How a Single Pop-up Change Increased Opt-ins and DOUBLED orders
Episode 9 speed-runs the biggest retention levers brands can pull to increase revenue growth and improve order volume. They debunk deliverability myths (image–text ratios, why adding real text helps), along with comparing the differences of plain-text vs image-heavy emails. Jacob Sappington also clarifies Klaviyo vs GA vs ad platform attribution and how Klaviyo’s new active-profile enforcement curbs old billing “hacks."
Key Takeaways:
The single change to a pop-up that can spike opt-ins and orders immediately
Why you should change the pop-up and not your flows first
Offer vs build vs creative: how should you weight each for mobile pop-ups
Why this one thing is likely killing your Landing Page's performance to convert.
How your traffic source may be affecting your conversion rate
The easy setup mistakes that are likely throttling the performance of your email flows
The magic number of how often 7- and 8-figure brands should email and text without burning the list
Are third-party identity tools worth the risk and which safer paths exist
To learn more about the Scalability School Podcast or listen to other episodes head to https://scalabilityschool.com
To Connect with Jacob Sappington send him a DM at https://x.com/jsappington
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Full Transcript
How A Single Pop-up Change Increased Opt-ins and Doubled Orders - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZY6ONHyl2Y
Transcript:
(00:00) brands just have really bad popups. You know, the past couple of years, they're kind of becoming like a cool thing again, but for so long, I think they're just ignored and it just felt like something that was never cohesive to the site. And so it just feels like they're actually being taken seriously.
(00:12) And there's been a lot of players into the space. And so yeah, I'm here for it. If I'm pulling levers, I get into a client's email account and like the first couple of things that I can do is either send more emails, make the emails look prettier. I can fix the pop-up or I can go and start messing with flows.
(00:32) Like I'm sure it depends by brand, but like, do you have any examples of like simple changes that you made to the pop-up or any changes that you made that led to a pretty big impact for opt-in rights and probably revenues or results? Pop-up is like the lowest lift, highest impact place that we can touch. It's always a part of our initial plans for how we help our clients grow.
(00:50) You know, developing an email takes time, especially when you're first meeting a client and getting to know their voice and everything. But we can probably nail like 20 words of coffee on a pop-up pretty quickly. But like just last week, we had a client where it was, it was as simple as just making a pop-up a full screen. It was a, a white box variant versus a full screen variant, five and a half percent to 8.3% same AOV, double orders and double the conversion rate.
(01:07) All these inbox providers and primarily Google, Google's probably going to make up 60% of your list, maybe 70%. Um, they don't tell you what they factor into for deliverability. And so you're kind of always making some assumptions that people always talk about like an image to text ratio. I think 60, 40 people recommend, but a few stuff, text into your emails, they're likely going to inbox a little better.
(01:29) And that's, um, there, I mean, there's softwares that are set up around this, uh, are just injecting text into your emails to help you, uh, inbox a little bit. Yeah. Would you trust like a one hour view based attribution? If it's Snapchat, I don't trust anything. Snapchat says meta click based. I started to get a little bit more trustworthy, but, um, there's a lot of nuance there too. So anyways, not to be real.
(01:41) And now let's take a listen to the scalability school podcast. All right. Welcome to episode nine of the scalability school podcast. Brad and I are here with Jacob Sappington email SMS retention legend. And he's going to talk to us today about how these tactics or how we can use tactics on these channels, uh, to actually make money today, Jacob. Welcome to the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. It's my first podcast in a while.
(02:13) So, uh, it's good to be back. Yeah. Well, we, uh, we kicked Zach off in exchange, so we're, we're much happier for you to be here than, than him. Yeah. Off the Island. Yeah. Off the Island. Yeah. He had too many Twitter followers. So where does it now it's called the losers and the econ and Brad and I hosted.
(02:28) Yeah. Um, the, all right. So, you know, there's a ton of things that we can get into today. I think obviously everybody's here to like, what can we do in retention and SMS better? Um, I think there's a lot of it that you, there's a lot of hype and there's a lot of ups and downs. Brad, there's some like stuff that you wanted to get into right away in terms of hot or not, essentially.
(02:46) You want to, you want to kick it off with that? Yeah. I don't, I don't know if we're going to exactly go one by one through this, but I think it'll, uh, if we hit some like overrated and underrated discussion points, I think that can push us into, we can take them and go deeper.
(02:59) So I'll give you the floor to decide if you want to expand on any of these things or not, but I'll just, I'll just kind of list some things and you let me know how you're feeling. Um, all right, let's go. All right. Pop up software, um, or I did underrated. I love Clavier software. It's including your plan.
