One of the easiest, most profitable, and overlooked marketing options is email.
The Ecwid
Ecwid now has a complete integration with one of the most powerful and easy to use email marketing platforms in the world, Mailchimp!
A few months back, Tim and Jesse did a pod on the Ecwid native Automated Email capability. This is still relevant and worthwhile to use the native email functionality.
Today we will focus on the Mailchimp integration. Great design capabilities, segmenting, revenue tracking, single platform, other integrated marketing options.
Show Notes:
- Target customer data
- Behavioral data
- Automate welcome series
- Abandoned cart
- Browse retargeting
- Content
- Newsletters, promotions, top sellers, most popular
- A/B tests
- Reporting
- Three easy steps, full integration
- Customer data, order data
- Full product catalog
Transcript:
Jesse: Happy Friday!
Richard: That day again, they come quickly these days.
Jesse: We’ve now recorded a couple of days in a row. For everybody out there, we’ll get these pumped out, and hopefully, you can listen to these in
It’s like one of the easiest things to do. And people want to do the harder stuff, the like the
Richard: I was going to say, look, even though I know this reference is going to kind of hit you in the heart a little bit because it’s coming from one of your competitors. I don’t mean
And part of why I’m bringing it up like that is it’s literally one of the fastest ways once you build a list for you to get revenue for your business. We could probably even talk about it more, even though we just did. We could talk about it for a long time. There are a lot of things you can do with email marketing. We’re going to bring on someone from Ecwid. And you guys did a new integration that I think we mentioned it a little while back. We just didn’t get in detail. But yeah, and it’s specifically around email marketing.
Jesse: All right. Well, with that, let’s bring in on special guest Eddie Standerfer. Eddie, how are you guys doing?
Eddie: Well, yes, Friday, first time color, as they would say back in the olden days. And just excited to talk about some email marketing today.
Jesse: Yeah, awesome. Well, now, Eddie, you’re actually a new employee. How long have you been on board with now?
Eddie: Oh, one month approximately, maybe a couple of days. Well, as an official Ecwid team.
Jesse: All right. We got you unofficially now. You were on as a contractor there for a bit. And the reason we wanted to bring you on today is you’re actually what is your title, Lifecycle Marketing director? For people who are like, what? What the heck is that? That’s you’re our email marketing guru.
Eddie: It’s funny because I said my title to somebody last week or a couple of weeks ago and they said that’s a total California title. I think they must have thought that I said lifestyle marketing director. I was thinking about why anybody would say that. But yeah.
Jesse: Yeah. So for all the Ecwid listeners now, if you’ve been on the while, Eddie didn’t send those emails, but if you sign up for a new account, you’re going to see Eddie’s magic. You’re going to notice that all these emails. The segments kind of come from you. They weren’t necessarily written off by you. But the strategy and where people are in the funnel. I use the funnel word. Then and you get emails based on what we think you’ll want to see at that time. Send your complaints to Eddie. (laughing)
Richard: By watching what he’s doing, they’re going to probably feel compelled to move to do something new.
Jesse: Exactly. Like what does Ecwid want me to do now? OK, I see this call to action on the bottom. I’m going to do it. Give Eddie a click.
Eddie: Give it a couple of months though. Just give it a couple of months, OK.
Richard: It reminds me of Stephen from the Amazon guy. We’ve said it many times in slightly different ways. But you’ve got to get a customer; you’ve got to get them to come back, you’ve got to get them to buy more often.
And you’re trying to raise their card value, too. So in some way, shape, or form, that’s just another way that you’re you’re potentially using email. Is that correct, Eddie?
