Email: Perfect Post Purchase Campaigns with Jessica Totillo Coster (episode 036)
by April Buencamino-dyJessica’s been in eCommerce for even longer than me! (that’s over 20 years) She’s owned and run her own multi-6 figure bricks and mortar boutique, spent 6 years running a 7-figure online store, and now she’s ‘the Klaviyo girl’ building out clever, effective, game-changing sequences for her happy clients.
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Her beginnings in email marketing
Jessica says she’s been doing email marketing for as long as email marketing has been a thing.
In a company she used to work for, she couldn’t perform social advertising because it was against their terms of service. So she dug deep into their number one channel for marketing which was email, and developed her skills.
She’s now at a place where she knows what works and starts off with that as her baseline, and then continues to iterate on top of that.
Focusing on Post-Purchase Email Campaigns
Jessica frames post-purchase email campaigns in 2 ways:
- Just because you’ve made the sale doesn’t mean the work is done.
- Put out what the customer needs to know and understand to have a good experience with your product, leave a positive review, and purchase again.
She gets herself in this mindset when thinking of what a particular company needs in their post-purchase series.
Contents of a Post-Purchase Series
For Jessica, unmet expectations is the biggest source of customer complaints. After automatically sending out order and shipping confirmation emails, you will also want to create a positive post-purchase experience for your customer.
With this in mind, she suggests 2 ways of crafting post-purchase emails:
Education – driven
- How to use your product, how to care for your product, or what someone can expect from your product
- This information may be on your product page, but that doesn’t mean anyone has read it
- Sending educational emails may result to less return requests and better product reviews
Community – building
- Send a personal, thank you email from the founder, so the customer feels connected to who they’re giving their money to
One or More Post-Purchase Email Sequences?
Jessica usually has one series which she splits up conditionally and triggers by fulfillment.
First-time buyers get the founder’s thank you email, then transferred to the regular flow with educational emails.
Scheduling Email Releases After Purchase
Think about your own internal processes.
Review your timeframe, trigger by fulfillment, and send the thank you email a day after.
More importantly, don’t get caught up in this and work on getting your emails live, then make adjustments later on.
Insider Tips
If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with Email Marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
Jessica says you have to release your pre-conceived notions about email marketing and stop projecting your own feelings about it.
If a customer is on your email list, it’s because they want to receive content from you. Not sending out emails to your customers is doing them a disservice, and they will eventually forget about you.
She also mentions that of all marketing activities, email gives you the highest ROI with the least amount of spend, which makes it a must-do.
Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve email marketing performance?
Get comfortable looking at data regularly. A few metrics she wants you to look at are the following:
- Open rate
- Hit a 20% or higher open rate
- Click rate
- Target between 2 and 4% click rate, based on the number of people you send the email to
- Focus on getting the click and not necessarily the sale because people are not always ready to buy when you send them an email
- Just get them to go to your website, and inch them towards the purchase
- Revenue as a whole
Once you know your average rate, go ahead and test. Try out new things and different content inside the email. Also, test text-based email versus fancy-designed emails.
If someone listening wants to learn more about email marketing is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?
Jessica has a resource library that has a ton of free content about email marketing.
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in emailmarketing?
Everyone is going to build relationships with their customers and email is an amazing place to do that.
Put on your customer hat and ask yourself: What does the customer need? How do they want to feel when they read your emails?
Have a conversation with your customers, create relationships, and retain those customers through the power of email.
Interview Links
Jessica on Social media:
Sponsored by…
Klaviyo is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications.
The company’s hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 80,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.