(03:16) So I would say, uh, the right ones are appropriately rated and there's a lot that are overrated as well. Okay. Cool. So we don't, you don't have to mention specific providers. I know you're a big, you're a big fan of Clavier for lots of reasons. That was actually something I wanted to talk about later is like, I feel like people are perpetually confused about how Clavier bills and I feel like I see you on Twitter, I'm explaining it to everybody all the time we could save that. Okay. So I guess let's, let's do, let's do is a sub bullet point of popups in general
(03:41) that like, what are people missing with, with popups that makes them not as effective as they otherwise should be. I think for the most part, Branches have really bad popups. I think, you know, the past couple of years through amped and through Alia and through all these other ones, like they're kind of becoming like a cool thing again, but for so long, I think they were just ignored and it just felt like something that was never cohesive to the site. And so it just feels like they're actually being taken seriously. And there's been a lot of players into the space.
(04:09) And so, yeah, I'm here for it. I love it. I want to see, you know, more people in our space. Do you think that the software is the thing that like, is it, is it the software that drives the impact like a, like an AMP to Oranalia or is it the copywriting, is it the offer? Is it some combination of those things? I'm sure it's a combination, but like, how would you wait maybe each of those things? We always look for three main tactics. So we think about the offer.
(04:34) I think I could have a great offer and a terrible looking pop-up and I could rip options. Um, I think we think about the build, how you functionally put it together matters a lot. And then the third lever that we think about is creative. So headlines, um, you know, you know, assets that you use for it, those are important, but like on mobile, we prefer things to be very direct, not a lot of creative involved in it. And so it's, it's on there, but it's, it's third for a reason.
(05:00) I think the software can make a difference. But what I struggle with with different software vendors is for the most part, they have the same tech. What I really struggle with is that, uh, you know, how someone defines an impression or who they're defining as an impression or as a conversion. None of us just know.
(05:20) So, um, you know, maybe, you know, back when AMP first came out, like, uh, I always had like, we, we still use them because we would like, uh, fact check, um, email subscribes in Clavio as a source of truth to make sure that everything was, um, uh, as an expected, like, um, you know, you don't just like clone a pop-up and double your opt-in rate. And so I think that the.
(05:38) Biggest confusing point that's still confusing for me for a lot of sources is just how do you actually define that? Um, and trying to get like an Apple samples comparison to, to traffic. That's the biggest challenge. So if we're talking about, let's keep going on the pop-up thing.
(05:55) Do you fire pop-ups on landing pages versus just the main site or do you fire them on listicles and not just shopable landers? Like what's your thoughts on that? Yep. Um, a lot of brands push the merger with their traffic to those LPs. I want to capture traffic there. It's one of the main ways that we've, uh, been able to grow this growth for, um, some of our clients.
(06:12) The thing is you just have to make sure that it's relevant to whatever content you have on the shop or the LP. Like one of the worst things you could do is have a BOGO on your shoppable because you're being really aggressive with some acquisition offer. And then your pop-up offers 10% off. And so you're immediately adding confusion. You're immediately adding friction.
(06:29) Someone thinks can I combine BOGO on 10% off? Um, it's just like really weird messaging there. So, you know, maybe, maybe listicles are, uh, something that's even like less offer incentivized. Maybe it's, um, something, you know, like, I get maybe a guide of some sorts or, you know, some, some sort of content that resonates with what they're actually pushing on the listicle, but we want the popups on there.
(06:47) We don't, you know, there's always this expectation of some level of bounce rate increase from adding a pop-up. But the, the, the thought process that we have is that the LTV of an email subscriber is higher than the LTV of a non-email subscriber. And so my ability to say in front of them and the cheaper method than meta, um, is really important.
(07:05) And so, uh, yeah, we still want them on those places as well. What do you expect for like good pop-up rates, like our collection rate? We see a lot of brands come to us like 3%. Um, we've had some brands that we've been able to rip 20%. Um, and I think it really just comes down to the traffic that they're driving.
(07:24) We've had brands we've struggled to get to 6% too. And so a lot of times those are brands that are like, have like really heavy organic presences as well. And so the reason they're coming on site is not the same reason. You know, if you're running an ad, um, and someone's interested in buying today and you're running an offer driven pop-up, there's probably a pretty high likelihood that they're interested.
(07:41) But if someone's coming to you from SEO, from organic social, the reason that they're there is not to shop likely. Um, and so those are the times like brands like that. We've had brands who had like really heavy organic presences and we've just had to separate that traffic out or show them different pop-ups relative to why they're on the site.
(07:59) That's really interesting. There's, I would love to have like some specific examples of pop-up changes. So I would say, I'm curious, like if you, if you broke things down into, we're very heavily deviated off of this overrated under-rated and I'm okay with it. Cause this is really, this is really interesting.
