"37% of Revenue Will Come From JUST 2% of Emails You Send" - Top Shopify Email Strategies w/ Greg Zakowicz Sr eCom Expert @ Omnisend

Jay Myers: Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've been waiting to do this because I am an Omnisend user myself on all of the stores I manage. And so I'm so excited to have you on to personally learn some tips and tricks and also I know there's gonna be so much value for our user.

So, real quick tell me a little bit about yourself, who you are, the company you're with and a little bit about your background, and then we'll

Greg Zakowicz: Absolutely. So, yeah, so happy to be here and I knew you were smart, so. So Greg, Zack was senior e-commerce expert at Omnisend, which is is fitting for us. So it's nice. I've been with the company for five, six years, much smaller way back then and I was a lot smaller before then. My background, I've been in marketing for 20 years, been in email, which is, this is the nuts part.

I've been in email for 19 years and kind of stumbled my way into it and then got into it really early and I was like, oh, there's something here. And just kept going on that. And I've held all roles. So practitioner to consultant to analyst, and now kind of a combination of all those things here.

So I've been doing it for a long time and we were talk, we were talking offline, Jay. I'm like, you know, marketing was like my second, my fallback career, if you will. Old radio broadcasting major that went into marketing and made that transition. So we were joking that very few people in marketing are actually went to school for marketing.

Jay Myers: Right. So true. Well, 19 years, like that's, I mean, so you were in the email marketing space when, when they're before spam, almost like.

Greg Zakowicz: Oh, well, I, so this is the funny that we ever get around, have a cup of coffee or beer or something. I will tell you Wild West stories about Spam House existed back then, right? I could tell you about buying lists, renting lists, having like 20 ESPs because they would just get shut down for getting on this bed.

'cause we're just buying like millions of names and stuff. It was nuts back then. Really funny stuff. But it, it, you learn deliverability very quick way

Jay Myers: totally. Well,

Greg Zakowicz: lot easier now.

Jay Myers: yeah, and it's, it's been good what's happened in the email space because there's been regulations and different laws that have been passed, and so people generally have to like, follow them. There's still some bad actors out there, but I think I was actually, you did a talk the other day and I was just looking through the numbers on the open rates, and I think for the last five years, open rates have actually steadily increased, right?

Greg Zakowicz: They have. And the interesting part is just kind of going off the top of my head here, I think it was like 26 point something, maybe 26 2 for 2024. So, for those interested, we do these yearly stat reports. We throw 'em on Omni Send, you can check it out to the resources section there. So, last year, 25 billion marketing emails sent.

So we're looking at 26%, over 25 billion messages sent through the year. You know, it's, it's interesting because you, like we all talk about the email is dead and it's never really dead and things like this. But I think what with the emergence of like paid channels, you know, mostly like paid social and the amount of social networks now I think brands are really starting to come back around to, hey, you know what?

First party data works, first party marketing works, and then you have consumers that kind of get fatigued with with some of that to some degree. And they now look at email as, Hey, this is where I'm gonna go when I wanna shop. Or at least that's part of my discovery process. And we kinda see the, the effects of like click rate and click click to purchase rate change based on consumer behavior as well.

So I mean, 26%, it's one of every four emails you send get open, which is nuts,

Jay Myers: It's actually crazy when you think about it. Not one of every posts on social media gets viewed by your followers. If you want to compare apples to apples, right? Like the actual attention. I think for a while, email was a little bit looked at like, oh, that's, that's the old way now.

There's like, everyone went heavy on social media and then a lot of, like, the rug got pulled out from them under like, you know, people that built huge audiences on, on their Facebook pages. And then Facebook now started charging you to reach the audience you had and just. Everything else going on with like, if you don't perfectly match, like find the secret to the algorithm.

Like you might have a post on social that goes viral and you might have something that doesn't hit anyone. Because it's not, it's all up to the algorithms where your audience on email is your audience on email, like you own it. And then that's, I think that's sexy again.

Greg Zakowicz: It is. And you know, there's a level of comfort with email too, right? It's been everyone's lives for years, right?

Jay Myers: Yeah,

Greg Zakowicz: we are talking about like, we have kids around the same age. I. You know, my 12 year old's got an email address that he uses for, you know, PlayStation and signing up for AI tools and stuff like that.

Like, everyone has an email address. It's a comfort thing. Not everyone is comfortable clicking on social ads. And I think social ads are great, by the way. So don't, don't get me wrong, it's a great place for product discovery. But you get people that, like, I do it sometimes. I'm like, man, if I click on this thing, I'm just gonna get inundated for

Jay Myers: Mm.

Greg Zakowicz: month on like, similar type companies.

And like, I've gotta balance that myself. I might go to email and I just might just do a search of my email, be like, Hey, what is the product I'm looking for? See if I can hit something or I'll search the brand name. Something like that. So I think the level of comfort with email and now SMS, I think it, it's a little bit understated, but it's important.

Jay Myers: Yep. I wanna get into some I got a list of like examples and some strategies and stuff, but real quick, what is Omnisend?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, so I, I think I probably missed that on the, the

Jay Myers: No, that's fine. That's,

Greg Zakowicz: the company's gonna kill me when they watch it. So, we are an email and SMS marketing automation platform built specifically for e-commerce merchants. We have plug and play integrations with pretty much every major e-comm platform.

So the Shopify, obviously for your listeners get set up and going in, you know, 10, 20 minutes, just click and play. But you can get the whole store set up in no time whatsoever. So, a couple clicks and you're in. And we've got all the features that you need to run a successful business. So automation, segmentation templates, drop and drag editors, kind of everything you want, we've got for you.

And you know, it's a very intuitive platform for you. So come check us out if you're, if you're unfamiliar with us. And I always tell people we are a super open and friendly company. Any questions, we're accessible on LinkedIn, you can email us whatever you want to do, and we're there for you.

Jay Myers: So I mentioned I use Omnisend myself, and I've interacted with the support team a number of times. They are like, I just use the chat and they're instant, they're fast, they're really good. And I know a number of your competitors are actually removing support.

 Unless you're paying thousands of dollars a month, you actually don't, you just have to find your own answer in a, in a support forum somewhere. So, I think that's amazing that you do that. It's.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Shameless plug here. It's free 24/7 support for all users. Even we have a free plan, so even people on our free plan gets 24/7 support. As long as you got it. Just want some awards, just throw 'em on LinkedIn. Today's, so, customer service awards

Jay Myers: Oh, amazing.

Greg Zakowicz: So shameless plug here, I'm

Jay Myers: Congratulations. No, that's awesome. That's awesome. I, yeah, I mean, when we started Bold, you usually, when someone starts an app company of any sort, the first thing you do is, you hire developers, you build a, you know, a bunch of products, you raise money, you hire more developers, and then you try to figure out support later.

Or you try to figure out, well, how do I not even do support? And the reason I respect this so much is we, we took the opposite approach at Bold. Our first three hires we're support people. And we always knew that product can, can be copied. Someone could do what we do. There's clones of just about every app in the app store, but what's really hard to, to clone is amazing support.

And that's what the, the knockoffs will never do. Right. And so I respect that a ton.

Greg Zakowicz: I was gonna say it's a good transition over to the e-comm side because I, I've been saying this for a few years now, but customer support is one of those major differentiators between brands now too, because everyone, almost everyone, right? Free shipping is almost there, even if there's a threshold on it returns, give or take.

But generally there's similar return policies. So a lot of those value adds are kind of similar across the board. You need to find your niche. Service is one of those, and you can lose a customer very quickly with poor support, especially on the retail side when you have products everywhere.

