Email Marketing in 3 Simple Steps

The only 3 things you need to be doing...

Author

Michael Rathman
August 07, 2024

Hey, Michael here.

We’re back with another edition of The DTC Letters.

In today's newsletter, we are going to over a question I get asked a lot by brand owners:

“We have a ton of advanced flows and we use a lot of segmentation when we send out campaigns, but we are stuck at 15-20% of monthly revenue coming through email…Why?”

The truth is if you’re stuck here, you’re probably overcomplicating your email marketing channel.

So I’m about to show you only 3 things you need to do in order to generate 40% of your brand monthly revenue with email marketing.

And if you haven’t already, check out this new training I posted on YouTube about How I Added $114k In 30 Days To An Ecom Brand With Klaviyo Email Marketing (link)

Email Idea of the Week

The National Day Email

Most brands know that there are a ton of fun “National Holidays” in the ecommerce world.

Like this 2024 Holiday calendar from Privy (just don’t use them as your ESP…it sucks).

Customers love these type of holidays for 2 reasons:

  • It makes them feel unique and special (since they enjoy the topic of the holiday

  • It gives them a reason to spend money (which every Ecom brand LOVES of course)

Yet I don’t see enough brands utilizing this to its full potential.

A lot of the time it’s because the brand wants to promote to many things in each email and is scared to send an email solely based around this one Fun Holiday.

But these are the micro topic campaigns that perform the best, and ones you can use year after year!

In the Example above, Lesser Evil uses National Cheese Day to highlight their “not so cheesy” cheese flavors.

Its a great way to utilize an interested angle (the holiday) and blend it with the products you sell.

ACTION ITEM

  • Check out 3 Ecommerce Holiday calendars

  • Write done the Holidays that could potential tie into your brand/products/audience

  • Feed each idea into ChatGPT or Claude AI

Now you have 5-25 fun and interesting campaign angles to use for years to come!

Email Marketing is Simple

Like I was saying earlier, most people overcomplicate their email marketing channel.

They think that generating 40% of their monthly revenue through email marketing means they need to:

  • Hyper segment their email list into customer categories

  • Have advanced upsell cross-sell flows for every product combination

  • Send emails that have discounts because “thats what gets sales”

I don’t blame brand owners for thinking this way… its what all the GURUS say online in order to get you to buy their big agency services.

But the reality is, getting email marketing to generate 40% of your brands monthly revenue comes down to one thing and one thing only…

The Basics

The 80/20 Basics

I keep the following sections short because well…it’s simple.

The 3 things that give your brand the most leverage and generate the majority of the results you’ll see from email are:

  • Having a high converting pop-up form

  • Setting up your core flows properly

  • Sending 2-4 campaigns per week

I know, underwhelming right?

The Pop-Up Form

You need to be bring in new subscribers to your list every single day or else you are wasting the site traffic you already paid to acquire.

On top of that, the pop-up form fuels your flows and without a high converting form, your flows will be severely underperforming due to low traffic.

This is the most difficult part for brands to achieve since it requires weekly testing.

But achieving 10%+ CVR on your pop-up is very possible for most every brand.

The problem is most brands aren’t willing to test that long and see minimal or no results.

This is how pop-up testing normally goes:

Test 1 - 2%
Test 2 - 2.6%
Test 3 - 2.1%
Test 4 - 3.5%
Test 5 - 3.2%
Test 6 - 4.4%
Test 7 - 6.9%
Test 8 - 5.9%
Test 9 - 5.3%
Test 10 - 8.2%

The name of the game is weekly tests until you achieve at least 10% CVR

Your CORE Flows

Now that you are capturing more traffic from the site and funneling them into you email list, you need the flows set up.

But don’t get ahead of yourself and start pushing a crazy 12 step conditional per product split post purchase upsell flow…

That’s low ROI unless you are trying to squeeze the last few %’s out of your email list or already have the basic performing at a highlevel.

The CORE flows you need are:

  • Welcome Flow

  • Abandonment Flows

    • Site AB

    • Browse AB

    • AB Cart

    • AB Checkout

  • Post Purchase Flow

These will complete your customer journey but more importantly these are the highest revenue generating flows.

Make them long and put about 40+ emails into them.

Get these CORE flows to convert at a high level perform thinking about any advanced flow automations.

This brings the most revenue and leverage on you or your teams time.

There’s no point in making an upsell flow and you can’t get your welcome flow to convert customers.

2 - 4 Campaigns Per Week

I can already hear you thinking

“WOW that’s a lot! I don’t want to annoy our customers and get a bunch of unsubscribes.”

Let me just say 3 things about that:

  • Every time we’ve sent more emails for a brand, they made more sales

  • People who are unsubscribing were going to anyway, they are doing you a favor (and saving you $ on your Klaviyo bill)

  • If you tested this in the past and it didn’t work…odds are you emails just sucked

If you are sending valuable, educational, and entertaining emails to your list that look good and sound good…

They will come back and keep reading.

Would you be made that a person saw your ad 3-4 times in the same week?

Probably not.

So why is seeing your brands emails any different?

With email, they actually ASKED to be sent the emails. No one ever asked to see one of your meta or google ads.

It’s that simple

  • $2.2 Million Email Design Tips (link)

  • 3 Common Email Design Mistakes Killing Your E-Commerce Sales (And How to Fix Them) (link)

  • Klaviyo Segmentation Goals (link)

How I Can Help You

If you like this newsletter and want to work with us, there are a few ways we can do so:

  1. You can apply to work with my Agency, AdSumo Digital (link)

  2. I will be posting free weekly training videos on my Youtube channel (link)

  3. I have over 7,000 tweets on scaling your DTC brand using your Email List (link)

  4. If you are looking to better monetize your DTC brands email list, we have worked with brands in several niches from Health & Wellness to Luxury brands and helped How I Added $114k In 30 Days To An Ecom Brand With Klaviyo Email Marketing (link)

Reply to this email with any questions or content that you want covered in future newsletters.

PS - If you run an Ecom brand and want to have a 15 minute strategy session with me, book a call here »