist bump I might open a fist bump Emoji actually. Yeah.

Toni: but I noticed that like two of the speaker’s today mentioned it in their talks

Steve: Emojis?

Toni: I feel like this is it’s clearly a trend but I’ve been getting emails from like big Brands like Macy’s type size brands with emojis in them now.

Steve: Really?

Toni: Yeah

Steve: Macy’s.

Toni: I don’t know if it’s Macy’s but like brands on that

Steve: What if you’re like bank send you emails with Emojis? I probably wouldn’t fly right

Toni: the bags of money.

Steve: I don’t want Bank of America sending me like fist-bump emojis or whatnot. So it depends on the business folks one thing that I also I found kind of neat was they have location-based also. So let’s say your shipping worldwide. You might only want to offer free shipping if they are located geographically in the United States as opposed. We actually ran into this problem the other day, we offer free shipping over the orders over the over 75 bucks, but then we had an international customer as their shopping. We had this like countdown right countdown to free shipping and she obtained free shipping. We don’t actually know where she’s located until after she starts checking out and she was she thought she was getting free shipping, but she didn’t. But anyway bottom line here is you can easily do that in your email to just make it clear that free shipping is only for U.S People and the international people won’t see that, you know.

Toni: Something they talked about later today that I thought was really interesting. And I wanted to chat with you about it is the cross selling and advertising versus email your when she discussed that it was the skincare lady this afternoon where she talked about taking the email addresses and instead of like using them to instead of marketing to them via email. They actually use them for like custom audiences and Facebook to cross-sell.

Steve: Yeah, that’s actually something we do but only with emails who have not opened with a certain period so essentially people who just have an open for a while and instead of just deleting them or just sunsetting them you want to do something with them and sometimes they’re not opening emails, but they’re on Facebook or Instagram and they can see those ads. So one thing that we do in that respect is we take some of our people who have bought before but haven’t bought in a long time have an open an email a long time and we try to get them back on with some sort of give away or some sort of like free plus shipping offer and that sort of thing or like a free hanky with any purchase and that usually gets them back on once they make a purchase again for some reason after they make a Purchase, they’re more likely to open the emails after.

All right. So one other thing that I thought was pretty cool and this is something that I personally am not doing is doing testing based on the weight periods for win back campaigns in abandoned cart. So when you do an abandoned cart, like I think I don’t know why I chose four hours perhaps I was just a default example.

Toni: I think it’s the default.

Steve: Yeah

Toni: In the system. Yeah.

Steve: But you can test that dynamically split test. I guess it’s not considered a split test, but you can dynamically test different wait times to see which one converts the best for the first email second and third email for win back campaigns, which is when someone buys something but hasn’t bought in a long time. You can kind of test this and figure out the approximate period when someone is going to purchase again, and then use that number.

Toni: Well another thing that she talked about in her session this morning was when you’re hitting them with the expected purchase again flow and she said she talked about a company that had 13 emails in the flow and everyone was in the room sort of had the appearance. That was too many and she said the open rate was over 30% on the final email and the conversion rate was 13% So I think the message in that was like tested length of your flows. So as opposed to like thinking well, this is like a four email flow like try different amounts of emails because the one who emailed people the longest was actually the best one remember her talking about that this morning

Steve: I do in my opinion there is.

Toni: Do you agree with that?

Steve: No well. No, it’s not that agree with it. There’s no flow that is too long.

Toni: Okay

Steve: In my opinion.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Like the more times you contact the customer the more sales you going to make so like our flows. We just continuously add to them because we know that every email is going to lead to some money

Toni: But do you think because I notice that my own flows that like, I feel like the farther out they get the lower the open rate unless

Steve: Absolutely

Toni: Very specific like sometimes I’ll shift the emails around because I know an email just performs better because it’s just a catchy or topic. So I’ll move it farther in the flow, but I noticed like a sort of seems like a decline. I was actually surprised by that statistic.

Steve: Yeah, actually, I didn’t know I’d have to see the nature that email. I wonder why that one last email did so well.

Toni: Yeah, I wonder if it was like a last chance or

Steve: maybe it was just like free merchandise.

Toni: Yeah, everything’s free in the store

Steve: Yeah right

Toni: Just pay shipping.