Jay Myers: You can lose them and you can win. Hundreds more with good support. I always say we, we tell our team, like, when something goes wrong, things are always gonna go wrong. Like a product's gonna get lost or shipping's gonna take a while or something will happen, a double charge for some reason, or like something will go wrong.

Those are golden opportunities to, to give amazing support and turn that customer into a raving fan. Like when, when someone just orders something on your site and they check out and they get their order in three business days or whatever it is, and they open the box and there's no issues, like they don't go and rave on the internet about it.

But if something does go wrong. Then you go out of your way, like say a package doesn't come and then they just ship another one with no charge or something is broken and they're gonna return it and they say, you know what? Just keep it. Give it to a friend and we'll send another one. Or do you do something a little bit above and beyond?

Those are all the stories you hear. You don't hear, Hey, I ordered from ABC company and I got my order like expected. There's nothing there to rave about, right?

Greg Zakowicz: So there, there's this old stat and it's probably 20 years old and every year you see it on some blog post that says like, new stat for 2024. If you track it down, it's about 20 years old. But there was some study that showed if you have a, a customer to your example, that has a poor experience, it doesn't have to be terrible experience, but just something's off fitting there and they need help and you help them, they become more loyal for you,

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: purchase.

'cause they know you're gonna be taken care of. And I, I think that's just as true today as it was whenever that that study was, because I know I am one of those people that I would value support over other things. Like I can give and take, you send me a bad marketing email, it's not segmented or whatever.

It's too many three in one day by accident. Like, I'll let that go. Gimme bad, gimme bad support. You're off my list.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Here's a fun fact. We, so for, for Bold, we have apps on Shopify and one of our metrics that we track is activation. And so activation for listeners using, if you install one of our apps and you keep it past trial, that's activation and we monitor that. And so it ranges different apps. It might be 30%, it might be 50%, you know, 'cause there's uninstalled during the free trial period.

So one of the things that we track is for people who install an app and just never reach out to support or people that have an interaction with support. The activation rate for people who interact with support during their trial period is almost double. Which is insane because you would think, well, they had a problem or they had an issue or something didn't work with the app and then they, you, you might think that would be worse, but they actually activate almost at a double rate for people that don't.

So, support is a marketing growth strategy too, right? It's not just we could, yeah, I, I don't wanna go too much down that tangent, but that's a huge thing that I appreciate about Omnisend. I wanna get into there's a lot and I know we're gonna run out of time, so I wanna make sure we get some really good tactical advice.

'cause I've got someone with 19 years experience in the email space here. So I see email as table stakes. First of all. There's like fundamentals you have to get right, and then there's, you can stand out. So. Someone listening right now, there's probably fall in a few different buckets. There's people who maybe are not sending emails at all.

They might just send a random blast campaign every three months when they have a sale, Black Friday sale or something else. And then there's people who don't send at all. There's maybe people who have a little bit of automation set up for abandoned carts and stuff like that. But let's start with what are the fundamentals that you see that a Shopify merchant should get right? Like what are the fundamentals to doing email well, on your e-commerce store?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it's a good question. Good kind of lead up to it as well. So I think table stakes is a perfect world, Jay. You know, I think when you look at it. Most brands and not all, which kind of surprises me now, but most brands will have some sort of popup on the website. I think it's the best way to grow your list.

It's the quickest way people will say it's annoying. I don't think anyone really thinks it's that annoying anymore.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: only annoying part is if you can't close out of it. Right. That's the annoying part. I was actually on, so I was on a website yesterday and a popup came up and you couldn't click off of it, but the x was the same color.

It was in the upper right corner, but it was the same color as the background there, and I couldn't, and I almost left the website and I'm like, you know what? I think that's the board of the box. I clicked it and sure enough it closed out. So that's the annoying part. But if you get that right, have the signup, have a popup, you know, we will get into SMS here.

I would collect s mobile numbers as well. The big thing there is make the mobile number optional. Don't make it a a two step where the second step is

Jay Myers: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: a discount. Hit the email address, you go to the next side and then it's hey, so you finish getting the discount, put your mobile number in.

Like, you just have bad expectations, but half a popup collect the email address. Number one.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: One of the things beyond that is I look at, right, we talk about omnichannel marketing. Things work together. You spend money on paid ads. It's to drive conversions, to drive web traffic. You wanna get that mobile, the popup there to maximize your other marketing efforts as well.

So you're advertising on TikTok or Instagram, someone sees it, they click through, can they sign up at that point? You wanna maximize the spend there. If they do a manual search and they don't come over from Instagram or TikTok and they do a manual search and get to your brand name, you wanna maximize again, you're still spending that money on that traffic.

Of course, the popup tool is, you can have settings in there, say, Hey, if they come from Instagram, maybe don't show it or show it on different, you know, po. So you can have those customizations too. Keep the experience going. So that's one. Get the popup right? Collect mobile numbers. Make the mobile number optional by all stretch of the imagination, please. Welcome message. We'll, we'll talk about automation I'm sure today, Jay. 'cause

Jay Myers: Yep, yep. I got that on my list. Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. But you wanna tie that popup or the sign up if it's in the footer of the website to a welcome message. We could talk about strategies of welcome message now or later.

I, you know, if you offer an incentive, obviously make the welcome message go right away, have the incentive, if near. If you don't offer an incentive, that's fine as well. Just I would tell you not to tell your brand story in the welcome message. People will yell at me for that. We get into arguments, conversations, and debates about it.

I think you're, you're wasting an opportunity to touch someone. So have the welcome message going and then just have a decent email set up. I think those are the basics here. Well, automations three, we're gonna talk about that are, I think are essential. Gotta have 'em. Welcome messages. Card abandonment, product abandonment messages.

We talk about post-purchase. I think that's super. We talked about customer service ties into it, but those three are my essentials. Now,

Jay Myers: Okay. So if you get nothing else right, collecting emails with your welcome popup, a welcome email. And, sorry, what was the third one?

Greg Zakowicz: Well card abandonment's kind of

Jay Myers: oh.

Greg Zakowicz: brands still don't do it for, it shocks me, but card abandonment you and product abandonment messages.

Jay Myers: And product abandonment

Greg Zakowicz: the, yeah, and here's how I look at it. You want high intent stages of the customer journey, right? They're signing up because they're on your website there, there's some sort of intent there you know, with you or someone else. Product abandonment, they're browsing products on your website.

There's again, some sort of intent there, something took 'em there. Cart abandonment, obviously there's an intent 'cause they card products, those things kind of string people along and keep that journey relevant.

Jay Myers: Mm.

Greg Zakowicz: I look at, I look at those three things and I say, okay, your scheduled marketing messages that you just send out any Tuesday or Thursday of the week.

Those fill the gaps in between there. But if you keep these high engaged moments going, you're gonna capture a lot of sales and you use then your marketing, your schedule messages to kinda fill in gaps, keep touch bases, and having those, and you're setting those to high intent cuffs. It actually reduces your reliance on having to send seven messages a week or five messages a week.

Right. You can send fewer because you're engaging people as they're shopping.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Okay. I wanna break these out a little bit because I feel like there is doing the basics, which everyone should do, and then there's doing it a little bit better because I go on some sites and they have a, into your email to get 10% off. And I go on some sites and it's an awesome experience. It's like they work in their brand in there, they make it funny or they do different things or, so I, let's talk a little bit about the welcome email.

And I wanted to just echo your sentiment as well too, that like, I do hear sometimes people say that it's, oh yeah, I don't want to annoy my customers with a pop-up. And there will be a very, very small percentage of a customers maybe that get annoyed. I, I don't even know if that's true anymore. Like, 'cause, because every store, like, they're just so accustomed to it.

But I, I really think the benefits a hundred x. The anyone, any potential negative downside of someone getting annoyed, like it's such a small, small fraction that that shouldn't even be a consideration.

