It Started With An Email

BUILDING a relationship with customers over email is like any friendship in the big, wide world.

You need to work on creating trust, endear yourself to your new friend, have some fun, and stick with them through thick and thin (or sale spend-ups and abandoned shopping carts).

Ezra uses a post-purchase sequence of emails (triggered automatically when anyone buys a product for the first time).

“It’s worth $0.15 to every recipient and it’s only 10% of our total revenue that comes from automations, but I would argue that it’s our most important flow, because it’s engaging with people who just bought and we really want to take care of them so that they will come back and buy a second time,” he says.

“Even if they don’t do so during this automation, this will help when we run a sale event.

“And if they placed an order more than once, we filter them out and we send them a different automation sequence. We want to send people who buy twice a different automation than people who just bought once.”

PRE-ARRIVAL EMAILS

Ezra’s company sends out four emails in the first series when someone joins the automation sequence after having bought a product.

These pre-arrival emails go out before the product arrives.

The goals are to build excitement and anticipation about the purchase, to reduce buyer remorse, to reduce refund rates, to increase the number of reviews of the product, to create an affinity with the product before it arrives.

Some ideas for this are:

• Brand identity content. “Here’s who we are and here’s what we think.”
• Open the box video. “Get excited. Your box is coming soon. Here’s what’s going to be in it. Check it out.”
• Press or third-party pitch video. This is customer testimonials or someone pitching your products. “This product is awesome. We love it and you’re going to get it soon.”
• Social-proof/science-proof/case studies/content related to the ownership or benefit of the product. So, what is the benefit of owning this product and how can you talk about that? Perhaps try brand and product frequently asked questions (FAQs) and then personal stories and market relevant stories.

Ezra suggests the first email sent out be similar to this one his company uses: a social call-to-action in the “Welcome to the Pro-Age Revolution.”

“Thanks for your purchase. We’re already busy working on your BOOM! Order and we’ll email your shipping receipt as soon as it leaves our warehouse. We also wanted to thank you for joining our community (that links over to the blog). Since BOOM! first began, it’s been our dream to have a community of women who celebrate their lives and embrace their natural beauty every age. This is what the Pro-Age Revolution is all about. It’s an invitation for you to love yourself …”

The email aims to:

• express gratitude for the sale
• set the tone for the rest of the series of post-purchase emails
• confirm the customer’s order and deliver shipping information
• introduce them to content and offer support
• promote social channels
• tease the rest of the email series
• send them over to the company blog and store.

 

“This email, by the way, is not designed to sell anything,” Ezra says.

“But look at that click-through rate: 65% of the people open it and 8% of people click one of the links in there. You’ll never see a click-through rate that high.

“And of course, it sounds like almost 10% of the people who received it actually clicked on it.

“It’s insane. And of course, it does make money. But that’s not the point of this email.

“It’s just to engage them, get them to our social channels and get them over to our blog.”

A few similar emails are sent in the lead-up to the product arrival.

Then the cross-selling begins.

CROSS-SELLING EMAILS

The cross-sell email sequence encourages them to purchase other items they haven’t bought yet (perhaps to display your second-most popular item), to increase your lifetime customer value, to leverage dynamic automation (“You can automatically set up your Klaviyo account with us”).

This is where you want to build anticipation, use pre-sell engagement articles, social-proof, science, case studies,  give direct links to the offer page and incentives including a discount with a time constraint plus pricing tiers (“buy three of these items and we’ll give you a discount”).

Ezra offers this cross-sell email as part of the BOOM! post-purchase automation sequence.

It goes out on Day 7, offering a discount, to people who have not yet bought the company’s second-most popular product – a moisturiser.

“So, we’re trying to promote that product. We’re trying to educate people about this product,” Ezra says.

“We’re trying to increase familiarity with our brand. We’re trying to introduce them to our brand philosophy offering a discount for this product and giving directions to purchase it and giving them a discount code and offering a deadline to increase urgency for the sale with a call-to-action to purchase.

“It links right over to the product offer page.

“Let’s move to how this has performed: a 25% open rate on Day 7 of an automation sequence; $27,000 in revenue from this email.

“So far, this is a pretty new email but it’s a very, very effective strategy to have a cross-sell sequence.”
CONTENT/ENGAGEMENT/RELATIONSHIP SEQUENCE

After the cross-sell sequence comes the content, engagement and relationship building sequence.

For BOOM!, email 10 on Day 15 is a blog video.

“Meet the women of the Pro-Age Revolution” aims to: offer a compilation of the best of the most popular blog videos and articles available; educate the subscriber on the brand; engage them with content; establish common ground and bond with them; to establish authority; to increase brand familiarity;  reintroduce them to the brand philosophy; and tease the next email.
“No sales, but yet a 38% open rate,” Ezra points out.

“That’s Day 15 – $10,000 in revenue, 5% click-through rate.”

“So, these content emails really work if they’re on brand.

“And this doesn’t have to be content you created, but you want to mix content in between your sale offers and your user-generated content.”

USER GENERATED CONTENT

The final email sequence aims to encourage loyal customers to tell the world about your company through photos, posts and videos – brand assets that you can then use in your digital marketing.

Blog Post created from Ezra Firestone’s DMDU Connect LIVE 2020 Presentation.

If you would like to watch the full presentation, CLICK HERE and start your

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