Steve: Yeah. So one thing that they did talk about was your implementing all these automated flows and they can clash with each other and Klaviyo has this feature where you can make sure that you’re not sending more than one email per day so that they’re not getting like four emails and an autoresponder sequence having the same time. And what you can do is you can prioritize the autoresponder over the broadcast because one thing that I can’t remember who, was it Alex said this? That the flow emails tend to always perform better than your broadcast campaigns.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: So you want to prioritize the flows over the campaign’s

Toni: so you would set the black

Steve: there’s a button. I can’t remember what it’s called

Toni: Yes, smarts endings.

Steve: smarts endings. that’s correct. That’s what it is.

Toni: So you set that for your broadcast. You keep your flow going.

Steve: That’s correct.

Toni: But you’d make it work.

Steve: Yes, that’s correct. That’s correct. We’ve been jumping around here. I have in my notes here. Just more on the tagging different uses of the ability to tag a specific user. If someone shops in a certain category or opens email in a certain category, you can tag them and say let’s say they’re interested in oil necklaces, right and that way later on you can just Branch saying I only want to send people interested in oil necklaces this particular email and all other categories it different in your flow

Toni: I think that’s really valuable if you have like if your SKUs are wildly different. So let’s just say you’re selling like for you.

Steve: Well, we have a whole bunch of categories, right?

Toni: Yeah, right. So you have your napkins

Steve: Napkins, hankies, towels, aprons, pocket squares

Toni: But your apron purchasers are probably never a pocket purchaser.

Steve: They’ll never going to buy a hankie.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: That’s correct.

Toni: So to be able to I think if it in any business where you like have these different some businesses just don’t have that. They saw a couple of Using they’re all very similar, but I think really closely what you’re doing. Like I think for me with the jewelry, I would probably tag it by like either type of jewelry. Like are they getting the higher value of the higher price jewelry the lower-priced jewelry. Like are they sort of a bargain customer?

Steve: Yeah.

Toni: Because there is two different Shoppers, which I know or based on like style and design

Steve: right

Toni: So I would tag them that way because my SKUs are all very similar like you’re buying jewelry. You’re buying jewelry, but I think for you, you know, anyone who’s got in a store that they have multiple categories. It’s huge right because you don’t ever have to send your apron people.

Steve: Yeah. I mean just to be clear this functionality was already in Klaviyo. Like you can create a segment of everyone who’s purchased aprons and do a broadcast their what this what these new features that they released allow you to do a dynamically within an autoresponder sequence. That’s the distinction there. You mentioned high and low value customers, right?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: You can branch dynamically based like if you have a high value customer, you know, they purchase from you multiple times and they purchase a high value. You should be treating those people differently. Offering them perhaps Loyalty Rewards or something like that. Whereas someone who might not have purchased before or they have something really low in their cart. Maybe you just, them purchased for you definitely want to just try to get them to purchase but let’s say they purchase from you before and they are a low value customer. Maybe you might be less inclined to give them a discount or whatever. I don’t know you it’s important to treat them differently because with our store I think 10 percent of our customers generate over 50 percent of revenues like our largest customers.

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Toni: So I was actually curious about that because they talked about that a little bit this afternoon with the Loyalty program actually haven’t done anything like that.

Steve: I haven’t either

Toni: Have you had any students with success?

Steve: With a loyalty program? The reason why we haven’t done it first of all is because we’re weddings, right? I mean if they’re loyal and that means it has a lot of weddings, right?

Toni: They need to get a reality TV show exactly.

Steve: Yeah, in terms of loyalty. I guess you’d be more for people who have items

Toni: consumables.

Steve: Consumables. Yeah. Yeah, maybe like pet products or something like that.

Toni: Yeah and the beauty space right? all those product.

Steve: Correct. Correct. I mean, did you see any reason for your products to do that?

Toni: I mean ours are more. You just want more different styles, right? So there’s not a lot of you don’t buy something again the same exact product. Right?

Steve: Right. So for you be more like cross-sells. Yes on what they bought right? So if they bought a bracelet you might show them more bracelets or oils.

Toni: I’d actually show them a necklace that they bought a bracelet

Steve: A necklace. Okay.

Toni: they’re probably not going to buy a second bracelet.

Steve: that makes sense. Yeah. Well they have two wrists

Toni: just go all out.

Steve: Yeah.