Eddie: Oh, yeah, for sure. Email is the best conversion tool that I use. So, you know, it’s the job of people like Jesse to get people to sort of in the door once they’ve given us their email address, and we have that email address. Then the idea is you immediately send them an email because they’re really engaged. Then they’re interested in whatever it is that you’re doing. So send them that email and try to get them to convert. And then once they’ve converted, the more information that you have about them, the
Jesse: Yeah, well, I mean, you guys probably if you’ve seen it in the title at this point, we have a new integration with Mailchimp, so spoiler. By the way, I have used Mailchimp. We use it at Ecwid. We use it. I’ve used it on various different businesses. It’s basically the leading email service provider out there. And in general, I think it’s awesome, and we have great integration with it. So and now we have the knowledge here from Eddie for the listeners out there, how do you use Mailchimp to start building the business? So, I mean, that’s kind of what this part is about. Like how can we use Mailchimp? I do want to touch. So if for the regular listeners of the pod, like probably a couple of months ago, we did a podcast about automated email capabilities to be released from Ecwid. That’s still relevant. It’s still good. It works. It’s a very specific set of emails, though. It’s generally just triggered emails. It’s not a
Eddie: I would say a couple of things, it is very easy to use, and it’s very powerful. It has a lot of very nice features that allow you to do things that are most important in email marketing. The number one thing, I guess, would be targeting. It has a very nice segmentation feature that allows you to do just simple segmentation and then more advanced segmentation with nested and/or statements. So that’s where I start off, just having that, getting those email addresses in there. And then figuring out, hey, do I want to segment certain people? Do I just want to send an email to everybody on my list? Something is always going to be better than nothing. And so just the first thing you do is you use to set up your list, and then you go from there.
Jesse: Yeah. And I’ll give an example of that if people are wondering, like, what the heck is a nested email, blah, blah, blah, like — so technical talks. I’ll give you a very easy example. I’m going to send a coupon for 10 percent off to my entire list because I have some bills to pay, and I need some money. But all the people on my list that just bought in the past two weeks, I don’t want to send them this email because they’re going to say, hey, can I get that 10 percent off and you’re going to be doing a bunch of refunds. Nobody likes to do refunds. So, for instance, you can say, I want to send to everybody minus people that bought in the past couple of weeks. Or maybe you want to have any demographic’s information. And people that bought this product, all the data that’s in your store is now in Mailchimp, and you can use it and slice and dice it. I’m breaking it down into a different language. You can slice and dice data in so many different ways to send the perfect email to people. So that’s awesome.
Richard: So a quick question about that. I guess it doesn’t have to be a yes, but just wondering, is it different, is it any different than Google Analytics? So like if somebody set up Google Analytics today, they can’t go back and get data from yesterday or the day before because it wasn’t set up yet. Is there a way, or is there past data that was inside of their Ecwid account that Mailchimp still now has access to that? Or is it only moving forward? Either way, it’s a win if they’re getting it, integrated, moving forward. But it does it have any access to past data, or is it just moving forward once they set it up?
Jesse: This is that good point on the pod, Richie, where I defer to Eddie on this one because I don’t know the answer.
Eddie: Yeah, so it does have past data, actually. So it has order data and abandoned cart data and obviously, all the email addresses that you have collected before. And that’s awesome. It probably even has revenue data, but I guess maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not worried about that. But if it has data, then I guess it does. Yeah.
Richard: Well, either way, just getting some of that other information is fantastic because it’s one of the things I try to tell people early on when it comes to analytics on their site. It’s hard to go back and collect data from the past that you weren’t collecting. But sounds like no matter what, it’s going to have access to some data. And so it’s not even though they’re going to be starting from scratch, it’s still going to have some form of logic or wisdom in there that it’s going to help with future emails. What about collecting emails in general? Do they have the capability to do
Eddie: Yeah, so they have they definitely have a
Jesse: And everybody loves
Eddie: Yes. So many emails. The most important emails I feel are automated emails. So you have the welcome series. That’s when people initially come to your site. They are the most engaged. They’re actually expecting an email from you immediately with an offer. It is one of the easily one of the most open and engaged with emails that you’re going to send. The other ones that are automated are definitely lower funnel emails, which worked really well and in email. We all know what that is. Somebody put products into their carts. They got distracted, they wanted to go shop on other sites, they left. Send them that abandoned card email. Now, this is all included in Mailchimp works really, really well. And then, you also have browser retargeting email.
