Abtin Masseratagah is a digital marketing consultant and founder of Northn Mo., a Toronto-based digital and social media marketing firm. Abtin’s been in the industry for over a decade specializing in retention marketing, paid media, growth hacking, influencer marketing, social media marketing, brand amplification across digital platforms, and business development. Abtin’s been featured in major media publications such as Forbes, Huffington Post, and Entrepreneur Magazine. In today’s episode we discuss strategies around retention marketing from email marketing, SMS, and push notifications.
Abtin Masseratagah is a digital marketing consultant and founder of Northn Mo., a Toronto-based digital and social media marketing firm. Abtin’s been in the industry for over a decade specializing in retention marketing, paid media, growth hacking, influencer marketing, social media marketing, brand amplification across digital platforms, and business development. Abtin’s been featured in major media publications such as Forbes, Huffington Post, and Entrepreneur Magazine. In today’s episode we discuss strategies around retention marketing from email marketing, SMS, and push notifications.
Key Takeaways from Abtin:
DTC growth Show. Welcome to the DTC growth Show presented by bank notes mentored by hashtag paid where we talk all things ecommerce and DTC. My name is Sophia. And today I could speak with Abdon, who's the founder of Northern Mo, a digital and social media marketing, often has been in the industry for over a decade has been featured in major media publications like Huffington Post and Forbes. Today, we're gonna be discussing all things retention marketing strategies that brands can implement into their own marketing mix. From email to SMS, you won't want to miss this episode. So can you walk us through the role of a good customer experience plays and the relationship it has with repeat purchase rates? Yeah, so a lot of brands are missing out on that good customer experience. And where they're missing out on is even brands are just starting out, they'll say like, let's just start with driving traffic, spending our money on paid media, which is a good place to be, but a lot of them will miss out on the super little, the super little touches that really make a brand come together and make customers really appreciate it. So where I like to start personally with that is across a few different channels, whether that just be starting with just email, or if you can afford to also have SMS in there, you want to build it out as well. Or you also want to have push notifications. So email marketing is the easiest place, you can start to bring in this great relationship and tie things together. So what I would say is just having like some regular or some regular aspects to your email, so email gets broken down into realistically two areas, and so does SMS and that's flows and campaigns. What a lot of people don't realize is that email goes just beyond them gather a list and just send a message to this list of people. That's what your campaigns are, where you're sending a broad message to the larger aspect of the group or even break broken down segments of that group.
What really develops his relationship is your flows. So flows are emails and messages that get sent based on triggers. So after someone's made a purchase, or maybe after someone spent a certain amount of money with you, after someone's made X amount of purchases with you, so one of my favorite things to do is on that post purchase flow, which would be the flow after someone's made a purchase, we will create a couple of different versions of that. So after you've made your first purchase, it might come with a message that says like, Hey, these are the founders, we deeply appreciate that you're supporting our brand, it's your first time shopping with us, here's some really important information, once you know about, maybe the materials or the product, where the profits come from, what the mission of the brand is, and those kinds of things. Maybe on the second purchase, we want to alter that message. So when that same person buys for the second time, they're gonna get a message that just says like, Wow, thanks again, for coming back. And really, we really appreciate you supporting the brand further, we're happy that you'd like what you got the first time that you actually are coming back to us. And then maybe on that third message, you want to give them a reward. So what I tried to I tried to instill into a lot of brands that I work with is don't be afraid to reward your heaviest users. And something I love doing is finding out what their margin is of the product figuring out at what point are you still profitable if you did offer a slightly heavier discount that you might not offer to a first time buyer or a second time buyer. So that's things like, I'll offer them a discount code for 15 bucks off their next purchase. But it has to be a minimum order of $60 or something like that to reward them on their on their third or fourth purchase. And then that's insulated to push them over to making their fourth or fifth purchase at that point. So there's very little things you can do with very little errors you can pop into to do some cool things like that. Like for some of our other clients. When a user is on, maybe they've come to the website five times that week, and they've made a purchase, we'll have an email that shows up that we're able to track if what times you visited the website and all that kind of good stuff, right. So on that fifth email, we'll put a little funny message in there that says like, Hey, this is like, Judy, from customer support, I spoke to the big boss, and I managed to get you 10 bucks off your next order if you want to, if you place your order within 24 hours. So there's all these little things that you can do to make that customer experience a lot more fun. And all that you can automate, you just have to build out once and you can start tracking it to see exactly how it's doing if it's performing well if it's not performing well. So it's a lot of little things like that, that you can do that really can up the customer experience and make people more fond of your brand brand. Remember your brand. And if it's funny enough or cool enough, they actually might even go share it on social media for other people to see. Okay, so you mentioned a few things. So you're mentioning for brands, maybe to offer discount codes. Have you ever ran into maybe some of your customers and just in general brands that are afraid to offer discount codes? Because it's in some way? Maybe like they feel cheapening their products?