Greg Zakowicz: If someone is getting annoyed by a popup, they're gonna have a tough time shopping online just in general, right? 'cause things are going to go wrong, right? It, it's like the least annoying thing in the world Now.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And then I sometimes also hear people say, "well, I'm not really doing email marketing right now. We, we plan on that for next year." Or like, "we know we need to do a better job at it, but we're not we're not doing it yet". So, what I often say to people in that situation is, well, when you do email marketing, you're gonna wish that you had collected emails from the last year.

Right? So, so start collecting them even if you're not doing a single email marketing like that, welcome popup is like, when you're ready to start, you're gonna wish you had 10,000 emails from the last 12 months. Right? So, so what are some things that you can do to maybe increase the, the, the opt-in rate on that and just optimize that welcome popup

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. So I will say just real quick, even if you collect the email addresses, you don't use them for 12 months, send at least one message a month. Just

Jay Myers: just to keep 'em warm.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, you.

Jay Myers: and it's also good for the, the email software, if you don't email someone for a certain period of time, it has a higher chance of going in a spam filter versus if it's regular, right? Yeah,

Greg Zakowicz: Deliverability best practices. Yeah. So keep 'em engaged. Get those good metrics working for you and and start building from there. Okay, going back to the original question, how do we maximize the popup? So, my, my general rule is keep it simple. Make the X easy to close out of, right?

Obviously for those people that get annoyed by it or maybe are not ready to sign up at the point, right? Let 'em close out of it. Let 'em get on with their day. I think the other thing is keep it simple, right? You don't have to promise people how often you're sending to 'em. Just give 'em a reason to sign up.

It's, it's the old adage, right? What's in it for me? Think that's relevant. So. Hey, sign up and receive 10% off. Obviously the call to action is I'm gonna get a discount. I'm recognizing you on my website, so you probably wanna buy something sometime somewhat soon from someone. So why not me?

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: you don't have to offer an incentive if you don't want to.

Maybe margins, maybe a personal choice, right? You don't wanna be a deep discounter. I would then just provide 'em some sort of exclusive benefits. So, hey, be the first to know about insider only offers or email only offers. You can make it generic. You can make it real quick, but just give 'em a reason there.

I would, when I say keep it simple, you can still ask for other information. Think about the information you are going to use sooner than later. So a lot of people, and this has changed a little bit over the years, but a lot of people will ask, they use gas, like gender, and then they will have a birthday field within, they would have like a preference box or, or, Hey, are you interested in XYZ you know, in, in ABC and now you're asking for a lot of pieces of information, which are all fine to have.

If you're not going to use that information very soon, you shouldn't be asking for it. You can collect it later. So birthday. Okay. People are think, are we, we were chatting about this before. I think people are generally aware that if you're giving a birthday, they're going to get some sort of birthday treat.

So that's okay. It's super quick. If it's something very specific, maybe you have a B2B and a B2C line, like gift baskets or something

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: that's gonna be relevant for you from a welcome series, from a segmentation standpoint, ask for it, right? You know, if you're planning on giving some sort of surprise and delight thing, so shirt size, good example, right?

You can ask for it men's and women's clear cut. What are you shopping for today? So keep it simple. Keep the information that you are asking for, information that you are going to use. And ideally you wanna use it right away. And we could talk about welcome series strategies to use that right away, but I think it's as simple as that.

And then SMSI would always ask for it. You're going to get people that will sign up for it. It is becoming a - we talk about table stakes, I think it's a must have channel now, recognizing that it's not for everyone. Not everyone's going to want 'em, but those that do want 'em will put their information in.

You wanna collect that. And again, this is a good example of I'm not doing anything for six months. Well, six months from now you're gonna wish you had six months worth of, of mobile numbers, right. To collect. So, you know, keep it, keep it simple, stupid. Right? That's how I go for it.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And I noticed that there's also people that feel that SMS is too intrusive, but there's actually the younger generation, they prefer SMS and they when they check out, they'll only enter. Shopify has the option that you can enter an email or a, a phone number. You don't have to have an email to check out.

You can just have a phone number. And a lot of the younger generation only enter a phone number. So it's just their preferred method of communication. They don't maybe check an email as much. So SMS there's a segment of people that, that's their preferred method.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. And I would say that, you know, years ago, SMS marketing has been around for over a decade, right? So years ago it definitely used to be a young man's game, right? It was the younger generation. It's not like that anymore, right? It spans every generation cohort, including baby boomers. So here's the thing, I my, I always tell this story, like, if you ever watch me do a webinar or something, I tell this story every single time.

But my mother is not a technology adopter. She hates shopping online. And I was visiting her a couple years ago. It, you know, she's got every sound on the phone in the world on, and then it's like dinging and I'm laying on the couch and it's just ding. And then she starts reading 'em text out loud. And they're all from brands and she hates shopping online.

She is not a technology adopter. She doesn't know how to do anything, but she's signing up for brand text messages. And I'm like, I, it was kind of that aha moment. And I'm like, all right, there's something here. The caveat, I always say, if people don't wanna sign up, they don't have to give you the mobile number, and that's gonna be your indication about whether or not your audience wants it or not. You know, it's, it's simple.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Last question on the welcome popup before I move on to some of the other ones is if you had to choose any preference, there's like the spin the wheel for a discount. There's the enter your email for a mystery discount, which sometimes I find interesting. There's. A percentage discount. Some people do a dollar discount, some people do enter your email for a draw.

So like, rather than just getting 10% off once a month, they give away a thousand dollars product, which so has extremely high value. Like in the end it's net the same 'cause it's only one per month. What's your preference there? What would you say about some of those different options?

Greg Zakowicz: I'll give you half of a consultant's cop out here, which I, I'll do, I won't tell you to test it, which is the other consultants cop out. But, and sometimes it's true. I. So all things being equal. I've got good profit margins, stuff like that. I wanna capture the sale. I think we're, this answer might have changed if you asked me two years ago, because we are in a place where consumer confidence is declining.

Consumer spending is declining. Every earnings report you are seeing in the last month, they're all warning against it. Amazon is now running their spring sale, their big spring sale to non-prime members, right?

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: knows this is coming up. I would say if you can afford the 10% margin or whatever that discount is, I would give 'em a discount.

I think for your personal brand, whatever makes sense, right? Cost, whether it's a percentage off, a dollar off with a minimum spend, which tier discount, right? Things like that are perfectly fine. So get the minimum spend in there, get 'em above that threshold that makes 'em profitable. All things being equal spin.

The wheels are fun. People like 'em. They do, I don't. This is anecdotally, I don't think people sign up for 'em more. Omni Send Data will tell you they do sign up more. You with spin the wheels. So I would say spin the wheels 'cause whatcha you gonna lose? And you can customize those now. But just a regular popup versus that, I think you're fine either way.

So whatever fits your brand discounts. Now, if you can't discount your point of like a monthly giveaway, love it. Right? Make it work for you. If you've got really tight margins, I think minimum spend on the discount works really well, is also, so just play it by year. I don't think you can really go wrong though.

But don't feel you need to give away the farm. Do what works for you.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I, I agree. And I so on, I'm thinking of one of the stores that I am, I manage with, and I use Omnisend, I think I've tested every single one. We have an offer for $15 off. We we then we've tested another one that was 10% off, which their average order value is between a hundred to $150, so works out to be around $15.

We did another one where we did a draw every month, and then we also did a big fly out with a spin the wheel offer for us for this test, the spin the wheel converted quite a bit higher. But what we don't know is how much did that affect people's buying behavior when they didn't have a coupon? So there's like.