Jesse: Now, before we go into the browser retargeting, I want to go back to that welcome email. This is probably coming back to that
Eddie: Right. Well, so the first thing is, is you’re always going to send that welcome email, the first email, obviously. The welcome series, it depends. It depends on do you have a lot of information that maybe you need to share to get out and let this person know about your company, about your products, and most of the time, you do. I would say that most of the time, you would want to do the series, but you should definitely, even if you don’t have the content for that series at the beginning, you should definitely start right off the bat with the welcome email.
Richard: Both you guys bring up good points and kind of touch on both of them. Real quick. Here is it really depends on your product and what’s going on. If some people might be a lot of information, they need to consume before they even buy your product. You might have you might be in a WordPress blog. They’re learning about a particular thing. You get their email in the beginning. And now this series might just be educational or showing other people using it to get people fired up to then maybe make this bigger purchase, that you say they need to learn more and it’s a big price. And then the other side, it could be a welcome email series or at least just one welcome email where you just bought something, and you’re basically saying, hey, thank you for the purchase. This is what you should expect it should be and maybe not get into the length of time till they get it. Or get into the length of time how long they get it. But it really depends. I hear from you, Eddie, on what it is you’re doing and the type of product you’re selling. And do they need to be informed more, or is this a point of purchase thing that you’re really just letting them know what to expect moving forward, like an indoctrination series or something?
Eddie: Yeah, so definitely correct as far as different products and different companies are going to have different needs as far as do you do, I need to send one welcome in our welcome series. I think one of the emails that you were talking about, which is more like a thank you email that was sent after somebody makes their first purchase. So that’s more of they bought something now. Now we’re going to say, oh, my God, thank you. You’re so great. And that’s a really good email to send as well, which is a little bit different than the Welcome email series. But all of them are very good, timely, and relevant emails to send.
Jesse: Yeah, that was helpful. I just wanted people to start thinking about what would their first email be from. If somebody clicked on pop up, what would it be? And for some people, that might just be one. Some people might be a series. So trying to get their mind turning here and what could it be? So let’s come back to that. We talk about abandoned carts. Yeah, we all know that. That’s also that’s been around a long time. But browser retargeting. Tell me about that. I haven’t heard of that before. Give us some more info.
Eddie: Ok, so what browser targeting is. Somebody comes on your site, and they look at a product, they go into the product detail page, let’s say. And so what you do is that you send them an email based on whatever product they’re looking at. Now, you obviously don’t want to send; there’s a couple of things. Unlike an abandoned cart of email where you send it pretty much an hour after the abandoned cart, you don’t want to send a Browse retargeting email that quickly because you don’t want to seem like a creeper or something. I think that’s really the reason for it. So you basically give them
Jesse: Yeah, perfect. I mean, as we talked a lot on different paths about the importance of getting people to your website, and that’s expensive, you’ve already gotten somebody to your website, and they’re looking at something, this is one of your most valuable prospects. So, hey, this is another way to get in front of them.
Richard: Yeah. What’s the conversion rate right now? Somewhere between one and three percent, people convert. You spend all the money to get one hundred people there. One to three people bought. They came some for some reason, the first time you might as well be trying to retarget those
Jesse: Like you got to keep doing all these, all these steps here. Let’s move on to, you know, like for people that are getting started; you do emails all the time. So for you, you have a bunch of ideas like here’s what we should put in the emails for somebody that’s just getting started with their business, a little gun shy on set emails. What’s what kind of content should they be content should be putting out?
Eddie: It depends if they want to make an offer. An offer is going to convert more than anything else you can do it; it’s a little sad to say, people just don’t want to pay full price. But when they get an offer, if you put an offer in your email and say you were to test that against the same exact email without an offer, I can promise you that the one with the offer would have a significantly higher conversion rate. So that’s the first part of the content that you should consider. Also, make sure that you have really good imagery; people are about pictures and headlines. So pictures, headlines, and talk about your most popular products, new arrivals. People are always interested in that and things like that just to get the engagement and that sort of that whole of wanting to convert. That’s what I would put in there. Also, you could put in things about just your company in general, let people get to know you, and why do you exist? And just what you’re about.