Have you ever encountered that? Oh, yeah, all the time. We have a lot of brands that will like I feel like a lot of founders will try to emulate either they're okay with doing some discounts. Or they'll be like, No, we want to be like apple in our space. We don't wanna do any discounts at all. And that's totally fine. So there's other ways you can kind of get around that by making different offers doing different types of giveaways. So maybe instead of offering a discount or anything like that, I tell him like, Hey, are you open offering a gift card because it doesn't cheapen the brand. It acts more like a giveaway, saying we want to give you this 15 bucks, and sometimes a lot of users will actually respond better to saying
He want to give you money to spend. So you should spend this money rather than just saying, here's 15% discount code is a great thing to split test, as well, as I tell a lot of those guys too. I'm like, Look, let's show many products that we can offer for free on certain days, like, Great merge, like making waterfalls isn't too expensive. Making really cool pins isn't too expensive, like things that people will hang around and essentially act as free advertising for you when they carried around. Or even stickers. People love stickers. So it's just grabbing these little pieces of merch that might have cost you 50 cents to create or $1 to create or something like that, that doesn't hurt your bottom line too much. offer those things for free. Like we had just one brand that sells wine. And they made these really, really cool beans that they're like, hey, with every first purchase, we're going to offer these beanies, because you're so used to going to a website and getting 10 or 15% off and things like that. These guys were like No, no, no discounts, no discounts ever. And I was like, Okay, do you have anything cool that we can offer these people for the first time purchase. And he's like, we have a box of 200 beanies that we never managed to get rid of. And I'm like, cool, we're gonna offer every free beanie with that first order. And what we managed to see was we managed to watch their signup form rate go from like two 3% where it just said, Hey, join our family and sign up for first access to products to one up to 25% from people just wanting to get that free beanie. So everybody's gonna have the website, one in four people were sending this email rather than like, two and 100 people.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, even when I go to like, the first thing I think of is even just going to the LCBO and seeing like, the cups on the bottles, you know, sometimes Oh, yeah, those like cups or like a water glasses. Yeah, like even for me, like I bought like a bigger bottle of vodka cuz they're giving me like a glass water bottle with it. And like, they'll offer like a little cup on one of them, but maybe not the other one. So I'd like take the cup off, put it on or like just buy more just because, like those little cute cups, so no, I'm just trying to think like, or some of them have the little like other drinks like attached to them. Were just like, Oh, here's this Oh, yeah, you always want everybody loves getting like free extra stuff. And that's like, a great way to not cheapen your brand. And that's, that's a big thing. The Apple even does now right Apple's like known for like barely ever going on discount. If they do it's like 5% or student discount or something like that. But they always do the back to school, like, Oh, get a free pair of beats with this laptop or get a free pair of beats with your headphones or something like that. I feel like they bought these just to be able to give freebies away
to companies but yeah, that's that's a big thing I push for is like you either kind of want to go to people to offer a discount and can offer a discount, you can offer gift cards and giveaways to your brand because like, you give him a thread and all this your brand isn't you losing $300 It's you maybe losing 50 to 150 bucks, depending what your your profit actually costs. And if you don't do any of that, go the other route where like pins are super cheap to make. sticker packs are super cheap to make beanies. Water bottles, like anything that you think people might want to pick up extra. Or if you're a brand that can offer like some type of knowledge, it's always really easy to offer knowledge. So we have another client that sells at home gym equipment. And what they did was they reached out to a couple of fitness influencers to write these free programs, that if you spend over a certain amount, you're gonna get their free program with that dumbbell set or like the squat rack and those things. You're talking about flows and the overall customer experience. Obviously, there's different channels to retarget or to
keep your current customers active. So how do you use you know, channels like SMS, like email marketing, push notifications in that overall flow state? Like do you use email marketing for you know, a certain goal versus SMS? Like what how do you use those all so that it kind of is in synergy with each other? Yeah, for sure. So there's like three levels I like to stick to I feel like most email agency slash like retention agencies focus on mainly two things, I'll focus on email marketing, I'll focus on SMS. SMS was the thing that I mean, it's always been around, but brands have started to utilize it a lot more heavily to collect, click phone numbers, and they'll treat you slightly better on SMS. So when you go to a website, most times you'll sign up for email that offer you 10%. And you'll see the SMS pop up and offer you 15%. So they'll treat you a little bit better for getting onto that SMS, rather than just getting on to email because they know that you have higher odds of seeing the SMS, you're not gonna subscribe to billion brands, what you do with your email, there's a third option that we'd like to put into there eventually down the line that a lot of brands are still not doing so this day. So there's two companies out there that you can actually build an app for your store with. And it's like no code, it's very easy to do. And they're both Shopify based, so anybody who's on Shopify can use them really easily. One of them is called Tap cart, and the other one's called global. We use a lot of their stuff for a lot of our brands pretty heavily, especially tap cart. So with those, you're able to create a push notification experience through the app which costs nothing which I love for my customers because email you get a great return SMS, you get a great return like typically in the retention channels, you're seeing anywhere from a minimum of I'd say 20x And that's on the low end to as high as like three, four or 500 time return on your spend, compared to paid media where you're getting anywhere from like a point five to maybe a 510 x
Depending on how everything's going, your retention is always gonna be way higher. So within email, it's like I kind of treat email as that foundation layer, it's like you're you're part of our community, you're there, you're gonna get known of products, you don't have sales. But if you want to get those, those early sales, early product releases and those types of things, that's where I like to bring in SMS and the push notification at the very top. So SMS does tend to get a little bit more expensive every time you send a single text message it costs to send, once you have a list of 100,000 people, a million people starts getting really, really expensive just to send those text messages, if you want to send a text message that includes an image or a GIF or something like that, your three cents per message. So if you are sending a image and a couple of couple of lines of text, I have four cents per person that you're sending to. So you have a million people on your list the way you'd like brands like I think we're not really strangers, like this board game brand that exists, they have a million people on text from what I think I've read. And they're just they're not even promoting their product all the time. They're just send people quotes and like funny messages here and there. And that can probably get really, really, really expensive. So one of the reasons I love push notification with having your own app like a brand like tap cart, and global is you're not paying per message, you're just paying a monthly fee to have your app hosted. And because all of its sent through data rather than through SMS. It's all entirely free. Like we have brands that are on plants that cost 900 or $1,000 a month. And they can send as many messages as they want to like the 50,000 100,000 people that we have on push notification. And their apps are making them several $100,000 a month in sales and acts as like a whole different shopping experience. Another great thing about it is that I'll tell brands to like introduce your products, but put them behind like a paywall password wall, so that only those who are on SMS, get the password, and they get access to it. So you don't push people through these tiers to you're trying to push them up to tears of where they're going to be. So email, everyone gets like a million emails, it's not really gonna appear on your lockscreen as much because it's buried with all the other emails, especially slowly getting to that point, too. It's like you're getting so many messages on your phone and majority of users that are actively shopping all the time on these econ brands being Apple users, when you look at your lockscreen, you can actually see that it's like a stack of messages, right, especially on text, you got to tap the stack to open the stack to see all the messages that you have in there. So now your SMS is also getting buried, but like the same way email does. And no one's just opening their lockscreen going straight to their email, everyone's going to read their text messages first in those other things. The thing I love about having your own app and having push notifications, is because you get a push notification from the app, it acts as a specific area of the lockscreen. It doesn't get buried behind messages or text or anything, it just sits live right there. So you get the plainest clear sight to your customer right off the bat, which is a really cool thing that.
