Email: Turn sign ups into buyers with the perfect Welcome Campaign with Val Geisler (episode 037)
by April Buencamino-dyAt the time of recording, Val was the founder and Chief Email Optimizer at Fix My Churn and an email obsessive.
By the time we put the episode live… Val’s become the Customer Evangelist at Klaviyo!
Val’s been obsessed with helping eCommerce businesses improve their email marketing performance for over a decade.
Listen now for free:
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Why Val loves email marketing?
- It’s the most direct channel to your customers or potential customers.
- Email marketing involves minimum risk. You spend money on ads or events but, you are depending on algorithms and other factors. Thus there are always risks involved. Comparatively, email marketing is free.
- She considers emails to be her digital living room. It is in a sense she decides who can come in and so on.
- Another benefit is that you can test it all the time. You can’t just walk away from it.
What is a great welcome email campaign all about?
You need to start by defining your welcome email. The process starts right from the moment someone joins your email list but not yet a customer.
Val feels that it is a huge area of opportunity for eCommerce and encourages every e-commerce shop owner to use SAAS to run their business.
You are getting SAAS emails already from places like Klavio or Shopify. You need to go back and check their welcome emails. You need to take note of what you like and what you don’t.
What is a welcome email?
According to Val, welcome in e-commerce is from the point they join your business to the time they make their first purchase. You must avoid what is known as “Blast Emails”.
Instead, you should have segmented emails, the ones that matter to your customer. It is when they are the highest interest level of your brand, and you need to make the most of the interest they have.
With their Email ID, they have given the key to their Digital Living Room.
Dinner party strategy
Just like guests would want to leave a dinner party that is cold and unwelcoming and you would always prefer the ones that have a warm host, appetizers, and desserts, the same applies to emails as well for your potential customers.
Building a Sequence of 6 Simple emails
Val’s idea is to have something live, to begin with. Then collect the data and try and then improve it. Just avoid procrastination for the perfect email.
Have the welcome email from the founder
The best way to get started is to have an email from the founder. It is a way to connect with the customers. The email should focus on what matters to the customer. It could be a simple video that is human and connecting.
Email- Appetizers
It should tell more about your product or your brand.
Email – On Tray
With this email, you need to make your product shine. You need to tell your customers why your product would matter. You tell them what they would be interested in.
The Side Dish Emails
In this email, you tell about products that you might have not noticed earlier. Here is where you can get use the User Generated Content (UGC).
It is a great way to make others tell your potential customers about your brand.
The Dessert – Emails
It could be a lot of different things. It is not about your affiliate or reward program. It is a sweet treat.
What does your brand offer as a sweet treat to its customers? Here you could talk about free expedited shipping.
For example, you could say that we offer free 2-day shipping for you which, no other brand offers. Or you can speak about Facebook Groups and so on.
It could also provide links to podcasts that talk about the brand.
Invite Back Emails
Here is where you ask them to make their first purchase. You could also show how simple your checkout. You need to incentivize here.
Apart from this, you can also invite them, to write or get in touch with you.
With this sequence of emails, you can build a relationship with your customers.
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?
Val says that you always need to be testing. First, have your first email live. Thereafter you need to grab the data and just improve on the same.
Don’t worry about making it perfect.
Just get it live.
Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve email marketing performance?
Val loves to test long emails versus shorter ones. She feels that the more text-driven is shorter whereas the more images included is longer.
You need to find out which ones do your customers respond to better text or images and then work on with the more responsive one.
If someone wants to learn about Email marketing, is there a cheap/ free resource that you would recommend?
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in email marketing?
Val emphasizes the need to push for the personalization of emails. It is about segmenting and sending specific content to what they have expressed interest in.
Interview Links
Val 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.