(08:16) Like focusing on, um, pop-ups, I think it'd be interesting to know like where pop-ups generally speaking, whether it's the software or not, um, fit into like, if I'm pulling levers, I get into a client's email account and like the first couple of things that I can do is either send more emails, make the emails look prettier, I can fix the pop-up or I can go and start messing with flows.
(08:35) Like I'm sure it depends by brand, but like, let's, let's say that it is the, the pop-up and maybe you disagree with that, but like, do you have any examples of like massive changes or like simple changes that you made to the pop-up or any changes that you made that led to a pretty big impact for opt-in rates and probably revenue as a result. Yep. Yep. Pop-up is like the lowest lift highest impact place that we can touch.
(08:59) It's always a part of our initial plans for how we help our clients grow. You know, developing an email takes time, especially when you're first media client and getting to know their voice and everything, but we can probably nail like 20 words of copy on a pop-up pretty quickly.
(09:16) And we've had clients who, we've had clients who came on for paid and not email, and we've seen the pop-up and said, that's actually problematic. You're, you're gonna, um, prevent, you know, put a roadblock towards paid social, having an impact as well. And so we've done free pop-ups for clients like that before in the past, just to not, you know, make it harder for our paid team.
(09:34) But like just last week, we had a client where it was, it was as simple as just making a pop-up a full screen. It was a, a light box variant versus a full screen variant, five and a half percent to 8.3%. Um, double the orders, double the, um, let me think, same AOV double orders and double the conversion rate. That's pretty, I mean, it's interesting.
(09:52) You would say, because I feel like a lot of people come in and looking at flows as the first place that they're, I mean, obviously I think that's where a lot of people go, um, and where a lot of other email firms go, but you would say pop-up is an easier one to win, win with right away. Pretty interesting. Brad, feel free to follow if you have other pop-up questions, but I'm going to get into like, I'm just going to talk about flows for a second.
(10:10) So let's say the average client comes in there, seven to eight figure brand. They have some flow set up like, you know, sort of the standard win back or whatever else, right? Like the things that everybody tells them to put in there. Where are you going to look for optimization in terms of places that a lot of people aren't looking? Yeah. Before I jump into that one thing I also just want to think about for pop-ups is, uh, pop-ups touch everything.
(10:36) Pop-ups touch your flows. They're, they directly feed into your flows. Um, if I optimize that content or I optimize the framework, um, but I don't have more people coming in, my upside is limited. If I go from a five person, I'll turn to an eight percent. I'll turn to eight. What's that? Like 40% maybe something like that. So I try to do math here.
(10:53) So we don't, yeah, yeah. Good. I could call it. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. But anyway, so like I immediately add more people to the, to the flow final pains are a little bit of, um, a lagging indicator that it's like, it's, it's like kind of like retirement.
(11:10) You know, everyone says that if you start saving for retirement when you're 18, by the time you're 65, it just like those last 10 years, just like shoot up your network, it's the same concept where if I don't start collecting today and I don't optimize that for today, then six months from now, I don't have the same number of people that I could be talking to as I, as I could. So Andrew, the, the last thing you said there was, um, like how do we triage like where to put our focus at in flows? Yeah. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is like everybody had, everybody listening to this has exposure to some sort of email work, right?
(11:35) And I think pop we've identified popups as being a place that's, that's an unutilized place or utilized place. I'm thinking about, all right, what else are you looking at that like, aren't the normal things that people would be looking at in terms of optimization around flows? So I would say, do they have all the flows that we would expect them to have in place? Are they using either a first party or a third party identity resolution software to increase their number of triggered events for like flows within the flows. They do have, do they have enough emails? A while back, a client asked us or a
(12:05) prospect assets who we end up signing on with, um, you know, I only have one email, my I'm going to check out how much money is that costing me. And they wanted us to put like a dollar figure to it. And so what I went ahead and did was we took three of our biggest clients, um, who were doing probably $10 million a month, just in this single flow.
(12:24) And we aggregated the numbers and we basically found out that 50% of all of your abandoned checkout revenue comes on email one and then two through five, or you know, how many emails you have in there contributes to remaining 50%. So it's almost like I can get $2, but I'm choosing to pick up $1.
(12:42) And so it's like, do you have the right flows? Do you have enough emails within those flows? Do you have any like technical issues in place that are, but we frequently find people have flow filters set up incorrectly or additional filter set up incorrectly, which you immediately maybe trim the number of emails that you're going to send to someone that's a, that's a common one. And then maybe the content is just bad. Maybe they're, they're not focusing on their offers enough.
(12:59) Like we've had clients or prospects have came into our, um, into our funnel and they have an offer on their pop-up and then they don't send the offer via email for 30 minutes or the whole entire first email doesn't contain the offer. And so they aren't getting that for a full day.