So the way I like to treat like the ecosystem as a whole is, if we can at least get you on email. That's my first goal. And then through email, we're trying to convert you into SMS, whether it be offering you a bigger discount down the line, whether it be offering you a giveaway, because like using different email tools like clay, VO or send lane and all these other tools, you're able to create segments. So I can create a segment, maybe I have 100,000 people total on my email list, I can say, hey, let's make a list of people who haven't opted in for SMS, but we have their email, maybe that's 50,000 people. Now when it messages, 50,000 people and say, hey, we'll give you 20% off today only if you join the SMS list and take them to a landing page where they can give us their phone number. We have him on both. And we want to try to push them to the app next, and we'll push them to the app next. But the app is pretty easy to grow because it can act as a some sales channel. So I can release a product on the app before I do on the actual website. So whenever I do an email on a new product will be like, hey, this product came out today. But if you add the app, it actually came out yesterday, you couldn't got access to it. Oh, when you work with a lot? Yeah. When you work with a lot of brands that sell out like literally when they drop products, you have the app you didn't you have a second chance to get the product, right. So the app can work in a lot of really great ways too, as well as we just think about exiting your company one day, like the more retention channels you have overall, even if there's overlap. It's great. That's what brands love because you could totally dial down every other aspect of your advertising. And a q4. That's where you're making all of your money is all the customers you've already retained.
Okay, that brings me then to my next question, because I know a lot of brands focus on customer acquisition and then kind of spearhead and it's more narrow thinking and just focusing on customer acquisition, but sometimes neglect retention, that obviously is resulting in your repeat business. So what other conversations that you have with founders or brands that you work with that ultimately gets them to start taking retention seriously? Yeah, I mean, honestly, most time, I'll just kind of show them what we've done with the other brands a lot of other brands like we've seen anywhere from like a five to 10% Boost just out of setting up a couple of things that can take as little as a week or two. Like there was a brand I recently did an audit for I'm not gonna say the brand new but like I was looking at their stuff and I just from looking at it for five minutes. There were branded as $700,000 a month just from looking at it for five minutes. Like I told him I was like you'll make an extra 100 grand just off of me setting up
These two things. Like it's, there's there's such simple things that a lot of these brands are missing.
And the greatest thing about retention versus paid media paid media has this. It's great. But it's also very hard for agencies, they'll either do really great for you, they'll do okay for you, or they're gonna be terrible for you, because they can actually lose your money working in paid media. That's the biggest issue. Like I've seen media buyers who will spend a lot of money and not get that much return, because the creative might have been great and wasn't just working all that well. And that's the cost of working like in paid media. But when you work at when you work with retention, can't really lose somebody that much money unless you your retainer is outrageous. And then I believe in your return. Majority, the time I'm able to just kind of show a brand, like, Hey, this is my prediction of how much I can make you right off the bat being conservative, but I think I can do way more than this. And it's gonna be way more than what the retainer typically cost depending on how big their list is,
depending on how much traffic they actually have going on in the moment. So it's pretty easy to convert them because you have this like general checklist, you start with to see what they're missing. And then you optimize from there, which takes months to optimize, as you continue to test everything to the moon, whether it's a discount that works, whether it's to change the color of this button for read the blog, because that converting higher and what you might want to do. So there's so much you can do. And retention is great, because you're not you don't stand to lose any money. It's so cheap to have an email marketing program or SMS program or these other programs with the returns that everyone's getting. There's no shot, you lose money 90% of the time, unless your product actually isn't even selling in to begin with. But if your brand's already doing anywhere from a couple of $1,000 a month plus, you only stand to make money implementing these programs, especially because they have free versions to begin with anyways, so you can build on the free version. And if you're doing well in the free version, then you upgrade so you can hit more people and scale that out.
Okay, and I know often customers don't really subscribe on the first time that they purchase a product. Maybe they're not subscribed totally to the brand. Can you talk a little bit about what it takes for customer to come back for like a second time or third time?
Like what can brands watch out for? Yeah, so that's the other really cool thing that you can do with these tools, because they all integrate into Bigcommerce and Shopify so well. And that like there has been this ecosystem that has been built. The ecosystem did get hurt with Apple rolling out like I was 14.5, which did a lot of damage to Facebook's pixel that could track you. And to like break that down before we jump into kind of some strategies we use is that when I was 14.5, came out.
If you had the Facebook app on your phone, the Instagram app, the messenger app, the WhatsApp app, they they could basically track you across apps, you could be doing something a different app. And if you Google search something it would be able to track it. If I open safari went to nike.com. Then I opened Instagram, I got a Nike ad. It's because it was able to track you across your across your apps. So a lot of people start to realize after they updated their phone that they were getting this notification when they installed an app saying Do you want to let this app track you across apps? Obviously, everyone's saying no 96% of people opted out from that tracking, which did a huge damage to retargeting. top of funnel was totally fine, because you're hitting people that have maybe never seen the products and those things. But now, you're not able to hit people that were just visiting your website, if they're opted out like it was 96%, right. So we're able to bring a good amount of that back through these other tools. So let's say you come to a website, let's say you fill in your email for that 10% discount, and then you bail. Maybe you unsubscribe and you're not subscribed anymore. I actually have a list of people now that are unsubscribed in the back end of our email marketing tools and our databases, right, we can actually push that full list to Facebook, to Instagram to Snapchat to any platform we want. If you signed up with the same email there to the same email that you were shopping with or that you built your
that you made your Facebook and Instagram account or whatever account with, it'll match those profiles. And now we can target you with advertising. So a lot of the data that he's like missing now through targeting through the pixels, we can actually bring back as long as you have that a great offer that is able to gather email in some type of way or SMS in some type of way. It'll push all that data back and try to match them.
So it actually brings back a lot of stuff. So something that's really easy is that like, although we might not do the paid marketing for somebody, we might be just doing the email or SMS or just consulting for that brand. We'll so we'll take a look at the paid media and say like, Oh, hey, why aren't you running this campaign to people who've unsubscribed in the last 60 days was like a wicked offer to bring them back. Some brands that we work with do subscription, subscription, coffees, subscription, protein powders, and those types of things. And we'll see, we'll basically create a segment of people that will automatically populate every time somebody unsubscribes and that list will grow. And then I'll say hey, you should offer these people like a larger incentive to bring them back. Whether you're giving them a gift, whether you're giving them a bigger discount for the first three months or whatever it might have been. You can easily recover those people if you make that effort. And it's like all these brands are spending so much money for cost of acquisition and then they neglect the people that
Like, recently turned out I mean, I've purchased in the last year or so, with building a good campaign that will bring them back, you'll likely even though you're offering them a discount, you have higher odds of bringing them back if they didn't have the worst experience with you, versus trying to go and hunt down a million new people every single day on Facebook, which is just getting more and more expensive.