For example, what I mean by this is if you, if you line on a site and you see a big coupon of like a potential coupon that you could spin and there's one 50% off coupon on there, but like a whole bunch of 10 percents and you get the 10%, it makes you think that there's 50% coupons out there and you feel a little bit burnt only getting a five or a 10.

And what I don't know, we, we haven't checked is for people who get the 10% off on the spin the wheel, do they convert the same as people who just opted in and got the 10% off on the default popup because they don't feel burnt. They don't feel like, oh, there's a 50 out there and I didn't get it. And then even more so people who just enter.

If there's no mention of a coupon code, just submit your email and we're giving away a thousand dollars worth of product this month. They don't see a coupon code at all, so they don't even, I mean, one of the biggest reasons of card abandonment is people leave to go find a coupon code, and so, so, so I, that I don't have the answer to, but I, from what we've seen is the spin the wheel definitely seems to convert the most.

How does it affect others? I, again, I, I then I, I would test too. I agree.

Greg Zakowicz: Well, here's the beauty of Omnis Sun is you can test popups, right? So you can throw two side by side to your point though, right? If you have one with incentive, one without the incentive, you know, you can obviously measure the submission rate, the follow through rate. I mean, here's the other option you can always do here is say you're okay giving everyone 10%, but you just wanna find out if you cannot give someone 10% without affecting sales, just send them a 10% like surprise in the like, welcome message.

Discount in the welcome message for those that you do not promise a gift a 10% for. See what your conversion rates are like, and that will give you an indication that, okay, our submission rate slightly lower, but the conversion rate's going through, right? You could play around with that as many ways as you want to.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Can, so you can ab test popups?

Greg Zakowicz: can,

Jay Myers: I haven't done that. Okay. Interesting. So that, that's the perfect thing to do then I think in this scenario

Greg Zakowicz: I think when you're looking at the platform, upper right corner, there's a dropdown that'll just say A/B test, and then it'll, it'll duplicate the form for you, and then you can make your customizations there.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Okay, let's get into automation. I wanna talk about automation, personalization, I wanna talk about flows, but let's automation what are. Maybe a handful of automations that stores should be thinking about doing. There's the obvious ones that come to mind. You probably may have some other ideas.

What are the main ones that you would recommend stores run and maybe rank them a little bit, if possible.

Greg Zakowicz: yeah. Absolutely. So I, I'll, I'll give a quick baseline here for why I am talking about automation so much, which I've been talking about for years. But, so last year, 25 billion messages sent, right? 37% of all email orders came from automated messages. So 37%. 2% of send. So you think about the weight of that year.

Now LA the year before that, 2023 might've been around 40%. Typically it's gonna go between 32 to 38%, somewhere in that ballpark. But you think about last year, 37% of sales came from 2% of messages. That's why I talk about automation so much. It's like a cheat code,

Jay Myers: that's insane. 30% of all revenue driven through emails came through. 2% of automation sense. It came as in, that's like, you know, the Pareto principle 80/20. This is like

Greg Zakowicz: yeah,

Jay Myers: that to the extreme, like amazing!

Greg Zakowicz: This is why, what, when people don't have, they're like, ah, no one needs a welcome message. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, even if no one, you're not sending it now, what's the, what's the harm in sending it? Right. You do something. So, so that's, that's my baseline for why I get so amped up about automations.

Okay. So let's layer that now. Over 80% of those sales came from three messages or three series of messages. So this is where I go, my ranking, and that's gonna be your welcome message. We just talked about. It's gonna be product abandonment and it's gonna be card abandonment. So we talked earlier about those high intent stages.

It's not surprising that those high intent stages of messages drive the majority of the revenue. Now we'll say card abandonment, welcome messages. There's a lot more volume sent than the other messages, right? Compared to labs purchase. So the percentage of orders will, will skew a little bit, but they still get higher than, you know, they get the better conversion rates, they get better open rates, they get the better click rates.

Jay Myers: What is the difference between cart abandonment and product abandonment?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. So product abandonment, sometimes you'll, they'll say Browse abandonment. Same philosophy, just different strategy. So cart abandonment is user puts an item in their shopping cart and then doesn't complete the purchase.

Jay Myers: And they've gotten to the checkout or even before?

Greg Zakowicz: So you could do either. So there's checkout abandonment and cart abandonment. Right? So check cart abandonment would be, I don't actually go through checkout yet. You could if you want, but I don't go through checkout yet and I leave your site, but it's still in my cart. Checkout abandonment is actually, you go through the checkout process and then you leave.

During that process, you can customize those either way you want or you can move from one to the next in a workflow as

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: So, hey, did they get the checkout phase right, and then you can split it that way. So I just lump 'em all together.

Jay Myers: So, this is a really interesting point, but, so product abandonment, you might wanna nudge them like, oops, did you, did you leave something behind checkout abandonment shows a higher intent of purchase. Like, you, you, we noticed you, you might've forgot this, and then maybe you offer a discount at that point or something.

But you can have a different strategy for each of them.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. And so you're right, product abandonment. We don't put an item in our shopping cart yet, but we're checked, we're viewing a specific item or in browse Abandonment's

Jay Myers: Mm. So the mess, so the messaging is like, we noticed, we noticed this piqued your interest.

Greg Zakowicz: yeah, yeah, something like that.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: Those messages, you could leave generic, but if you think about how you can use this specifically, right?

So if I'm looking at like, I don't know, I don't wear a sweater vest, but I'm looking at a specific sweater vest like a jacket sweater, like a vest jacket,

Jay Myers: Yep.

Greg Zakowicz: You could send me an email and highlight specific features of that, you know, there's a, a phone pouch and whatever, and triple insulated, weighs less than whatever, right?

So you can use those messages to re-engage people and be like, "Hey, we saw you looking at blah, blah, blah" - but you can give product detail and you can convince that person, you can show some social proof about what people thought about that, right? Show reviews. So the goal is to get them back to the site where they can cart a product at that point.

Browse abandonment. Little more generic, right? You could do a category, so men's shoes or men's sweaters and be like, Hey, here's some, we'll talk about social proof today, but here's some of our top sellers of men's shoes, or, you know, customer favorites of top rated products of men's shoes. So you guide them a little bit more.

But again, it's those stages, right? I'm on your website, I'm checking out products. There's some sort of intent with me. Go ahead and trigger that to me afterward. You know, years ago I would talk to clients and be like, well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna bother people. I don't wanna make them feel like I'm stalking 'em.

I go, well, are you, are you gonna send 'em a message anyways? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, are you're gonna email 'em on Friday? And they're like, yeah. Is it gonna be segmented to exactly what they're shopping for? Well, no. So wouldn't you rather send them a targeted, timely message based on something they're actively shopping for than send 'em an unsegmented message?

The answer is always yes. That's why they convert better.

Jay Myers: And if anyone doesn't think that they're valuable. My mind goes to how many times a day I open another tab on my browser and then completely forget what I'm doing in another tab.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah.

Jay Myers: Like, we're so, we're so busy, I have 70 tabs open. I'm doing something, I open another tab, I get distracted, a message pops up, and then I literally forget what I was doing and I start clicking through the tab.

Oh yeah, I was in the middle of this email, or I was in the middle of this document or something. So like, people are so distracted with a hundred dings and popups and messages and like, it's just natural people are gonna abandon and you're doing them a favor by sending them that email. And like, it's not annoying.

It's, it's a, you're doing a courtesy almost.

Greg Zakowicz: And there's two things I would say to this as well is one, you can combine multiple channels in the workflow. So if you know they're an email and SMS subscriber or SMS only, or email only, you can easily customize those pads. So, hey, come back and check out XYZ on my phone, and I've got my other tab open.