(13:17) So I would say like the biggest bucket of issues are, do you have the right flows? Do you have enough emails? Are you layering an SMS in there? Um, but then there's a lot of like small technical things that can break things as well. So just to be clear, these flows, these are like abandoned checkout, welcome flow. What are the other ones? Yeah. What's that? So like the welcome flow, the browser abandoned flow.
(13:35) Um, yeah. Everyone says add to cart, but I'm anyone you identify with the add to cart, you're also going to identify through the browse. And so the only difference there is I can now talk to them a little bit differently. Otherwise like welcome browse, checkout post purchase. Yeah.
(13:51) If like, and we like to split post purchase between pre-delivery and post delivery, so what are the expectations that someone has as soon as they order? Um, and what are the expectations someone has after they, their product comes in. So much of LTV is driven by the product itself. And if I can help you adopt the product that I'm selling to you, I think my likelihood of increasing your LTV goes up pretty considerably. And this identity resolution thing, what does that, what does that mean? Yeah.
(14:14) So, um, you have all these different identity resolution partners out there. You have first and third party ones. Basically they're saying we help you know who people are on your list or on your website. So the first party ones are ones that they're already on your list and you know, cookie expires and we don't know who they are. So they're browsing my website. I see someone browsing, but I can't say this is Andrew.
(14:36) If I knew this was Andrew, I could send Andrew an email saying, Hey, Andrew, you're checking out this protein powder or whatever it is. And so first party helps me identify people who are already on my list. And then the third party ones are the retention.com, the revenue roles, the open sends, all these different ones that say, there's someone on your, on your website.
(14:54) You don't know who they are, but I know who they are. And I can tell you who they are. At least that's the theory behind them. And those love the first party ones. And then we're kind of mixing the third party ones because they can just enter in so many, so many risks, especially have done incorrectly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, that's, that's what I thought.
(15:13) And I, there was, I remember reading on, uh, reading about retention.com, getting into some legal hot water. You know, I read it on the public internet. Okay. This isn't just me conjecturing. Like I know that there's issues around that. So I was curious what you meant by that. But, um, anyways, sorry, Brian, go ahead.
(15:30) Is that, uh, what's your overrated underrated take on third party? I think a lot of them aren't actually great at what they say they're great at of actually identifying people and matching them to people on your list. And if they aren't great at that, then they're just like opening up the door for like so many deliverability issues, which is like the number one issue that we see from that.
(15:46) You see, you know, previously you'd set up like a welcome series of sorts for those third party people, which is a terrible idea actually, because someone's coming to your website, you just clone over your welcome series and you say, Hey, thanks for signing up. And it's like, they actually didn't sign up for anything. No one really recommends that way anymore.
(15:58) They kind of bring people into the CRM in a much lighter way. But even then I'm, I personally don't like them, but they also drive performance. And so it's kind of a balance of what the client is interested in. I can, I can tell them reasons why we don't like it. And then we can talk about the risks. And then if they decide they want to take that risk, then, um, you know, I'm more than happy to help them out with that one that I've been, you said we don't talk about vendors. No, you can't know letter it. That's all right. Okay. Well, we'll just go ask him for a sponsorship after the fact.
(16:20) There we go. One that I have been really gung ho to test out and I'm, we have a, we're assigned a client who was already on a test with them. And so that should be wrapping up your next week or so as customers AI. Their whole thing is that they have been throwing out reports showing how they are much better at identifying than other third party ones.
(16:43) And if, if the identification rate goes up to a pretty healthy degree, and I don't carry quite the risk that I do with other ones, then I become much more interested in it. Um, right now it's a, uh, it's very easy to, to wreck things if you're not careful. It's funny that you say that the CI identification thing, I know if econ brands are using them because about 40 seconds after I go on their website, my wife is the one that's opted in and she's like, why are you on this? I was like, I'm just poking around. You know, like I'm just doing some research and she's like chronically
(17:06) the one that's opted in. I'm sure it's IP address related. Um, and it's, it's hilarious because I never get them, which is my preference. Anyways. So no, it's, uh, it's, it's funny that you say that. Cool. Okay. Sweet. Well, we can, we can kind of get back on the, uh, the overrated, underrated chain, cause I think that there's a, there's some, there's some fun stuff we can continue to dig into there.
(17:25) So I think we've talked a fair about, about popups and there's probably even more to dig into, like maybe you have some suggestions on popups and we've also talked a bit about flows. And again, I'm sure there's some more there, but like, let's deviate to campaigns for a second. Sending volume isn't really like an overrated underrated thing, but I guess maybe the way to rephrase it is like, when you guys look at the average account, are they sending too much or too little? I would say average is too little. And I think, uh, you know, previously I,
(17:49) I would have said most brands are, are good with eight to 10 emails a month. And you know that I've been at home for almost four years. And since then I've had my eyes open that you can send far more emails than I ever realized. We have some clients who send 30 a month.