Toni: I was just curious about that because that’s not something that I’ve even really looked into initially when I got started. It was something I was interested in and I didn’t feel like a good fit but I didn’t know if you had any students with.

Steve: not that I know of

Toni: because I feel like with a loyalty program to you might be able to get your recurring what you could get people in a flow or even not you know.

Steve: yeah, actually one thing that was mentioned in Alex’s talk. What did Alex’s talk was? You know for your best customers you can offer like double loyalty point base.

Toni: Yes right

Steve: to get them to buy it’s kind of like the way we do with credit card points, right? There are certain purchases that will give you 5x and almost always fall for that.

Toni: Yeah, like it use it at the gas pump and

Steve: yeah, you get 5x.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: at the grocery store or buy a plane ticket today, you’ll get three extra points for that plane ticket.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Toni: It definitely works I just I want to see it in e-commerce.

Steve: Yeah, for sure. What was the I think it was smiled at I/O, right? What’s the service that? As well, that’s correct. So one other thing that I thought was cool that I did not know was a feature in Klaviyo was they actually provide benchmarks for what your open rates click-through rates and conversion rates are across different Industries. And the the slide went by really quick, but I noticed there was like arts and crafts, beauty, furniture all these different categories. So you can kind of Compare the numbers that you’re getting and your sequences what other people who are running similar businesses as you. Do you notice that?

Toni: I tried to get. Well there’s a lady in front of me. They kept moving her head. So I was trying to snag pictures of some of the slides just so we’d have them to refer back to you but I didn’t get

Steve: yeah, I’m going to ask Klaviyo for those slides actually because maybe I’ll post in the show notes because it’s pretty interesting.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: I think I was doing worse than I was looking in the arts and crafts. That was just the first one. Yes, we’re technically that arts and crafts. But..

Toni: yeah, it’s actually I think that’s pretty interesting though because I feel like right now the only Baseline I have is talking to other Sellers and you know kind of getting an idea of what their open rate is. I mean you and I have this conversation a lot with blogs emails.

Steve: Yes.

Toni: So but you know, we’re not even the same industry.

Steve: That’s correct. Yeah, the table was pretty big for what I remember. So

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: It’s just interesting. I like the open rates for really high. I remember thinking they’re all 32 percent plus.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: So I’m just wondering like if the data is just kind of SKUs towards like the most active customers that people are sending to I don’t know.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: I didn’t get to see the fine print on the graph. But if I can get a chance to get that information, I’ll post in the show notes

Toni: random side note nothing to do with this conference, but I did I started testing putting not a video in my email but a link to a video and adding video in my subject line and my open rates went up about 10%

Steve: Really?

Toni: My click through rates went up from about 2 percent to about 7 percent.

Steve: By just saying you had a video? Where do we just get that from

Toni: Fincon.

Steve: Fincon that’s where

Toni: Yeah, so I thought well, I’ll just try it like I’ll do it and I had videos that I could use like or very organically it wasn’t forced. I think if you could do quick product videos showcasing products, if you have especially if you’re doing an email about a new product and you can do it, you know those videos where it’s like lots of images in short bursts. So the video itself is only like 20 seconds

Steve: You know, what’s ironic about that is if I see video in the subject line, I’m not gonna open the emails I got no time to watch a video. I’m like a text-based person, but maybe it’s just our generation. Are you a video person or?

Toni: I never thought about the fact that if I was more or less inclined to open an email that said video in the title, but I do watch a lot of video.

Steve: Oh you do?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Okay for like an e-commerce store.

Toni: Yeah. I’ll watch yeah, I’d rather watch a video than read an article.

Steve: Really?

Toni: Yeah. Okay, maybe like we’ve had this conversation, I’d Rather Go on YouTube to learn how to do something.

Steve: Well, that’s if you’re learning how to do something but

Toni: but even gaining information I’d say

Steve: So you’d rather watch like a 10 minute video than read an article that you can just kind of refer back to.

Toni: I guess it depends on the topic. So let’s say

Steve: let’s say it’s yeah, let’s say it’s the autoresponder sequences how to implement autoresponder sequences. Would you rather watch a video on that or would you rather watch like a nice poet look at a nice post with examples and images that show exactly what’s in each email and how to set everything up step by step.

Toni: I’d want some static images, but then I probably watching video.

Steve: Really?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. Actually I knew that about you. Yeah.