I'm like, oh yeah, maybe I'll go there and maybe you only offer the, the 10% or whatever discount you give 'em like an exclusive time on their phone to get 'em back. It doesn't really matter where they purchased. They've got a code there, so use your channels. Second thing I would say is, again, we talk about omnichannel marketing here.

So if someone's on your website or they cart a product and then they leave, what is a, what is a retailer's like Common MO here, I was like, go, all right, well let's do some lookalike audiences or retarget them on another platform to try to get them back. Those retargeting ads are costing you a lot more than the fraction of a penny cost to sending emails.

So use the fraction of a penny to get 'em back in. Hopefully save yourself on those retargeting ads elsewhere. You know, that's how I look at it.

Jay Myers: So how does Omnisend know the person? Is it, do they have to have opted in to an email prior to this, to be able to email them?

Greg Zakowicz: So of course, right, we wanna go GDPR, CANSPAM all the different compliance laws and regulations around. So yeah, we're gonna be looking at people who are opting into your email program. If there's something that's tr truly transactional where you can send to 'em without the opt-in, we could do those things, right?

You think about order confirmation, stuff like that. But but generally we're looking at previous subscribers through email program that we can track them, even if it's not that session. They sign up, we know their web history, and of course we could say that history. So if you wanted to run some segmentation later, you know, or have the automation say, Hey, they've gotta visit this category three times before we send them a message.

So you kind of hit that intent. You can set those rules up pretty easily.

Jay Myers: Makes sense. Which makes it even more important why you get that email early on through your Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: 100%

Jay Myers: Amazing. I saw, I don't know if this is a good segue, but maybe it's a good segue, but I saw in your presentation the other week with flows, I, I saw something that I thought was genius. You had a flow created where when an order, when a cart size was less than $50, it sent an abandoned email saying, you left something in your cart, come back.

But if the cart size was more than $50, you included a coupon code because obviously there's enough margin there or there, there's different logic. Or maybe you can do something. If the cart size is over a hundred dollars, you do something even bigger. Like, I thought that was so smart. I haven't done that with the stores I run, and I want to actually implement that right away.

But tell me about, about flows and how that works.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, so thank you for noticing that, by the way. So I always say it's like it's the small, simple things matter, right? And it could be, I mean, the smallest thing sometimes does matter. So this is something that very few brands do. Some do it. So how I look at it is, let's just use the $50 example.

Let's say you have a free shipping on your website, but the threshold is 50 bucks as a starter. The person who's abandoning less than 50 bucks and the person who's abandoning a cart's at $300, they have very different intentions of purchase. They have very different reasons for abandoning. So we know for a fact the person who says the 300 cart is not abandoning because they get free shipping. The problem is a lot of brands, which I would tell you to do, templatize all their value ads and you know, in their messages, I think it's a great thing to do. Band cart, a lot of times they don't customize those a bit. They just use whatever abandoned cart message email provider gives them and they're like, okay, this is good enough.

A lot of times free shipping is one of those messages. So if you are getting this, and this happened to me before when I was buying a dishwasher. The big call out was free shipping. And I'm like, yeah, you're free shipping 35 bucks and I'm spending 1200 bucks here. You damn right I'm getting free shipping, right?

So it's a waste of message 'cause it's not giving me any value. So we have a different reason for abandoning. Chances are it's either scared of price point. It is, I'm unsure about the product quality, maybe the fit. If it's clothing, you're, I'm unsure about your customer. There's something else there. The 50 bucks, I've got lower profit margins.

I'm trying to get you above a threshold. Free shipping probably matters to you at this point because I might go to Amazon or temu or something and see if they got the same thing there and I get my free shipping. So you can make your messages slightly different. You can call out those different value add.

You can use different incentives to, okay, you're 20 bucks. I need to get you over 50, or I want to get you close to 50 'cause I want you to get the free shipping. Feel like you got something, but I'm also gonna give you a discount because I want you to get for shipping. And now we're talking about like, hey, we'll give you 20% off, but you've got a minimum spent of 75 bucks or something.

Right? You could play with that number, but you can promote something different. That message. So you make that message, which is already relevant. A little more specific to that. Specific to that user. You try to overcome those obstacles to purchase, right? Why are they not purchasing? And you could think about that differently.

You could also change, do I need to send three messages or four messages to someone who abandoned a $20 shopping cart? Probably not.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: Do I maybe wanna do that for the $300 card? Yeah, I probably do. So you can just customize your messaging paths, you can change the timing of those, you can do whatever you want to.

But small, simple things as far as doing it in a workflow is super easy. Like you can create one of those splits in four seconds, right? Maybe seven if you wanna play around with it. Not like the criteria, but I mean, we're talking about literally seconds to do that. And even if you just wanna test it and be like, okay, I'm gonna test my timing.

Just copy the note over, split test it and boom, you're done. So that's what I mean, you're, you're taking something that already performs extremely well and you're trying to cus do small, simple customizations that changes the customer experience and reinforces, Hey, this is why I wanna be with this company because.

They're gonna, they just told me they've got 24/7 amazing support and customers love 'em, and I feel comfortable purchasing from 'em. Right. And those are the things that are gonna matter at the end of the day.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And if anyone hasn't experienced Omnisend flows, they're pretty neat. You literally kind of drag and drop different flows. And if a customer does a certain thing or you send, start this flow. If they do take some other action, send this one. And it's, it feels very personalized, the email emails they get. Let's maybe give a bit of an overview of flows. 'cause we kind of went right into a specific flow there. But let's take the welcome series. What's a flow you could do with that welcome series? Let's start there.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. So obviously you got a trigger node. So here's the great thing about Omnisend. If you're unfamiliar with flows or you're unfamiliar with, say, an Omnisend platform - we actually build templates of the flows that you can customize the templates. If you don't know where to start, you just click welcome and it will have welcome, welcome three messages, welcome plus SMS, and it just templatizes it for you.

And then you can customize as you wanna go. So we do that with all the, all our workflows. Welcome trigger. Send that first message within a minute. Some people like to wait 30 seconds to a minute, perfectly fine, but there's nothing more annoying than telling someone you're going to send them a 10% or 20% discount, and the thing goes a day later. They get really annoyed. So one minute and then we have other options, right? If you have a message in there, you can just add a node, add a delay and say, okay, do I wanna send another message? Do I wanna split it to SMS? Do I wanna do whatever I want here? So you can just keep adding, moving stuff around and deleting as you see fit.

What I would do from a welcome message usually two to three messages, most brands will settle with, I think it's perfectly fine. My goal of a welcome message. Wanna get Jay convert? To guide you. You are probably new to my brand because you're new to my email program. It's an assumption, not always true, but I need to guide you.

And this is why I said don't tell your brand story. People are not setting up for your email program to hear your founder story. It might matter. It might be worth having a call out to link them more, but that's not why they're there. They're there to shop. So welcome 'em. If you give 'em incentive, give 'em the incentive right away, let 'em convert.

I would suggest products for 'em. So, if you don't have dynamic content or anything set up, I would just do something simple. Top rated products, customer favorites, put some social proof in there. You're guiding people to things that you know the reviews are gonna be good. You know what they're shopping, you know what your customers generally like to buy.

It's as simple as that. And then message two or three, hit your value ads. So. You know, tell 'em about top rated products, maybe different categories. So top rated, women's, top rated, men's top rated, whatever. Highlight customer service. Highlight all those differentiators that are going to make someone shop with you.

And if that's two messages, it's two messages. If it's three, it's three. Perfect. And, and let 'em get on and we can talk about customization strategies here. 'cause I got,

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: We could talk about guiding, but I don't wanna detract too much from this.