(18:08) So basically daily, we have a couple of clients who send two a day, every single day, and I think that's pretty far beyond what I, uh, think is worth it. And we're working with them to hopefully reduce that down to just a single email a day, doing a nice without tests there. So anyways, yeah, I think that most brands can probably send three emails a week.
(18:28) Um, if you have a larger list, if you have more to talk about, if you have more segmentation opportunities, you can probably go, um, you know, beyond that. But I'm talking like big buckets of customers, I'm merely engagement audiences. You know, if you have like, you know, local things happening in LA or something like that, and you're seeing it's like 5,000 people, I wouldn't, I'm talking about like, like, what am I going to do with my major sends? I think three a week is a pretty good standard for most brands.
(18:51) And then the bigger brands can go even higher. Yeah. And so like a seven, eight figure brand probably in the seven figure range. Three week is probably a good benchmark. Once you get into the eight, it's more than that. So that's further for the people that are listening in that seven and eight range.
(19:03) If they wanted to go about increasing the volume of campaigns, I have two questions related to that. The first is like, how do they actually validate that sending more is actually doing something now? If they're smaller, sending more revenue goes up on the website.
(19:21) It's probably pretty obvious, but I'm wondering like, okay, how do you actually validate that? And two, how did they come up with ideas for what to send? Like, are you, do you guys have a list of here's the campaigns that we want to talk about? I'm sure if you have more skews, it's easier, but I guess those, those kind of two buckets of validation and then ideation. So first off, I would just be a reasonable benchmark of revenue per email and see like, as I increase my cadence, does that maintain to a decent degree? Another thing is that, um, common trap that people fall into is they just evaluate the unsubscribe rate.
(19:45) And so they will say, Oh, my unsubscribe rate's still 0.3%. It's a healthy level. And it's almost as if like every single email, you know, for the most part, you're going to send to the same audiences pretty consistently. And if I'm saying to the exact same person every single day, then when they unsubscribe, it's only, you know, I'm only counting that unsubscribe as one out of the hundred thousand people in the email that I sent to. But if you look at gross unsubscribes, you see a much different picture where it's like, Hey, I only had a 0.3%
(20:11) subscribe rate, but I lost 2000 subscribers. And so I would, um, look at revenue per email. I'd look at the gross unsubscribe. So I'm seeing, um, and then I would just try and make a trade off of like, understand the trade off is, is an additional $10,000 in email worth the 2000 people that I lost off my list.
(20:31) Do I, would I rather, you know, one thing that brands can use to their advantage is promotional calendar. And I think anytime you have a promotional calendar, you can be more aggressive on the number of sins that you have. And so, um, if you have a really consistent calendar where you're messaging people, I think that you can be more aggressive there without, uh, some of the, the risk associated with an increased cadence. And so, um, those are the primary things I'd be paying attention to click rate.
(20:53) Trending down is obviously another one too, but revenue per email, unsubscribes are probably too many KPIs I pay attention. You mentioned for a client, you're running a holdout right now. Like is a holdout necessary? It sounds like actually isn't maybe even necessary in most cases, like it might be overkill or many people don't even send enough to know in the first place. Like how you feel about holdouts. Yeah.
(21:14) Um, we've not done very many holdouts, like really at all, because we're only trying to hold out the campaigns as a variable and Clavio's own tooling, uh, is more so focused on the flows. So it took us a little bit of brainstorming to figure out how we can even handle this. Because a lot of times we're relying on Clavio's attributed revenue, but if I'm holding out a group of 20% of people from an audience, of course, I'm not going to attribute any revenue to them, even though they might actually be purchasing. It's just not the money is just not being shown to Clavio. And so what we did was we, uh, took their
(21:42) main segment that they send to maybe 650,000 people, he put it through a flow where we attach some properties, group one, group two, group three, through five. And then we assumed that in a 650,000, uh, sample size that we would get a fair roll the dice and we wouldn't have to worry about trying to, uh, hold LTV consistent across the groups. Thanks Dave, re-cook for that suggestion.
(22:10) And then what we've done now is that we took 20% of the people we exported the data Clavio's exports, allow you to see someone's lifetime value. And so we're measuring two things. Does the LTV lift of group one maintain consistent with groups two through five? And does the number of subscribers maintained also stay, like that, do we see an improvement in subscribers retained? So the holdout test is kind of pain to do.
(22:31) And I expect that we'll have to run it for one to two months at minimum to get any statistically significant data. Um, so yeah, if someone's not sending very much, I would say just send more. You don't need to over complicate it. If you feel like you're sending too much, maybe you could do something like this, but it is mildly complicated setup. Yeah. Um, I'll, I'll shut up and let Andrew jump in a second here.