Two things out of that, that that came to mind. One, because you're talking about retargeting
for me, and what I've noticed is there's like one brand on my feed. That just keeps like retargeting me and I think it's like doing that for a lot of people in my network. Is there ever such thing and I was looking at their comments on their social media? Because I was curious to see how people respond to this. And a lot of people were annoyed. Is there ever such thing as over targeting? And does that actually negatively impact the brand? Yeah, for sure. So you can over targeted for sure. And that's something that when you're running paid media, you want to keep an eye on the frequency. And even when you're when you're running email, you want to keep an eye on the frequency of how many emails are these people getting? Whether it be in a week in a month, with paid media, it's how many times have they seen this ad in the last seven days, 30 days, most things within paid media, depending on like where you are at the funnel, and maybe the offer that you're trying to show them, a lot of people will just look at what is the return I'm getting on this ad spend. So for every dollar spending, how much am I making, if you're getting like, if you're hitting way above your goal, they're gonna let the frequency kind of right up as high as they wanted to go. There is a point where you'll see frequency getting super high and your return on adspend starting to go low from it. Because most people just don't care for it.
If you're a smart brand, you'll set a frequency cap where you're like, I don't want people to see this more than six times 20 times 15 times whatever that might be whatever the sweet spot is what your paid media team should be able to tell you what that number is. And depending on the offer that you're running, essentially, sometimes it takes literally 30 times for someone to convert. And yeah, if that's working and getting annoyed, you're in a good spot. Because also we're getting annoyed by an ad, you can also click the little three dots and say like, I don't want to see this anymore. I'm not interested, I'm seeing it too much. And like Facebook takes it as feedback. And it will raise their cost of CPM. Usually, they'll raise the cost of them running those ads, because they'll say the ads not good quality, they're spamming it too much no such thing. So it's always something you got to keep in mind to watch. A good media buyer will watch what your CPM is how many times people are seeing it, what's the row as all that kind of good stuff, instead of just how much money I'm making my client,
when it comes to email will keep track of the unsubscribes and those kinds of things. So email and SMS have this really awesome feature in most products called Smart sending. And what smart sending lets you do is, let's say you had added something to cart you had left. And you're meant to get that abandoned cart email saying like, Hey, you left this in your cart, but I'm already sending you a campaign. So instead of you getting that abandoned car, as well as a campaign all in one go, that next day, I can turn on smart sending, which will basically neglect one email from coming to you, it'll just say like, let's not send this person, that email will skip them out because they're already getting this other one. So you can set up smart sending on emails that might not be as high converting or just like more knowledge base that don't basically make as many sales as ones that might be discount based or gift base.
To avoid people getting too many messages, unless you just get you gotta keep an unsubscribe rate. How many people are unsubscribing that month or so many people are subscribing if it's too high turn on some smart sending and avoid that. And if you're a media buyer, set a frequency caps you're not hitting somebody 50 times with the same ad. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then, in terms of because you're talking about subscription models, and I think that's something even just I've been hearing in the last couple years that people that brands are trying to focus on. Is there any, like what's the most outrageous subscription model or out there subscription model that you've seen? Um, well, I mean, there's a lot of like, there's a lot of people out there who are like these people came from like, the dropshipping. Community, I want to say where they'll put you into an inscription unknowingly, like where you think you're signing up for something that isn't a subscription. There's a lot of brands that will like when you load up the page, obviously, you have the option to buy one time, or you have the option to Subscribe and Save, some will default to Subscribe and Save. And if you're not paying attention, you've accidentally subscribed to a program you didn't need to subscribe to. And you gotta keep it on your credit card to make sure that you're not getting charged 15 bucks a month for something and it's coming every single month unless you want it right. So it's some stuff that some people will do some stuff like that. You got to be careful of it. But a lot of people being like, very transparent, transparent about it. And I think it's become a larger and larger issue for like the FTC, and sec, and all that kind of stuff to make sure that like this stuff isn't happening. And brands aren't scamming people because a lot of brands have done this in the past and like, have made a lot of money doing it. Right. So some of the subscription models that exist right now and like some things you can do through email and some things you can do through retention and paid media is if someone's made a purchase two or three times from you, why wouldn't you send a message saying like, hey, we saw you purchase this three times in the last six weeks. You know, if you're on subscription, you would have got the same amount you would have saved like 20%
So you can very easily just in form of things like that. And like anybody who's made those multiple purchases, again, like something that a lot of paid media people aren't doing, a lot of agencies aren't doing is saying, let's take that email list of people who've bought this X amount of times in that day, period and advertise to them as well. So not only just send him a message on email, or SMS, but also like, show them on social media. Hey, we see you digital, you did this, like, here's a discount you could have had. So just instilling like those offers in them, because everybody wants to save money, who doesn't want to save money at the end of the day, right? So you might as well just educate them as best you can through as many channels as you can.
Okay, and talking about channels, what channels, I guess, in your opinion, are under utilized to retain customers? So can you share some advantages of one channel over the other that benefits the overall customer buying journey? Yeah, I mean, I do think channels like having your own app are underutilized. I think everybody is starting to use email. If a brand isn't using email just blows my mind at this point, you've grown to not have email.
So a lot of brands that aren't using email, like you use emails, like you need to have it 100% like zero doubt in my mind. I've seen brands get away with not doing SMS, you don't have to do SMS, but it is as much as a great tool to have.
But I believe the most underutilized thing out there is definitely having someone like tap partner global being being your own app and having your own messaging system, because you can offer community access through there. It doesn't have to just be
selling products you can offer. You can also have a ton of stuff in there. So there was another podcast that an interview on and they said, okay, cool, like, but not every brand can have an app. And I said, Okay, let's try. Ask me any question. So they threw out the idea of a hammer company that only sells hammers, but like all we do is sell hammers, that's it like nothing else right now. And I said, Yeah, you can have an app, and they're like, how would we do an app? So essentially, what I told him was, a lot of people don't.