Jay Myers: No, that'd be great. Well, and then just, and you can then trigger different flows based off if they click on something in the email and how they interact with it. Do they open it, not open it, engage with it. You can send them down different paths as well too. There's a lot, like, I would just encourage anyone, like go play with it.

 It's really powerful the different paths a customer can take based off how they interact.

Greg Zakowicz: So user behavior, it's exactly right. And even if you build one flow and you have, like, you don't split it off and you have SMS message going away right away. And by the way, if you have an SMS and they opt in, send 'em a SMS welcome text as well with email. But even if you make, like, make a mistake and they're like, oh, I put one flow for email and SMS, what happens to my SMS?

Or people not opted into SMS, it just skips over 'em and goes to the email portion.

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: We, we make it kind of foolproof for you. I love your example of click-based behavior 'cause I talk about this all the time. So we wanna customize these messages as much as possible. So again, small, simple things. I've got one welcome message sends everyone, no customization. You can customize it based on the information you ask for on that popup form if you're asking for something different, male, female or not, but say you have a generic one. So think about if I'm selling men's, I'm selling women's and I'm selling kids, and I get the welcome message, and you just have a note that says, Hey, give me everyone who clicked on the kids category in the welcome email.

Well, you can split those people off and then send them a welcome series, which is very similar to before, but now you're recommending top rated kids products or you know, customer favorite kids gear. It could be same with women, same with men's. It could be product categories, you know, shoes, jewelry, bathing suits, whatever it might be.

And again, you don't have to have dynamic content necessarily in there, but you're just doing something a little bit better, a little bit more than the other guys, but you're trying to be more targeted with them. And you can always have fallback content in there, right? Your tertiary content that's just.

Different categories. Shop men's, shop women's. So if they click by accident or they're shopping for their boyfriend or girlfriend, but they also wanna shop for themselves. They've got fallback categories to then pursue. So small, simple

Jay Myers: So smart!

Greg Zakowicz: Really minutes to do. And it can, it can make a big difference.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So there's some strategy here where in that first email, in the welcome series maybe have a few different categories of products that's like top of the funnel. They click on a certain one and then you can segment them based off of are they interested in your TV equipment or your car audio equipment?

Like they can channel 'em that way. Or do they have dog dogs or do they have cats If you sell, you know, if they sell. Yeah. Super smart. And then you don't have to ask all that up front on the signup form, so you maybe get better, better opt-in.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, and it's self segmenting, right? But most brands will have a navigation bar in their email, so it's an easy place to kind of with it.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Fair enough.

Greg Zakowicz: Like you could combine multiple of these things into one thing, right? Did they click on any men's category link? Boom. Done.

Jay Myers: I feel like we skipped by some of the other automations 'cause we jumped right into the different types of abandoned cart ones, but I remember you highlighted a lot of different ones. There was the post-purchase ones, what are some of the other ones that stores should think about making sure they have on? I'm trying to remember.

I think it was back in stock, was the number one opened one, right?

Greg Zakowicz: So the metrics with in stock are nuts, right? Highest open rates, highest conversion rates are astronomical. I think. So put it, I'm gonna go off the top of my head here. I know. A general scheduled kind of quote unquote batch of blast marketing message, your conversion rates. So conversion based on email sent is 0.07%.

Pretty consistent year over year. Welcome message might be like 2% or a 2.-- something, right? So you 0.07% to 2%. I think back in stock might have been like 5.8%! Like it's ridiculous the amount! We send fewer of 'em than we do any other message. So take it with a grain of salt, but I think there's a lot there because it's been sending for a couple years and those numbers are pretty consistent.

I think to me, what it tells me is sense of urgency

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: slash fear of missing out, you know, "FOMO", they work for you and how do you take what you learn there and apply it to something else. So if you have the ability to run back in stock messages and automate those, I would do it. We talk about our signups.

It integrates with Shopify where you can just plug it in and it'll only show up if your product's out of stock and it disappears when it comes back in stock. So you can start collecting email addresses that way, but the automation's set up for you.

Jay Myers: So good.

Greg Zakowicz: It takes you literally two seconds to do, like you just hit enable and it shows up in your Shopify store.

If you don't, I would just do, like, you could always do a popup and stuff like that with those settings too. But if not, utilize the things. So if you have a product, that comes back in stock and you're looking for an email to send it on Tuesday, right? Back in stock! You just send it to everyone.

But again, it's using social proof, which I love.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: It's reinforcing the people, whether they bought the product or not, whether they're interested or not, that the product sold out once it's coming back. It's a customer favorite. It wouldn't be if the product stunk. It's top rated, and you use that to your advantage here.

So works from a subject line standpoint. You can also do that with recently back in stock products as secondary or tertiary content in your messages. It also tells you what your customer favorites are. So when you send that welcome message, you're like, okay, I wanna suggest a couple products in this message, or product abandonment messages.

I wanna suggest a couple products. Go to your ones that sell out all the time and suggest them. Let people know like, "Hey, it's not gonna last for long", you know. We're just, we're reusing content across different messages that hit on these things like social proof, fear of missing out you know, timeliness, again, we're just adding small things.

It's like compounding interest. We're just making it stack up.

Jay Myers: And it's one more point where you collect that email and then if you wanna send browser abandonments, you have it. It's just another great spot to collect the customer as well.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. And you know, you look fast forward six months or a year, right? So, we'll, let's use that like jacket vest or something, whatever thing I said before, right? So they were interested a year ago. We've got a new product line now, or an upgraded version of that, right? You still have that contact info saved.

Even if they didn't buy the initial product, you know, you could send just a segmented message to those people and be like, "Hey the latest or the upgraded XYZ you know, jacket for you", and you try to get those sales the following year as well.

Jay Myers: So can these back in stock emails, do they trigger automatically as soon as you update your inventory in Shopify?

Greg Zakowicz: They do, yeah.

Jay Myers: So when the item's out of stock, the button switches to a "notify me", when in. They click that, they enter their email, and then a week later you just adjust your inventory in Shopify and everyone who entered that, it automatically gets sent?

Greg Zakowicz: Yep! So the signup form disappears from that product page on your site and that the automation will trigger off to the contacts who filled out that specific form.

Jay Myers: Like that's a no-brainer to me. Yeah. And I click those all the time and I use 'em all the time too. Like at so many stores. That's one of the emails that I will always enter. It doesn't feel marketing, it's very transactional. Like I just, I wanna get notified when this is back in stock.

But you're also collecting that email as well, too.

Greg Zakowicz: So I'm the same way. I fill those things out, right. And, you're only filling 'em out if you have a high intent to buy. Like, you identify, it's like checkout, right? You identified a product that you're like, "ah, I need to hear about this". You're hoping it comes back in stock within a couple days, but it also, like you can create a different workflow that says, you know, Hey, if someone's signing up for this green pair of shoes that sell out, can you send off a message to just those people? If you know it's not coming back in stock for a month about other similar top rated products that like, Hey, we, we know you're interested in this, but here's some other options for you. And like a smaller segment, but you can get some of those conversions there.

So there's so many things you could do with like small pieces of data that doesn't take a lot of time that anyone can do. And you know, the goal is just to increase sales as quick as possible.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I've been using Omnisend for years, and I still feel like I'm not even using all of the value that it can bring. It's insane when I log in and I see the total number of conversions that it's driven and I'm not using the back of stock feature on a lot of stores, but I'm gonna turn that on right after this episode.

Greg Zakowicz: So, I mean, you've been using it for a couple years. The, the platform is so night and day from what, even just two years ago, right? It's completely different. It's so awesome.

Jay Myers: The other ones that were really high up there, let's talk about post-purchase. I feel like this is one that a lot of brands don't do well and they're missing a big opportunity.