(22:48) I feel like Dave is also, maybe when you send an invoice to Dave, I feel like we're just constantly saying Dave's name. Maybe he's just really good at providing value on Twitter. And that's why he keeps coming up. I used to work for Dave and he taught me how you spreadsheets. I attribute all my spreadsheets to Dave or Chad GPT. All right.
(23:04) Dave, Dave, Dave's going to send you an invoice instead then. So awesome. Um, cool. Okay. So then the second piece of that is, well, actually, okay. Before we dive into getting more ideas, what is the sending volume difference in that specific test that you're running? I'm just genuinely curious. 103,000 in group one versus whatever. 130,000 times four is 265, 20, 130 versus 520. Okay. 20%, 20% to 80%.
(23:26) Gotcha. And how many, like, what's the difference in like actual, um, direct, is it volume of emails? Like if you're saying you're going from three to six a week or like, what does that actually look like? And it's 14 a week versus seven a week. Okay. Okay.
(23:43) Got it. Cool. Okay. And then my second half of this Andrew, feel free to stop, but, um, but just like campaign ideation. Like if you're going from seven to 14, like what, what do you talk about? Yeah. What are you even going to ask him? Yeah. I mean, a lot of the ones that are sending that frequently offers all the time for offer, offer new product release, new product feature, primarily the content there for the client that sends a 14 a week.
(24:02) Luckily we're not in charge of content ideation for them. Very likely. But, uh, yeah. Uh, I mean, anytime your business has something to talk about, talk about that, uh, product features, testimonial features, story features. We had a client that's been scaling really aggressively in the past year.
(24:20) They're not a client of this anymore, but, um, they were scaling really aggressively and they did frequent promotions. And at one point we checked their data and six other top 10 performing campaigns were non-promotional story-based messaging that was just talking about someone's experience with their product and how it's helped them with problem solution type thing.
(24:37) And so I think the first thing I jumped to it would probably be offers as a way to drive it, but I also know that not everyone wants to be so offer heavy. So, you know, leaning into problem solution, if you have it leading into testimonials, reviews, product features, half the battle is just being in the inbox.
(24:55) If you're in the inbox and your mind's one day exists, you know, maybe, maybe they don't need the product you're trying to sell them today, but you reminded them that they do need something else that you can provide them. So half the battle is show up in front of them. And the other half is like, what, what can my content help push you to? So somebody goes, how many, you know, what's the ratio between, um, sending SMS versus email? I mean, I feel like you spend send SMS a lot less, but curious on that.
(25:16) Yeah, we're much more conservative with SMS. I would say two a week is a pretty good number for nearly every brand. I have less hard opinions on this, but I think one a week would have, would work for most brands. And again, like, you know, we talked about like the cost of email being so much cheaper than meta, obviously like SMS is cheaper than meta, but SMS is still really expensive in the cost scale.
(25:40) Especially if you're not segmenting your list, we see a lot of unsegmented SMS lists that are just full list sends. So, um, you know, if you're a decent rate for our clients, it'd be like half a penny. We've seen some clients go down to a third of a penny, but most people are probably sitting at like eight, eight tens of a penny. And those sound like small differences.
(25:56) But when you're sending it to an audience of a hundred, 200, 500,000 people, and you're sending it multiple times a week, we're talking, you know, we had a client that we helped save, I think I want to say $30,000 every single month by segmenting the list. And we saw next to no drop off in revenue. Yeah. It's just, they're just blasting everybody.
(26:14) Yep. So another thing I've always been curious about is a lot of these emails that you get from brands through Klaviyo or wherever are heavily designed one big graphic. Right. And then, and then I always feel like the plain text stuff looks better and actually is what I respond to more. So two part question.
(26:32) One is, is like, what, what in terms of design is innovative and revenue driving in email on, and then the second one is like, is there an ability to send more plain text emails or is there like, you know, take that wherever you want to. I think plain text stands out because everyone sends design.
(26:56) I think if every single person sent plain text and plain text wouldn't work as well. Generally speaking, we see, um, you know, image driven emails have a lower click rate, but they have a better conversion rate of people who do click and the plain text ones tend to have a much higher click rate and a much lower conversion rate. And so they ended up being like a kind of like a wash in the end.
(27:14) Uh, I think, you know, back to that problem solution brand, they weren't doing this problem solutions through plain text, but I think anything that you can attach a story to plain text will do really well. And so like, we don't have hard and fast, like for plain text a month, but they're great whenever you need a really quick email. They're great whenever you need to kind of explain something. They're great when you want like a personal touch to it. And so yeah, they're fantastic.