Toni: Yeah, but I know that like I, my SKU older right? So like so my generation is actually less inclined to want to video but like what is the stats that I think we found that out last year you’d like 25 to 40. It’s like 22 like that age group is way more likely to watch a video

Steve: 25 to 40

Toni: is it? I don’t know what it is. Like it’s bit of there’s there’s a chunk of age that I’m not in so 10 to 20

Steve: just for the record Toni is now within the band she just specified.

Toni: But the younger generation is way more likely to watch a video than they are to read an article. So to me, if you have a product and you want to demonstrate like how to use the product how the product integrates in your lifestyle even talking about the product like I would probably do a video and add that in my email

Steve: Oh since we’re on this topic. I heard that gifts or do you say gifts or GIFs?

Toni: GIFs that lady said it wrong today.

Steve: No, I thought it was GIFs, GIFs work. Well for email for click-through rate?

Toni: Yes.

Steve: Yes. Absolutely, which is also something that I’m not doing.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: Right now.

Toni: You know those part of it is like does it fit the brand?

Steve: I think anything can be made to fit the brand right a GIF doesn’t mean it has to be cheesy like someone dancing or whatever. It can just be like different different angles of the image animated. So I will get you looking at GIFs yes.

Toni: Yes. Can we take a poll? Can you take a poll in this podcast?

Steve: Okay, fine. Yeah, we can I guess if you think it’s GIFs, you agree with Toni then leave a comment. But if you agree with me do not leave a comment.

Toni: Oh ha ha. That’s unfair.

Steve: Ha ha All right. So that’s I think that sums up everything for Alex’s talk. Did you have any comments about the Keynotes?

Toni: I actually wrapped some of the keynote stuff in

Steve: You did. Okay.

Toni: Yeah, so I was going through my slide pictures. You know one thing I thought was interesting the first lady. I’m trying to get the brand

Steve: Co Paris

Toni: Co Paris?

Steve: I think was Co Paris

Toni: Co Paris is a beauty product.

Steve: Yes. Coconut. Coconut Beauty.

Toni: Yeah. One thing I thought was interesting is when she was talking about starting out with the company and I think she said she was there first employee and the very first big promotion they had they had an email list of what under 300, 300 people are so and she sent out a launch email, but they didn’t have the product or website. So it was a major blunder.

Steve: Yes.

Toni: Because she sent us out and actually was surprised. She didn’t lose her job to be honest, but maybe she was there weren’t a lot of people in the company but I think what I learned from that is, you know, you can make mistakes when you’re testing things out like when you’re getting started. I think there’s a lot of people that won’t try something because they’re afraid it doesn’t work. But I think she was proof that like they made a lot of mistakes early on in the company with email marketing and they still have grown to be a substantial company. They’re in what Sephora couple other stores I think pretty big brand

Steve: a snapshot of her klaviyo account is like a million bucks.

Toni: So I mean, I think when you’re listening to some of these tools are these features and Klaviyo, sometimes they’re a little overwhelming to implement but I think it’s important to start experimenting with them because even if you don’t hit it out of the park the first time you’re probably there’s a lot of forgiveness there from your audience and especially only have an email list of 300 people.

Steve: Yeah, what’s funny about her is she signed up for Klaviyo because it was free.

Toni: I know

Steve: that’s the only reason she signed up for it up to 250 which proves that the freemium Model works.

Toni: Yes

Steve: It’s alive and well

Toni: because they’re not they’re not free now. No.

Steve: Yeah. No, they’re not. Well they still have that free tier up to 250.

Toni: No. No, but that companies definitely.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have tons of emails Subs now. Some to Tactical things that I got out of that talk with Co Paris Beauty was emojis in the subject line, right which is why are you talked about and pre headers.

Toni: Yes.

Steve: So this is something that I’m not doing either but you know, like when you’re looking at an email on mobile, you see the subject line underneath usually it just takes the first sentence of your email, but you can actually change it. It’s kind of like a meta description in SEO. You can change that to make the email much more clickable.

Toni: So I do that all the time

Steve: You do?

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: You’re just better than I am.

Toni: No, it’s probably cuz I heard it at a conference but I actually have tested having it and not having it and it likes he was right. It is significantly better.