They don't realize that blogging is still such a great thing, like content is so good for brands. So I told him to hire somebody on like Fiverr, you can probably find somebody for super cheap, like a VA that can write you simple, like DIYs like this is how to build a desk. This is how to build a tree house. What do you need to build all of these things, some wood, some nails and hammer, right? So it's like, hey, down, like if I went to Home Depot, and I saw two hammers, and one of them was just 10 bucks, the other one was also 10 bucks. But option B said, Hey, we have an app, you can download, it has a ton of DIY, you can do different DIY whenever you want. And we'll walk you through it. I'm buying the hammer that comes with all the DIYs and the free app, because I'm going to learn things and become more better handyman, right? And I told him, I was like, it's also great, because now you can say, well, Dropo will send you a notification once a week when we have a new DIY for you. And then whenever they expand the product line to these other things as their hammer company grows to sell nails, and like other tools and things I want to I want to know because I'm gonna message me, I'm not going to have to be like that first brand where it has to waste that top of funnel marketing to tell me did you know we dropped these other products, right. So it's just a matter of like growing retention and building a community building a real brand. So like, it was a good example of this. And like why blogs are so good, is because a lot of people think in email marketing, and in general marketing, I gotta push them discounts. I gotta tell about the product 24/7 Those types of things. You can write a blog that's relevant to it. So like the coffee company that we work with will send a blog about like cool drinks that you can make with it. No discount is like implied in there at all. It's just like an email we'll send out that says like, hey, go to the blog, we put up like five new drink recipes.
And it's just like a small reminder of like, Hey, you can get your coffee beans on subscription. Right? So it's pretty easy to implement some of those other things. So I definitely think like apps are the most underutilized because there's so much stuff you can put in, versus like a website might get start to get slowed down and bogged down, the more you try to put into it. You can save like some of these really cool things and say, Hey, this is like exclusive to the app, it'd be in the app to get recipes or to get DIYs or get this extra bit of knowledge that kind of exists. Yeah. Do you ever feel that blogs are just oversaturated that like every brand kind of just has their own blog? Like how do you differentiate between the other brands that are doing that? No, because like, honestly, I like to use the blogs as like a thing for the community that's like hardcore there and like actually cares for you. So like, you might have brought people in for the product. And then you just rewarding them with extra like materials that remind them of your brand.
I don't think blogs are oversaturated. Like there's a lot of blogs that exist. But at the end of the day, if your brand is growing, and you can drive more people to it through email, like if you can drive 20 30,000 hits just through like one message to your current community of people that love your brand. Why wouldn't you because you'll just start to rank higher on Google when people like are searching those things like it's a lot of live free benefits up just come with it through the SEO through that extra traffic that ranks you higher so I definitely like I think like every brand should have a blog regardless of like, how many of the same blog has been written like an existence because your brand is growing. It's just it's an easy way for you to make more money to educate user base and climb SEO
for free, essentially.
Yeah. Okay. And then I guess this overlaps with my next question, but what are maybe like two to three mistakes that you've noticed brands are making with their current retention marketing strategies? And, like, Why do you think they're making these mistakes? And how can they fix them? Yeah, um, the biggest thing that usually happens is that brands aren't educated in the realm. So like I have a lot of brands that will come to me or agencies that will come to me saying, they want to come full service. So they might have just unpaid before. And they want to now do email marketing, retention, marketing, and offer that for their clients as well. Because the clients are happy with their service, they're, they're interested in more services.
A lot of times the brands and agencies that I've spoken to and seen, they just know the basics, the basics are everywhere, you can just Google basics of email marketing, and they'll say like, make these like six flows, it's when you get to the more complex things slash the things that might be
when you're more experienced in the field, just kind of like you'll just learn things and be able to apply them for a lot of your brands. So like, there's a brand out of Vancouver that came to work with us. And we did a quick audit for them before starting and me doing my quick audit, they asked me, How much more can you make us, this is a brand that was five $600,000 a month in sales, me implementing this one additional flow for them that I'll explain in a second, made an extra $40,000 a month, like just that alone was way my retainer even was for that initial first month. And they were like, wow, okay, cool, we're sold, we're gonna work with you forever.
So that one flow that exists is a flow that a lot of these email marketing tools essentially allow you to build through some custom code. So the most classic flow that everybody knows about is the abandoned cart. So when you go to a website, and you ask them in the car, and you get to checkout, and you type in your email, and you say, I don't want this anymore, and you bail, and you get that message that says like, hey, Sophia, you left this, this project in your cart, we want to offer you 15 20% off.
That's, that's a great way to bring people back, right? This other flow, that kind of resist is kind of like one one step down from that flow. And it's through a tracker of like JavaScript, JavaScript, and cookies, that you can basically implements your website and literally five minutes of coding. Essentially, what it does is if you came to the website, and you got that pop up, and you left your email signing up for the discount, then you went out of the product to cart, but they'll say you didn't go all the way to your checkout, and you didn't put your email and you just hit Add to Cart and you left the website. Because your cookies and because you already gave consent with your email, I can now email you saying like, hey, Sophie left this in your cart. And you might think like, oh, wow, I hit Add to Cart, but I never went and left my email. It's because you're being tracked at that point. And you can set up that flow that just hits people who weren't able to go all the way to checkout to leave that email. So that one additional flow can usually make you anywhere from 20 to 50%, of what your abandoned cart makes you so if your vending carts already making you 100 grand a month, you can pick up another 20 to 50 G's and just from adding this one extra flow into into, into your kind of like list of flows. And that's one that's not like widely like broadcasted or like mentioned in places, and there's a lot of brands that are doing like five 600,000, a million dollars a month that I'll look at, and I'll say like, Hey, by the way, if you just set up this one thing that you probably didn't know about, you're gonna pick up 1000s and 1000s of dollars.