(27:32) We love using them. And again, like I think supplement brands can really, really lean into this because they're, those are always, you know, primarily problem solution brands. And so, uh, that's a great example of it. And then from like, like design perspective, don't overcomplicate it. Um, you know, we have brands who have, we see brands who want to throw a million blocks in there or, you know, you're just, you're just giving people a million different things to pay attention to. And so, you know, I've heard many people
(27:56) say like the rule of one, like have one concept for your email. I think you can go beyond one, but after a couple of modules, a couple of things you're trying to get someone to pay attention to, uh, you're just deleting the message. And so I just recommend to keep it pretty simple conversion focused as CTAs and heroes, maybe, maybe you have like some, some product feeds where you're helping someone discover different products from you guys.
(28:15) And you're maybe using like the dynamic data that shows. Best sellers across your whole entire plot mix or one of the personalize to this person. So there's a lot of, there's a lot that you can do, but I would just say, just don't overdo it. Does this is a, this is a, I'm gonna expose myself here is, uh, does plain text read differently by like an inbox provider, like his Gmail, looking at that and actually saying this is different than the designed email, like something with HTML I'm assuming.
(28:39) Um, yeah, I'm just curious. Yeah. So if you, um, if you're using image slices, which is what 95% of DZ brands do and what we do as well, I have an assumption that Google is not reading the image behind that, you know, things like AI vision now it's, if it isn't happening already, it's going to be, um, very soon.
(28:57) And so before when you used images, the inbox providers had to kind of fall back to alt text. So yes, image emails have far less readability than a plain text would both for the inboxes as well as for, um, people who are, um, vision impaired or have like accessibility concerns, uh, you know, all these inbox providers and primarily Google, Google is probably gonna make up 60% of your list, maybe 70%.
(29:25) Um, they don't tell you what they factor into for deliverability. And so you're kind of always making some assumptions that people always talk about like an image to text ratio. I think it's like 60, 40 people recommend, but if you stuff text into your emails, they're likely going to inbox a little better.
(29:43) And that's, um, there, I mean, there are softwares that are set up around this that are just injecting texts into your emails to help you, uh, and box a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned segmentation in there and saving people a bunch of money. Um, we can come to the money thing in a little bit, but, um, what's like the 80 20 of segmentation, like what, what, what, I guess, like, well, how are you thinking about segmentation? Like, is it we're trying to increase relevance, which is going to lead to improved open rates and click rates in general across both that segment and then the broader list as a result or like, um, I'm just curious, like mindset. And then like, what is like tactical
(30:12) piece of advice for like how to actually implement segmentation knowing the vast majority of your revenue is going to come from the hyper recently engaged people. There's a reason why a lot of agencies and people default to like engage 60 engaged 90 day audiences.
(30:30) We want to take it beyond that, especially if the product kind of demands that thing of like jeans, I own some modern boat jeans and I haven't bought new pairs for four years, but I plan to buy some more soon. If you looked at me from a, from a customer perspective, you said I haven't bought in four years. I'm a laps customer. No, it's just, it's just because you made a great product and I don't need to buy anymore for awhile.
(30:46) And so if your product lends to a longer time usage, then you have to give someone a reason to purchase, whether that's offers, new products, they might like, that's, that's like the primary things, but, um, uh, it's largely dependent on your own product. I think people just try to make it a cookie cutter approach for everything.
(31:05) So yeah, most of your revenue is going to come from a small bucket of customers who are very, very recent, and you should think about email as a dependent channel. Email is just pulling people from meta, from organic social, from SEO, and it's just a cheaper medium to get them there. If you had the best flows in place, but you didn't have the other channels funneling the mental email in SMS, you would, they just want to have any impact whatsoever. So I just want to apologize.
(31:23) I'm going to ask about attribution, which is if I start to fight on Twitter, yeah, which is like, what, what's something that everybody misses between Clavio paid and GA, what is, what's the piece there that you feel like most brands are missing out on cause I feel like it's always a battle to get, to get a full understanding of that.
(31:43) I think GA is the most conservative look. And I think Clavio is the rosiest outlook. You know, if you're looking at like Clavio default, the amazing thing is that Clavio now has comparative models. So I can, we've done this for Zach for all of, for multiple brands. And they've recently adjusted their attribution model.
(32:02) But, um, if I wanted to know, are my, you know, open rates are really open rate is really so much like a view based attribution for you guys. And if you, if you had a one hour view based attribution and the row is was solved, which would you trust like a one hour view based attribution? I don't trust attribution, generally speaking. Okay. So I don't know. I don't know. You know, it's like, it depends on if it's Snapchat, I don't trust anything. Snapchat says meta click based.
(32:22) I started to get a little bit more trustworthy, but, um, there's a lot of nuance there too. So anyways, not to derail. So my point of view is that, uh, open rates are open based attribution is really similar to view based, but if I take it down from a five day down to one hour, that's much more trustworthy to me. If I like to click based only, that's much more trustworthy to me.