Greg Zakowicz: Underutilized over important in my opinion. So we talked about customer service before. People hear post purchase and hey think of like, "oh, I'm sending a product review email", and "I'm sending a shipping and order confirmation email". Those are not what I'm talking about. Those are great messages, by the way, obviously transactional ones, but like product review, a lot of value that comes from those messages I'm talking about, I'm talking about your customer service team.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: So how I tell people to do it is look at a post purchase series as a series of messages, however long that is, that benefits the customer and does not benefit the company. At the end of the day, it will come back to benefit the company. So I'll give you examples of this and a thank you message after someone purchases that just, "Hey, thanks for making your purchase".

You know, if you need help, have some sort of call to action, go to blog, FAQ pages just provide customer service numbers. It could be an incentive with a call to action in the shop, right? You don't have to, but you can you know, thanking people like to be thanked.

Jay Myers: yep.

Greg Zakowicz: It, it is simple, right?

So there, I'll tell a story here in a second about a message my wife sent me a couple weeks ago. It was a thank you message. She's usually my barometer for

Jay Myers: So was mine.

how

Greg Zakowicz: brands are doing

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Greg Zakowicz: from a shopping standpoint because she likes shopping. She'll, you send her a 2% discount, she'll buy and convert from it, but she also has very little room for for bad emails.

So it is kind of a funny, so messages like that "how-to" or "tips and tricks" type messages. So how to get someone to utilize that purchase better so they have a better experience with a product. So if you have makeup, that's an example. I put in that presentation. This is one my wife got about a week and a half ago.

She bought some makeup and the email came and it was like, "you got your makeup, now here's how to apply it". And it linked to, I think Instagram or YouTube. But it does a couple things. One: it helps her use that product better so she doesn't put it on like, oh, this stuff sucks, you know. Two: next time she needs makeup, she might go because it's a good experience.

Three: even if she's not buying it again, but she wants to learn how to do other things, makeup better or sell her hair better. She looks at the company as a resource. Now she's gonna navigate to YouTube or navigate to the Instagram handle to look for those how-to videos. This is stuff that matters at the end of the day, right?

Tips and tricks. We utilization here. I'm a huge proponent of first time customers. You send a check-in message a week or two after they purchase to just ask 'em how everything's going, right? We talked earlier about customers that have a fine experience but not a wow experience. It's very indifferent. You know, getting that is harder, but those people, if they have a slightly hiccuped experience. Not enough for them to wanna spend time contacting someone complaining about it, dealing with all that stuff. But the next time they need to purchase, they might just not come back. Right? They, or they'll come back as a second option.

They'll look somewhere else first. And you know, they'll know like, I can't get it here. So now I'll come back. Messages like that. And I used to have clients that would do this. They would say, okay, we'll do that. We'll check it out. It's a good idea. And they would get people that start contacting them and go, you know what?

Now that you mention it, this happened. Not a huge deal. But it is your chance to then solve that problem. And the quicker you solve the problem, the better it is. The more they feel taken care of, the more likelihood they are going to come back and shop with you. 'cause they know if there's a problem next time you got me.

So that's what I mean by post purchase.

Jay Myers: yeah, and you get ahead of it too, right? So like people need an outlet and if they ha are frustrated, they might post about it online somewhere, but you get ahead of it before they get out and tell their friends. Yeah, no, it wasn't that great. I had this issue like, you're, you're proactive.

Like, it's, it's huge. So we we do a lot in the subscription space and I always tell our merchants, when someone subscribes, you don't actually have a customer yet, you have a lead. When someone buys a product, they're not sold on your product for life. They're trying it out and you, your job is to educate them and, reinforce the value of it. Maybe it's about the good will that your company does with charities and how it's ethically sourced and how it's made and how you have a diverse workforce and just all these different, there's a hundred different things you can include there, but the point is, there's no difference often between a $20 bottle, like, you know, a $5 bottle of wine might be cheap, but they say when you get to like $25 or $30 the actual difference in quality from like a $30 bottle to a $70 bottle isn't any different. It's just "perceived" value. Maybe a $500 bottle wine is from a, is a select few or something.

But anyways, and you get the point. And so the perceived value. Is the knowledge that you get from the sommelier when he comes by your table and says where the wine is from, how it's made. And there's a certain region where only these grapes grow and we sing to the grapes as they grow or something, whatever it is.

But you, soon as you understand that and then you taste that wine, it tastes better and be, it's because of the knowledge. And if you don't have that, it's different perceived value. And so there's a point of shopping and they've done studies on this, of where endorphins in the brain are released. At the point you check out when you actually click that checkout button, is that one of the highest points of endorphins.

Or sorry, a dopamine hit when you're, when you're shopping online and like, we've all experienced it. I joke about this with my wife, like sometimes when we make a big purchase, I'll tell her to come over and we click the buy button at the same time. Like if we're like booking a big trip or we're buying something, we're like, okay, are you sure?

Are you sure? Okay. Come over. Okay, let's click at the same time. I don't know, there's like this moment of excitement, right? And then a lot of times everything after that is just like a big letdown from the brand. I get like an order confirmation email and that's it. But you have this window of opportunity, and I call it the "half-life of excitement", where you have this opportunity where you could probably send that customer three emails within a day, and they're not gonna get mad. Like you could send them an email right away. You could send 'em another email two hours later, you could send 'em an email six hours later. And that customer's not gonna be getting mad. 'cause if I just bought a leather couch, I wanna learn about like where the leather's made, I wanna learn about how it's treated.

I'm not gonna be mad because that company just sent me three emails. I'm actually gonna be thankful. And then, I'm also gonna appreciate it more, I'm gonna recommend it more and I'm gonna perceive the value. So I think it's one of the most underutilized email automations of any email automation.

Greg Zakowicz: So product care messages you just mentioned, like the leather example, how to care for your couch, I love those messages. Freaking love 'em! So you know, if you have accessory items, you don't have to push the accessories that help that, that tie into it. Like suggest them at the bottom. So I always get the example of like buy lingerie, right?

And you get a message like how to properly wash your lingerie. Well, if you sell a lingerie detergent and a lingerie bag, perfect, easy upsell! Waterproofing of boots or shoes, right? Maybe you have a spray. How to properly care for these things. And you have that, these simple upsells where you're not pushing it, you're helping them care for the product.

Huge, huge people love those things. You got time for a quick story, Jay?

Jay Myers: I love stories.

Greg Zakowicz: Awesome. So I used to work with this company years ago. Sold high-end Christmas trees, like expensive, high-end Christmas trees. And we were just, we were at an event and just having a drink one night. And we were talking, they already had a post-purchase series in place for these people, which made a lot of sense.

But she was like, "Hey, you know, we just updated one of our messages". And I'm like, oh, tell me about it. So it was like the typical Pinterest stuff. People would get this high entry, looks beautiful, quality's excellent. But they'd set it up and it doesn't look like the tree in the picture, right? It's, I always, I use Pinterest, but

Jay Myers: Yeah, yeah,

She

Greg Zakowicz: said their customer service department would get inundated with phone calls, Hey, it doesn't look like it.

And they would said customer service department would spend their time telling people, giving 'em instructions how to properly, they call it fluffing a

Jay Myers: yeah, yeah. Yep.

Greg Zakowicz: And once they did it looked great. They had a mechanism internally that would look at that and go, okay. They would communicate. Common issues from customer service over the marketing department, and this

Jay Myers: Hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: the number one request.

They were also struggling at the time trying to cross sell accessory items for trees. So decorations, wreaths, stuff like that. So they're like, okay, let's make a how to post purchase message, make a video that shows you how to properly fluff tree. So I don't re remember the numbers offhand. I know the customer service calls decreased by over 50%

Jay Myers: Oh, I bet.

Greg Zakowicz: because of this video.