Yeah, so that's insane. There's a lot of basics like that, or even just like another one that a lot of people don't use is like a site of Animal Flow, which is, so you have people who come to the website, if they check out and if they go to checkout type in their email, they leave, they're getting the the abandoned cart right? Now you know about the one that if someone just hits Add to Cart and leaves, they're getting that email, there's another one that's like widely broadcast, it is a flow that everybody should have called browser abandonment. And this is just people coming to your website, if they already signed up on email, they just look at a product and leave, they're gonna get an email saying we saw you looking at this product. There's another one below all that called Site abandonment that nobody has really set up. It's not like a basic one that's like included in the list that you should have. It's one that we kind of just like discovered, like doing research and talking to other retention marketers. And that's if people don't do anything but visit the homepage and leave. They don't look at a product. They don't have to card, they don't do anything. They just visit the homepage and leave. Why wouldn't you send them a message? Once maybe every you can set it so it's sent once every 14 days once every 30 days. Or if someone has visited your website five times in a week but hasn't done anything or looked at a product probably have huge intent to buy something from your website, even though they haven't looked at anything. There's just visit the homepage. If someone's visited your website five times one week, maybe you want to give them an offer, say like, Hey, yeah, here's 10% off or use 20% off to try to convert them. So it's a lot of a lot of companies kind of just like Google, like the basics and like they don't really go deeper and I feel like the knowledge isn't really being shared excessively on these like extra on these extra things you could be doing, which is why a lot of them kind of like just miss it and they don't do it. Yeah, yeah. I guess like talking more about the tools because I know you mentioned a bunch of
really cool tools up
grantees like TAP card and clay VO for email marketing. Are there any other tools that you recommend brands use to help improve the retention strategies? Yeah. So there's a couple of websites that are just like basic tools that you can use to just like learn and track your competitors and those types of things. So one is a website called milled certs, MI, Ll ed.com. It's completely free website. Anybody can go on it. And it tracks I believe, over 100 100,000 brands and emails that they're sending. Oh, wow. Yeah. So you can just go on there type in like Nike. And you can see every email Nike, USA and Nike Japan is sending. There's a lot of massive brands on it. And there's a lot of small brands that you'd be surprised if you have competitors or brands that you kind of like aspire to look up to. And you don't want to make another email address and subscribe to them and just try to track them as best you can. You can go on there. And you can kind of see a lot of the emails that they're sending out when they were sending them out. So like, maybe this is your first year that your brand has been set up. And you're planning for q4 and you're like I have no idea what to do for q4. I wonder what all those other brands that are kind of like us did in q4, you can go and build and you can literally flip through the pages. So you get back to like last December last November last October. Take a look at what they were sending, you can build your calendar off of that and see what offers they're doing. Another really great one is called
you have to get to have a clay vo account to do it, you can go to showcase dot clay veoh.com. And you can see clay Vo is tracking a ton of the top brands as well. So you can actually see a lot of emails that they're sending out. You can also see SMS examples that were there as well. So you can see what SMS people are spending as well. So those are two great tools. Another great tool is called Holiday insights.com. Holiday insights.com is a website that has every holiday for literally everything you've ever heard of, or probably not heard of. It's my favorite thing about it. So I can go to January, I can click January and I can see January 1, we'll have like six different holidays might be like National Pancake Day, and I had no idea it was National Pancake Day. So you can see like a list of all these different holidays, when you're building your calendar up for all the messages you want to send, you might have two weeks that are empty, and you're like, What could I possibly do in the middle of July. And then you find out it's National Hot Dog Day or something like that, when I'm gonna be selling hot dogs, but maybe you as a founder just love hot dogs, and you're gonna send an email out saying like, Hey, what's up, I'm apt and I'm the founder. I love hot dogs, even though I'm selling like, hammers. Today only I would offer you like 20% off using cold hot dog because it means something to me. So you're gonna have fun with it and do some really like weird things to really just come up with like a bunch of different stuff. So I feel like that's another like, falling point for brands is that they'll only do major holiday stuff, they won't really do quirky fun things like this, I feel those quirky fun things are like what people love to share and talk about saying like, Yo, I figured this code out, you'll use his code, and it's the most random thing and people laugh about it. So definitely using all those tools to research other brands is a huge thing to do rather than trying to Yolo your way through it and just go like, Oh, like I think this, this is kind of what I'm seeing everybody do. And it's if you're gonna do what everybody else does, like it'll work to an extent with retention. But you'll take it a step further doing unique things and having fun with it. And being able to research other brands like this, because a lot of these other big brands are doing cool things like this Lego like I'm seeing their unspoken about. Yeah, no, those are awesome. I think those are so helpful. Because, yeah, I mean, like a lot of brands are trying to look for tools or like tricks. And obviously there's like a lot of, I guess, sources out there, but it's just about finding like the right tools to utilize. So no, I really appreciate that. And then just bring us to the last couple of questions. Have you noticed any up and coming retention? Channels are strategies that owners should look out for besides like the current ones in place? And what are those? Yeah, so like messenger bots on Facebook was a really big thing for a while, it's honestly still a really big thing. It's just like, I feel like a lot of the younger Gen isn't using Facebook as actively as they used to. And messenger bots was basically like, you could DM any page and say a specific code word. And it would it would activate like a flow basically for you saying like, DM me saying the word of our like, discount, and we'll send you a discount or something like that. And that would subscribe you to their list of messengers, people on messenger that you could send to, that they can send to
it's becoming a thing on Instagram now. So there is a tool out there, I'm forgetting the name of it, they have a logo of an octopus that lets you actually automate stuff like that. So they were one of the first ones to get automation for Facebook. And now they can that same tool lets you automate messages through Instagram. So if you have a large Instagram page of some kind and you want and you know you get good engagement, you could good reach, and you want to make a posting like you want to do a contest and people just have to DM you to be able to run a contest. You can just make the post automated through there. Anybody says contests gets added to that list. And that becomes like a really big retention channel that you can then use because I feel like it's still very new. Not many brands are doing it right now on Instagram.
The other really good thing with that though, is that it feeds your algorithm. So the way Instagram works
All these other tools works is they want to show you more of what you want to see, right? They're gonna show you more of the influencer, that you're liking the brand that you're liking, but mainly your friends when you're liking their stuff, right? So what ends up happening is if all of these users are DMing, this account, Instagram looks at that and says, like, okay, Sophia, you follow like, 1000 people, but like, you're DMing 50 of your friends and this one brand, they're gonna put that brand above everybody else, they're gonna put it with that group of 50 people, you're constantly DMing and talking to your friends.
So it essentially helps your algorithm as a whole to and it's, it does a lot of extra things outside of just like, hey, now I'm getting this person subscribed that can send a message.