Steve: Yeah, like if you use promotional language or something just to get them to click. Yeah people actually read that

Toni: or I ask a question in it. You know, I try to just it’s something you try to come up with something very engaging in that second line or the pre header line but I’ve noticed a big difference.

Steve: Yeah, so use pre headers that something I’m going to definitely start using

Toni: The other thing. She was talking about doing like some testing with with a/b testing and klaviyo is professional images versus user generated content.

Steve: Hmm.

Toni: I know they said for them it was about 50/50 but I think that’s definitely something you need to test out because I know there are a lot of companies out there that the user generated content actually will perform better. But we’ve seen that too with video right like sometimes the videos that are less.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah

Toni: Perform. So I think that’s something you should be testing in your emails is everyone’s has the professional images that they have done other products, but then grabbing and grabbing images from people out of Instagram or Facebook or something like that definitely worth testing.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And then the final key note of the day was from Kara gold. Is it Goldie? Anyways the founder of hint water and I’m actually a huge fan of hint water my wife drinks it and it’s basically just it’s like Lacroix, but just not carbonated.

Toni: Yeah

Steve: and they use real fruit and it’s just a great alternative to like diet sodas and that’s the thing which is really bad for you. And what I liked about I like hearing her story because she started with nothing.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Absolutely, nothing. No one was just kind of on a whim. She was pregnant. She was like nine months pregnant. She’s like, yeah, I’m just gonna launch a water company.

Toni: Yeah. Well, she went into Whole Foods the day. She had her baby and said, I need you to take 12 cases and put it on your shelf.

Steve: Exactly.

Toni: Like totally pulled the I’m having a baby today card. Which good good for her.

Steve: Yeah. I’ve never think about using pregnancy as a tool.

Toni: This is a whole new marketing.

Steve: All right, is that why you had so many kids?

Toni: It is but it is like think about how many products I’ve sold. I loved her. I thought her story was very cool and inspiring and I think what I liked about her is that she grew by putting her products in other people’s stores, right? She was in Whole Foods. She’s in Starbucks for a bit

Steve: When she was in companies like Google.

Toni: Yes, she got into Google

Steve: you go to Google and then Amazon and she just became a staple of these companies in just kept ordering more

Toni: but what I thought was really cool about her, is that when even when To that point where she’s I mean like that seems to me like you’re kind of at the Pinnacle right? You’re in Google. They’re selling you on Amazon. You’re in Whole Foods like these are like huge opportunities for people but she was like, that’s not good enough. I want to own my customer.

Steve: Yes, and then she had a story about being in Starbucks where she was selling really well and then all of a sudden Starbucks pulled the plug took her Products off the shelf and that’s when she realized that she needed to own the customer. Are they in Starbucks now?

Toni: I don’t know I wasn’t there in that but like to me it didn’t even make sense why Starbucks pulled them because she said they were doing 3x what

Steve: Well even today she said. She’s the largest independent drink company that’s not associate with Coke and Pepsi right, which means that maybe Starbucks pulled them because people were buying that instead of coffee, right? That would make sense. Right?

Toni: I’m the only person I ever know that goes into Starbucks. It doesn’t buy coffee.

Steve: No I get I go and get tea.

Toni: Well, I’m not drinking

Steve: Just chai tea

Toni: But outside of like a drink on the menu. Like I’m the one percent of that goes in there and buys out of the display case.

Steve: What do you get in the display case?

Toni: It’s bottled water.

Steve: Oh

Toni: I don’t drink coffee or tea.

Steve: So do they have Hint water? I don’t think I just went to Starbucks the other day

Toni: I don’t think they do because I’m there almost every week

Steve: Yeah, exactly. So that doesn’t make sense. They sell other people’s water.

Toni: I’m wondering if there was some sort of an agreement. Maybe they were coming up with an agreement because whatever water they sell they sell SmartWater now or

Steve: I think so, but that’s not flavored water.

Toni: No, but it might be owned by a distributor that has a non-compete. That’s what made me think that that’s probably what happened which is a good reason to own your own your platform. Right? Because it might not even be that you’re not doing the volume or the sales that you need to do to maintain that relationship. It could be that some other companies in there and the relationship was accomplished.