Jesse: Makes perfect sense. And with Mailchimp, right, so the reason we’re doing this one is we have integration. So if you want to talk about your top products, your new products, it’s very easy because Mailchimp is now connected to your store. So you can pull in that product. It’s going to link to it. It’s going to be it’s pretty slick, actually. If you were using Mailchimp without the integration, you could do all this stuff, but you’ve got to know a little bit of the code, a lot of cutting and pasting. This links directly to your store. Let’s say you want to do a YouTube video that says this is what my store is all about and wave at the camera. You can put that very, very easily in the email as well.
Eddie: Yeah, it’s real quick too. It is really quick, so I connected my store to Mailchimp, went in, did an email, created an email template, just drag and drop over here recommended products, threw that into the email template, and boom. All the pictures of my products were right there in the email. So literally seconds with the integration. Nice.
Richard: Yeah, there is a good point you made at the beginning of all that right there, that there’s just something to be said about making an offer to. There are all kinds of things we could communicate. And, of course, they should know like and trust you and all that stuff, like, no doubt about it. But there’s something to be said about, if you’re trying to sell a car, putting a sign that says car for sale, you got to let people know they get so many things all the time. And emails just sometimes just get straight to the point and say, here’s an offer for you and people will buy.
Eddie: Yeah, 100 percent agree with that a lot of times, you don’t necessarily have to make an offer every time, but an offer will convert better. So it is definitely something to think about. If you have the margins for it and I’m sure you can figure that out, you should definitely put an offer in there that will get them to purchase that first time. And then it’s all about getting people to like your product. Once they like your product, then they’ll just keep coming back for more.
Richard: So there’s a part of me that almost feels like it’s so easy to set up and the integrations are so intricate that it really just comes down to just thinking, what do you really want to say? So it’s almost more like people who are here in this. They should mostly be focusing on what would be the conversations that you would have with your customer at different points in the process. And what are the words that you would use? So basically, focusing on the copy more. I’m going to have to figure all this stuff out. And how am I going to connect to Ecwid — that part is going to be pretty easy and straightforward. There’s going to be some dropdowns in a couple of things you need to do, but it’s really more just thinking out. If I were to be having one on one conversations with these people, but now I don’t have to do one on one conversations with these people, what would that actually sound like? And just kind of writing out all that copy for these various things. Someone left your site and this abandoned cart. What would you actually say? Someone came to your site for the first time. What would you actually say? So really just almost going, hey, let’s just get this started, get this hooked up, and kind of focus more on those conversations and write down the copy. It’s not really that complicated, it sounds like, with this new integration.
Eddie: Yeah, 100 percent in writing the copy, to me, it’s the fun part, you get to be sort of like a
Richard: So that actually brings another question up. Is there a way for people who maybe they’re a little paranoid, like, oh, my gosh, did I write that right? Can they write two different versions of something and maybe test things out and see how different copy works?
Eddie: Yeah, for sure. One of the most important things that you were going to write when you’re talking about email marketing is the subject line because it’s a numbers game. If they don’t open your email, then you have no chance of converting them. So one of the things that you can do with Mailchimp is you can a/b test your subject lines. Create two different versions of the subject line, send it to 20 percent of your audience, and then the winner will get sent to the other 80 percent. And so you can test subject lines, you can test content as well. So, yeah, it’s in all that functionality built right in there. It’s very important.
Jesse: Awesome, so you can be creative and then if you don’t trust your creativity, you can be like, all right, well, why don’t I just do one super creative headline and then one that’s a little more down the middle and let’s see which one works better. Like that. All right, so we also talked about connecting your store and for the reporting angle. Let’s say I send five different emails, right? Can I look back and see which one worked better? Is that all integrated into Mailchimp?
Eddie: Oh, yes. One hundred percent of the relevant statistics that you’re going to look at. You’re going to look at an open percentage. You’re going to look at click to open, which is kind of telling you how is your content doing, the people that open it, what percentage of those people are clicking? And then, of course, the most important thing that you’re going to want to see is your conversion rate, because that’s going to obviously be the deciding factor on how your email is performing. Is it getting the job done? Is that conversion rate and also revenue? How much revenue is your email bringing in and all? That’s all that’s right there. It’s really nice.
Jesse: OK, awesome. All right. So we talked a little bit about all this stuff is available because there’s an integration with Mailchimp. How do you do it? What’s the cliff notes here for people listening?