So there's a lot of these, like extra things that you can do that like come into effect, but it's like, is it a high priority? I think like in order of priority, I would focus on email, then building out your SMS, then building out your app, and then also looking at these additional channels based on how big your following is, because you'd be shocked. There's so many brands that exists out there that have like 20k 50k 100k followers, but like, are crushing it and doing like literally hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. And like social media might be like a great thing for them, but isn't like the biggest thing for them. Like, yeah, there's a brand out there called Hero cosmetics that just recently sold for $680 million.
And I was like, Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how big their Instagram is onto the Instagram was like 140,000 followers, something like that. So you would have never guessed this brand sold for six or $8 million. Yeah, we only had a couple 100,000 people on Instagram. Oh, wow. That's like insane. And that's just because they built they did a good job of building out their community and just retaining their customer. Yeah, I imagined like they just did. Yeah, they probably did really, really well on the retention channels. I don't really know too deeply to speak on it. But then like I would imagine they got really deep into retail after and like basically the whole thing is they saw creams and like cosmetics, and I think they blew up for like, it's like little band aids you put on acne that makes you patches? Yeah, the patches. That's what they.
Okay, yeah. So and like when you fall in love with any, like any cosmetic brand, any like, brand like that, that has like high retention. It's my favorite thing on the planet, like because now it's like a lot of people come to me saying, like, they want me to advise or invest or like start to work with a brand. And because we run like a smaller agency like I want it to be. We're very selective on who we work with. Right, we want to make sure that we only work with brands that we enjoy working with that we know we're going to work with long term. So we're very picky about who we bring on. If you bring me a brand that is that has great retention, like I'll probably want to invest in it work with it like everything across the board, because like the highest brand that we ever got to make the most off of retention, percentage wise of revenue. On average, when you please have email and SMS you want to aim to do between 20 to 40% of your of your revenue through retention, that's a great place to be on average, like through the year, there was a brand that we got to do. It was between 70 and 80% plus retention, wow, on their brand every single month just through email marketing, he was spending maybe a couple 100 bucks just through paid ads, and he was doing
between 120 and $150,000 a month it was a slightly smaller brand, but like they were crushing it because they did. They made notebook planners and planner stickers, which has crazy retention. Everyone like everybody in the community was like every month, I gotta get a new planner for the month every month, I gotta get new stickers for the month. And you'd never You'd never believe like a brand like that had such crazy margins slash such crazy retention with his brands, like I've worked with that do like protein supplements and food and all this kind of stuff that you think that people would order every single month.
They'd be doing maybe like 50 60%. And I had never seen something goes high 78% Like, and that's something that I was keeping an eye on this. Like obviously you don't want that percentage to be that high. That means you could obviously be spending a lot more money in your top of funnel. But their fans were just such diehard you would send an email and they do like for read just offer an email
in sales for a brand that is only doing 100 to $130,000 a month. Is it because he was offering those extra things for his customers? Like why? Like how do you think he got to the 70 to 80% retention in email, we had built some like really in depth flows. And we're doing some really in depth testing. So we were working with him for about two years. They're doing about like 30 to 40k a month before they came to us. And we help them scale up to that 150 K
which just built really, really deep unique experiences. So based on if it was your first purchase, second purchase, third purchase, fourth purchase, we went all the way up to like eight purchases like you had a unique theme coming to you a unique offering coming to you things that were hyper personalized based on what you were looking at in the groups that we're sending to so when your email list does get to that larger point, and maybe you're a company that is offering, I was just talking to a company yesterday they sell like nipple pasties. They sell lashes and they sell face creams. And there's certain people that are only buying one product from a one collection but isn't buying the other collections. So that's why you emailing all these people all the time telling him about these different things when you should just be personalizing it so anybody who's only buying creams, talk to them about creams don't I mean you can talk to him about the other offering because like in other funnels, but your post purchase like you
I mentioned like, Hey, you can also grab these lashes Tris lashes, because you've never bought them before. But in your regular marketing like, you can, you can, you can very easily narrow in and like send them ads and things that are really to only what they're buying only what they're looking for, because it probably cost you less to convert on those things when you sell those messages.
So a lot of stuff like you can do, you can personalize it. So with him, it's like we definitely personalize it a lot, because he also had themes he had like space themes, playing themes, and like different selections. So it was like anybody who was like a heavy buyer of like, they buy a different notebook every month, it'd be like a different planet theme, whether it was a sunflower theme, or like a cactus theme. We narrow them in in those areas, and also show them other things occasionally, but we'd narrow you in to what you loved and what you kept buying. So if you bought something five times, and you'd haven't left that collection to try any asset we have showed you showing you more of that you're gonna convert on that really easily. So
interesting. Yeah, I guess because my thought process would be Yeah, like, how do I introduce new products to those customers? And I guess just zeroing in on that, but then kind of forgetting. Yeah, like, it's easier to convert on the products. And they're already and yeah, so there's like, yeah, there's a lot of great apps that like, let you show them your other products. Like simplify OCU. It's a great app that you can install on any Shopify store. And you say if somebody bought X, show them this as an upsell. So somebody like as the product checks out, makes a purchase, like it's going to ship to them. And just before you show them their shipping information, you can say you can add this to your order for like 10 bucks or something like that, just try this out this month. So I like to push like new products over there, as well as like in the occasional campaign showing at the bottom and other recommended products that they might like. But most of the time, I like to like hyper personalize, and that's where you gonna see like a lot of great revenue. Like when you start doing any of these retention channels, you'll notice like a 1020 30% spike in revenue. But then when you start to hyper personalized those extra things, you're only gonna go up maybe one to 3%, like in revenue, and like, for some random reason might be like, okay, cool, like we gained 30%. Like, let's move our focus off of this, why would we care for this one to 3% that we can like incrementally do per month. And for small brand owners might not make that much difference. They're making $100,000 a month, maybe they're only gonna make like, one two to three grand a month more. But for brands are doing a million $10 million a month, that one 2% 3% is like insane for them. Yeah. Or even depending on how tight your margin is, if you're only doing 100 grand a month, maybe that two, three grand, that's a lot of extra money that you're bringing back for yourself that if you have a great agency you're working with, I can do that split testing for you and figure it out. You can make a ton of extra money. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's insane. And then kind of segwaying to our last question now, because we're moving into q4. What are some strategies? Obviously, it's like the holiday time more than major holidays. What are strategies that brands should implement to successfully grow their email marketing list to achieve their q4 goals? Yeah, so honestly, when I'm talking to people about like growing your first party data, like you want to do that focus, like through the whole year, like the way I speak about q4, and especially November's like November's a Super Bowl of like, econ. That's like when we're the busiest we're doing the most work. Every brand is making the most amount of money. October is great. November is just everyone's already trying to get early shopping out of the way, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And now No one's even doing Black Friday anymore. They're doing like Black Friday week or Black Friday month, like there's something going on the entire month that you got to compete with.