Steve: Hmm. What’s cool about how she concluded the talk was she had skin cancer on her nose and she was like, oh my God skin cancer. I’m going to start using all this sun block and then she noticed that on her sunblock. There was all these chemicals which parabens or what I don’t know what the chemicals are, but she was like, okay, I’m gonna create sunscreen free those chemicals and she just went and did it and she’s using the same fruit extracts from the drink. I know and I actually have a can of it right now gonna fire it up. Maybe

Toni: I’m excited. I’m going to get it when I get home

Steve: Yeah, but then you end up smelling like fruit instead of chemicals.

Toni: Yeah. Well, I think it’s safer too right? because there’s some stuff in some block that I don’t think it’s very good for you.

Steve: Correct. Those are the chemicals I was talking about which I don’t know what they are.

Toni: Yeah, whatever they’re called.

Steve: Very inspiring story. She was pretty bad ass onstage.

Toni: Oh, I loved her. the second she walked on.

Steve: Well Toni just like her outfit

Toni: she looked amazing. No, I just I like stories of people that just say like I’m going to do this. I mean to me it’s like she has four kids, right? She has a busy life and that doesn’t let like circumstances life stop her from like getting her goal like changing people’s lives. That’s what she did this SmartWater. The hint water was because she was kicking her own Diet Coke addiction and she had some health problems. So she created the water and then she Realize that it was changing other people’s lives. So I love people that have like a passion behind what they do

Steve: absolutely there’s a passion between every product that she releases. I think specifically what was happening is when she started drinking water over Diet Coke, which I think was her drink of choice. She had acne before it all got cleared up and I think she had some stomach issues. They cleared up. So evidently those chemicals aren’t good for you

Toni: Yeah. We, neither of us are Diet Coke drinkers.

Steve: Yeah. I’m not a diet coke. I don’t drink Coke either you drink Coke occasionally right?

Toni: In very very very occasionally. No, not anymore not that I got hint water.

Steve: That’s correct.

Toni: I’m not sure if it’s on the east coast like in Florida. I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Steve: Hmm. It’s all over the place where I live.

Toni: Well, yeah, but she’s from where you are, right?

Steve: yeah, I actually first had it at Google ironically when I went to visit

Toni: very cool. So they gave and they gave it out at the end of the event today.

Steve: They did, bags along with the sunscreen. Yeah, but that was actually the last keynote of the event and then after the keynote there is actually the opportunity to get some one-on-one time with the klaviyo rep if you wanted them to look over your autoresponder sequences in your campaigns. I thought that’s fantastic. Right? I think that in itself is worth it

Toni: Absolutely

Steve: Company to come in and get someone from klaviyo to look at your sequences and and point out what you’re not doing.

Toni: Yeah, and the caliber of people that are here in attendance to are pretty phenomenal.

Steve: We got a bunch of friends here. You got Andrew Youdarien from e-commerce fuel. We got Eric Bandholz. We got Kevin these are all people that have been on the podcast and it’s kind of been like one big party. It’s been fun.

Toni: Yeah, you get to hang out with him tonight. And then more tomorrow we got Eric. Eric has a keynote tomorrow night.

Steve: That’s true. Yeah, Eric’s doing the keynote. So we will be back in the next episode to talk about day 2 of klaviyo and I’m not sure exactly what they’re coming tomorrow. But I think they’re going over all the new product features. There’s some super big announcement. They’re making in the next episode

Toni: Then we’ll have it in the podcast.

Steve: And we will have it on the podcast. That’s correct. I already know what it is. I think it’s going to be a game changer

Toni: I gotta wait till tomorrow though. I don’t

Steve: well, I won’t tell you then.

Toni: I’ll be genuinely surprised tomorrow then.

Steve: Absolutely. Yep. So join us again for the next episode and we’ll continue with day 2 product notes and more breakout sessions and the closing keynote from Eric.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Klaviyo Boston was a lot of fun and next week, I’m doing a recap of day two of the event but next time I’m going to have Andrew Youdarien of e-commerce fuel and Kurt Elster of The Unofficial Shopify podcast on the show with me. For more information about this episode. Go to mywifequarterjob.com/episode275.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use the term visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture exit intent and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it is so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any parameter that is closely tied your eCommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try it is free so head on over to privy.com/steve. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode, Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce Merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence a post purchase flow or win back campaign. Basically, all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo. Once again, That’s mywifequitherjob.com/klaviyo.

Now I talked about how I use these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store heading over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com

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