And they were able to almost two x the amount of accessory items sold in the post purchase series, which was just a cross sell email because of it. Because people got, this product looks great and now they love you a little bit more. And they're like, oh, you know what? That looks great. I bet this ornament, or I bet this wreath's gonna look awesome and you jump on 'em.

And obviously with a Christmas tree, right, you've got a limited time to jump on 'em right there to, to cross sell 'em. It's just a good example of, you know, that person can get the tree. It looks okay, and they're like, yeah, a little disappointed. Not enough to call and complain, but what are they gonna do?

Tell their friends like, eh, it's okay. I wish it looked better. You know?

Jay Myers: Well, the first thing you do when you buy something is you often go to YouTube to watch how to use it. I bought new microphones the other day, or new headphones I go and I how to, how to use it. Or if you buy this Christmas tree, someone's gonna Google and you might as well be the expert on that, and you might as well be the authority and give the exact right experience you want to your customers rather than letting

someone else who might slip in a few negative things here and there in the video. Like just be the expert. Put it in the email. Like, I agree. Man, tree fluffing is a whole ordeal at our house. It's like a two bottle of wine thing. We weff, it's like a we fluff the, oh man. My, my, it's a whole, whole thing. I I feel like we might have to do another episode at some point 'cause we're getting close on time, but I want to touch on, like, we didn't talk at all about personalization, A/B testing. There's so much to Omnisend that like, it's amazing. But maybe real Sorry, what were you gonna say?

Greg Zakowicz: I was gonna say to give you an out, we talked a little bit about personalizing some of those automations on, on simple things, so I'll give you a little bit an out there so

Jay Myers: Okay. Fair enough. We did, we did touch a bit on a bit, but I mean, it's like personalization is you know, different customers buy different products. They react different or engage differently on your site. I use this a lot with Omnisend, we send different emails based off of how they engage. I guess, we did talk a little bit about it with what they're looking at and, and in the automation and setting different flows. But A/B testing is something that I use a lot as well too. Maybe let's just talk about that really quick and then we will wrap it up because I think subject lines, oh man, I'd love to pick your brain on subject lines too, but subject lines, body the preview text and you can pretty much A/B test everything, the whole email itself.

Is there any best practices? Like, I obviously people can probably get carried away with this, like testing 10 different messages. But some basic things that they should do when it comes to A/B testing.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, I look at testing, like segmentation, right? It could be really simple, but it could also be extremely complex

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: and kind of unmanageable at time. So testing, my biggest piece of advice is I think if you test subject lines, you're gonna get very minimal results. I think subject lines might be more overrated now than ever in most things.

Automations, I think matter a little bit more.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: but just scheduled messages. I think your preview text probably matters more than a subject line nowadays. Side story: Testing, I say simplify it as much as possible and say, what do I wanna test and why do I wanna test it? Right. What am specifically am I looking for?

So, am I looking to get a 2% or a 0.2% increase in click rate when my conversion rate's not changing? I'm not sure what ultimately that's getting you right? We wanna drive the sales. So if I'm gonna get my clicks and I'm gonna increase this, what am I doing about the messages that convert well, that carries over to the website that gets people to convert.

Sometimes it's out of your control. It's gonna be product, it could be price point, it could be timing. But ideally, if you increase clicks, you wanna increase, your sales are going to increase. And if that's not happening, you've got, you're testing the wrong thing, right? It's like, "oh, what do I do to get more clicks?"

The answer should be, what do I do to get more conversion? Right? And that might take you to clicks. So I would really like break down exactly what you're trying to do and work backward from there and figuring out, okay, this is the thing that's gonna likely matter the most to me. Now how do I fine tune that?

I think, we talk about colors and all that stuff. At the end of the day, I don't think landing pages is probably a little bit different from an email. I don't think the color of your call to action button's ultimately going to matter

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Greg Zakowicz: for 99% of brands. So focus on like the things that you think are going to actually make a difference.

And I think that will guide you. I think you'd be fine with it, right? And that helps you keep it kind of contained and not outta hand.

Jay Myers: Yeah. We've really used it a lot to test emails that are very flashy with a lot of images, and then the same message, sometimes that is almost plain text. Sometimes we find the plain text actually converts much better. And then sometimes, like for certain emails, the flashy ones convert a lot better too.

Like it depending what the content is. So you can't just say, I sometimes hear people say like, no plain text is better. A short, super short and sweet. Well, no, sometimes you need that social proof and you need certain elements in there. So yeah, you look like you're about to say something on that.

Greg Zakowicz: No, I was gonna say you're a hundred percent right and times change, consumers change, right? Consumers are, are shopping different now than they were two years ago and five years ago. And if you're like, oh, plain text works, which the first Obama presidential run is what kicked off this whole plain text thing, right?

'cause that's how he was fundraising. He caught it at the right time though. He was targeting people who were used to email and, and everyone's tried to duplicate that since. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You know, different strokes, different folks, but different times as well, right?

The more people are are on Instagram and visual channels, a lot of times the more the visual works, to your point, sometimes they get fatigued and like, I like the text. Plain simple. Here's my button, let me click it. Right? And I, I think what works today, even if it is gangbusters, six months from now, you might find opposite results and you just need to shift there a little bit.

So just monitor your metrics over time, because that's gonna, that's gonna tell you whether you need to test at that point.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Greg, this has been such an enlightening episode for me. I've really enjoyed it. 'cause not only, I know this is, there's so much value here for our listeners, but for me personally as well as an Omnisend user. I think we should do this again and I would love to do it with, I know you put out your annual report, actually can you guide some of our listeners? I'll make sure it's in the show notes as well too. But you've got an amazing, or Omnisend puts it out. I know you're a big, you kind of head it up, but the annual report on different demographics and who's opening what and by industry vertical and it's really packed full of information.

Where do listeners go to get that?

Greg Zakowicz: So if you go to just Omnisend.com, hover over the banner, there's a resources section and then there's a subheading there you can just one click there, but there's a report section that you can go to. We do more than email as well. So we have reports on TikTok and Amazon virality. We have Amazon and TEMU Shop, right?

We have reports on kind of e-commerce ecosystem type stuff there as well. So even if email bores you, which it shouldn't, but if you're looking for something a little bit more, we do Black Friday and Cyber Monday specific reports as well. So you find some of those on there. But check 'em out. We do kind of holistic reports all over the place.

Jay Myers: Awesome. And I just wanted to personally say big thank you. Omnisend is a sponsor of the show and they believe in what we're doing and they believe in helping Shopify merchants grow their business. And so I personally recommend Omnisend to, to everyone I interact with. And so just wanna make sure all of our listeners are aware they're a big part of why this show exists.

And actually right after this show ends, we've got a very special offer from Omnisend to, it's a, it's a extremely good offer. Just, I'm gonna read it out after, so hang on for about 15 seconds to those listening. And then well, I'll instruct you how to get that, that o offer that Omnisend has put together.

And then just lastly, Greg, for you personally, if people wanna follow you and engage with you, where are you active? What social media platforms are you most active on?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Thanks for that. I, I'm gonna spend just five seconds giving you a, well, 10, just giving a quick kind of recap if I can. I, we talked a lot about today. I would just tell anyone listening. Don't be overwhelmed, like these are small, simple things. Just tackle 'em one at a time. So we talked a lot about today, but it doesn't have to be complex as far as where to find me.

LinkedIn, I'm always on there, so feel free to get me there. I've transitioned off of X so I'm over on Blue Sky now. So you can find me on Blue Sky under my name. But those are the two I'm most active on.

Jay Myers: Nice. Awesome. Well, Greg, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.

Greg Zakowicz: Thanks, Jay. Appreciate it, man.