So what I always tell people is I'm like, You're literally building this list as far as you can for q4. Like there's another brand I was working with. They're doing about
about like 15k a month when they first came to us now they're doing by ATK. And it's been maybe like, six months. So they've been with us.
He was hesitant to offer 15% off on the first pop up. And I said it's totally fine. He's like, Oh, should I just offer 10 or five? And I said, No, no, you're a new brand, you're doing well, but you're a new brand. Like let's, let's leave a slightly higher offer, we'll dial it down through the rest of the year, once you have like a grown email list. And now they've grown their list to be like 50 60,000 people and said, Hey, if you want to dial it down now, just totally cool to it's gonna, you're still going to convert by second earning at like, 10% you're gonna read maybe 6%. But because we have all of those emails now, coming into q4, he's gonna be able to send so many messages to them promote different things to them do so many different things because your retention is so cheap compared to what it costs what it costs to email 1000 people versus what it costs to show a message to 1000 people on Facebook or Instagram or any paid media. It's worlds apart, especially because it's like a warm audience of people who they've subscribed for a reason that they were willing to convert at some point maybe just want to give them a slightly higher offer in those types of things. So definitely say like collecting all year round is super important because
when you look at CPM, which is cost 1000 people on social media, it gets so expensive in q4. Every brand is like upping their budget they're spending more because like brands are making like 36% of the revenue in the last like three months of the year versus the rest of the year.
So it becomes more and more expensive to hit 1000 people becomes more and more expensive to then collect those emails, even if you're converting at a 10% on your website, just get those people the website was so expensive for you, right? So you didn't want to be collecting through the rest of the year. And because it's still early, it's still late September right now, I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but don't have till the end of October to really gather as much emails as you possibly can, before stuff starts to get more and more expensive.
Okay, I see. So doing it throughout the year building that audience and then it just, it's it gives you more of a base. Someday you can do if you're in q4, a great thing to do in your retention channels is, it's a great time to build an app, it's always a great time to build an app, you can build your app and have it out within
I say like three to six weeks tops, if you want to start now you can still make it for q4.
And it's a great thing to do, because you can I've seen a lot of brands, they'll do Black Friday in their app before they do it anywhere else. Or they'll do Black Friday behind the behind a password wall saying like, join our SMS. And you'll get access to Black Friday earlier this sale early. So things you can do within your channels, even though it's gonna get more expensive to acquire emails, if you already have emails, work to push people from email to SMS, or from email and SMS to your app. So build channels while you're still in q4 because that cost doesn't change for you at all, regardless of the time of year. So you're saying the funnel is more email, build out email, once emails, great, try to convert to SMS, then from SMS and email convert, then try to get them on the app. Yeah, I mean, if you can afford it, and you have the bandwidth and the time to do all of it at the same time, you definitely can, you definitely can. But for like if you're like a smaller brand, and you just need to focus on one thing, email is the number one thing to get, it's the easiest step to get from them phone numbers a little more personal, they might not be willing to put it out there. So as long as you can get the email and then gain their trust and get them to love your brand, you'll be able to push them to these other channels very easily. It's really hard to push somebody from like social to social is what I've learned, like, from getting someone to go from like Instagram to Twitter, it's like, it's intensive, because everybody has every social platform. But everyone has an email, everybody has SMS, and everybody has a phone or smart device that they can get these other things on. So it's very easy to push them through your funnel deeper and deeper. Because like realistically, like, everyone's got an email, you're subscribed to so many different things. And you're at the point where you don't care, you're willing to be subscribed so many brands, and you're willing to delete the emails, with SMS, you're not willing to be subscribed to a billion different brands on SMS and deleting them all the time and cleaning them up, right, you're only going to want to be subscribed to maybe five to 10 of your favorite brands. And even that's a lot in my opinion. Yeah. And then apps on your screen like how many apps you have on your homescreen like it's an you got to be really special app to on someone's home screen at this point, or else you're gonna get lost in the folders or the clutter of the phone.
So I think apps are kind of the thing that's like over over the over the hill that a lot of people need to start looking into, because like you can download fashion over it's built on tap cards, you can download the figs app, the marshmallow app, like marshmallow sells concert tickets through his TAP card app.
When there's all YouTubers getting these apps now that like whenever they post new video, they're merged, all done through the app, right? So
you can definitely very easily push people through those funnels, from email to SMS to tap cart. But then the other thing to keep there like apps in general, but the other thing to keep in mind is that like you want to treat them slightly differently through layers like email should be like, everyone kind of knows knows what's going on. Like you can offer discounts that kind of stuff, SMS, you should offer a slightly more customer experience where if they spent X amount of money with you, or if they're just in that club, like you might say, Yes, Mrs. VIP, you get a discount with every with every time we do a drops specific to you, because you were part of SMS, that's unique code that you get. And then maybe on the TAP card or the global level, like the app level you that's the most VIP experience like by far where they're getting early access early discounts that nobody else is getting on email and SMS. So you just want to curate the channels to be unique to each other. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, that was just an amazing episode. I feel like that was honestly one of my favorites. I feel like just even talking to you here. I've I've just learned so much. And I'm just making mental notes.
No, that was awesome. And just finally, just to wrap everything up, like where can everybody follow you on your journey? Yeah, so if anybody wants to follow me, I'm on Instagram. It's just a BT x n and then you'll probably get more knowledge out of me through Twitter. So on Twitter, it's a BT x n TV.
So those are the two channels. You can find me out if you want to speak with us or anything like that. Our company name is northern without the letter E. So it's just n o r t h r n.com. Anybody can reach out to us over there and if you reach out to me virtually on any channel, I will likely respond