Eddie: So this is going to be the shortest cliff notes ever; cliff notes are supposed to be short. So this is going to be really, really short. So basically, what you do is you set up a Mailchimp account, and that is easy to do. All you do is you put it in your email address, and you put in a password. OK, and then after that, you go into your Ecwid dashboard, and it is three easy steps. That’s it, I swear. And you have full integration. Then you are just going to Mailchimp. What I did when in the Mailchimp. I’m like, wow, OK, everything’s there.
Jesse: That’s awesome for people that have tried to do this on their own, like having the product data; having all these integrations is going to be way, way easier than using some other. Or if you used Mailchimp in the past, this is all fully integrated, so super easy. Now, we talked mostly about Mailchimp today as an email service provider. There’s so much more you can do with it, actually, like each of these emails, if you send an email, you can do it as a social post at the same time. So you send the email, you can have it go on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you can send postcards, you can do all sorts of stuff like it’s an integrated marketing platform. We definitely focused on email today because it’s probably the easiest way to market and most underappreciated. What else can we leave our listeners with here? Give us your best tips.
Eddie: Oh, my goodness, putting you on the spot here. Just send an email every single day. Don’t worry about spam, don’t worry about anything. I promise you; you’ll end up getting more money. That’s my tip.
Jesse: I love it. I mean, yeah, you’re an email guy. Send emails. You’ll make money.
Richard: To your point, though, I want to clarify your tip. And I don’t know the answer, but I would assume that it doesn’t necessarily mean make an offer every single day. To send an email every day, sometimes about what’s going on in the company, sometimes about something that’s going on in the world. Then it’s an offer right then. And I don’t know the exact number. This is where testing comes in. Get to know your customers. But just if you send an email every day and you mix it up, and you keep it interesting, so it’s not just the same email every day, that’s when you’re probably going to you’ll be making more money. Is that correct? Is that kind of where you’re coming from?
Eddie: Yeah, correct, but I’m just saying, if you’re going to default one way or the other between, you know, you’re just not sure, should I send one email, which I send an email a day? The more emails you send you end up getting, you just end up making more money. And the thing is, is that you don’t have to worry so much about this. You do want to change it a bit, and you want to keep things interesting for them. But I think it’s not as much as people think because. Not everybody opens the emails, if you’re doing well, 15 to 20 percent or opening your 15 to 20 percent of people are opening your emails on a daily basis. So they’re not going to see every one of them. And so that’s just the tip. There’re so many tips that we’ve already talked about with automation and things like that. But that’s just the thing that came up off the top of my head. And I know it’s true just from years of experience.
Jesse: Yeah, I think a lot of times people, when I talk to new
Eddie: So, yeah, the funny thing is, since when Gmail went to that whole Promotions type thing, people thought, oh, this is bad for email. But it turns out that it’s actually really good because what you have now is you just have people this is like their folder where they’re going to get emails from all the brands that they like. And it’s just organized here. And so they don’t mind that. You know that you know that that if if you start sending more and more emails, because that whole folder is full of emails, that used to be that the emails were mixed in with the other stuff. You had a hard time finding things. Now it’s just like you have a place to go and you can just go down and look at, oh, look at this is the email that my favorite brand sent Tuesday. This is the one on Wednesday. This Thursday. Yeah, and they won’t open them all, and they’re not going to like they’re not going to be mad at you, and then they’re going to look they will probably look for the coupons.
Jesse: You don’t want to send an offer on everyone because it cheapens you a little bit, but they don’t look for the coupons. And when they find them, they will buy it. And you give away a little bit of margin, but you get the sale to it’s a
Richard: Yeah, I mean, I would just add one thing now that we heard that through, and Eddie made a good point there. I would say go back to your promotions tab and just look at what other brands are doing. Look at some of their copy and know that you don’t have to really think all the logic through with this new integration. And so just study their copy, see what’s worked for you, and learn from what others are doing. Just get out, get this set up, and start sending emails.
Jesse: All right, it makes sense to me. Thank you.
Eddie: Everybody copies everybody. That’s just the way. That’s the name of the game.