(32:39) And then I think literally this week, I think Clavio is rolling out multi-channel attribution. Um, I think it just came out like Monday and they're multi-touch. Um, and so you can like weight things differently. I like to maintain the default part of what's, what's impactful about being an agency is that we have so many brands that we can look at.
(32:56) And if you change the context for how you attribute revenue for every single client, um, you kind of lose some of that, uh, that network effect. And so the nice thing is like, I can compare it though. I don't have to change the attribution. I can go and I can say, okay, our default is this, but if I go in and say, um, a one day click or a one hour click or seven day click, whatever I want to do, I can see what that would actually be.
(33:16) Um, but while maintaining my baseline attribution as the default. Yeah. That makes sense. I there's, I want to go back to just like saving money or maybe not even necessarily saving money, but like just the money piece of it in general. Cause I, you know, I think we kind of started with this, but I've seen several times where like on Twitter, a couple of times you suggested like, Hey, do these couple of things and that's going to save you money on your bill. Or you're on the opposite side where it's like, no, you're completely misunderstanding how your bill works.
(33:39) So I think it would be really helpful to leave people with. And you know, obviously we can dig into any couple of things or any, anything else we want to, but like what, when you first start working with people, like what is the most obvious thing that you generally do that helps them save their bill and like, and then this follow up to that is why are so many people confused about their billing? Because most people use Clavio and Clavio did not make it easy to understand that first.
(34:01) Um, I think it's, uh, the opportunity for immediate cost savings is a little bit lower now since they've went to active profile enforcement. So previously they would say, Hey, we're going to bill you off active profiles, but it's really only based off the number of people that I send to an a single campaign.
(34:18) So if I had a hundred thousand list, now I'm paying for a hundred thousand lists, but I have 200,000 people, if I split those 200,000 people into two different segments, I can send to both those, no problem. And so that was kind of like the, the gaming, the manipulation that, um, people would do now anymore. It's, it's, it's a little more dangerous to do this at the forefront of a partnership because you don't understand their CRM yet, but if I drop in a segment of people who are just absolutely dead profiles, you know, they've received 15 emails in the last six months and they haven't done anything, haven't been on site, they haven't done any of these things, you know, like those are probably
(34:47) people that are pretty safe to clean out. What I'm really hopeful here's a feature request for Clavio or for other ESPs is that they have all the data points. They have machine learning teams help me understand who I should be sending to and who I shouldn't be sending to, which that kind of creates a disincentive for them because it's going to trim some of their costs, but that's what I want to see.
(35:09) What do you think about, um, the way email agencies price, I feel like some, you know, it's like email agencies sometimes are charging for a number of emails there that you're sending, they're charging too much. When does that get out of hand for you? Like, what do you think is the most efficient way to charge and when, what should people look out for? We've went through our own iterations of like how we charge. And so I think I have a good perspective on this.
(35:29) I, we previously used to have a set price and then you would get a number of emails and I basically tried to relay it to people that they were basically playing X dollars per email. And then I think that that kind of diminishes the expectation around the strategy work that gets done.
(35:46) And so we moved away from that and we say, Hey, the bulk of what you're paying us for strategy and the creative gets tacked onto that. And if you want to add additional emails on top of your plan, you can do it for $250 in email, whatever it is. And so, you know, for a lot of brands, they're going to send an email and make 10 grand with their very, you know, nice attribution, but you know, $250 is usually no brainer for most brands to say, Hey, I have something I want to talk about next week. Let's do it.
(36:09) I have seen agencies charge as much as a thousand dollars in email, which I think is crazy. I think at that point, I think one of the hardest things about hiring an agency or hiring a, an email marketer is if you don't have the skillset, you don't know how to evaluate for it. And so maybe you bring in someone who helps you find the right fit.
(36:27) You have someone audit you and tell you how they would run the account. But if you're paying a thousand dollars in email, you should probably just hire in house. So yeah, I, on the low end, I've seen like people charge really low rates. Just, you know, as they're freelancing, getting their foot in the door, whatever it is.
(36:44) And I feel like I have since we, since we haven't, I haven't been in that world for four years when I put freelance. And so I have less of a perspective on that, but on the high end, I've seen agencies charge like a thousand dollars in email, which is just crazy. So we'll just finish off with a section that we like to call beefs with Z, which is anything, anybody, anything or anyone you want to get into that it really bugs you about the work that you're doing in terms of industry wise, in terms of tactics that you see that really bug you things that you would want to get out in the air. But if you need a second to think, I'll start out with Zach.
(37:14) Well, okay. Well, I want to say my, my beef is with Zach. That's why he's not here. We're just, we're just, we're really beefy. The D the text right now are just insane. They're just, yeah, it's crazy. So anyways, drives me crazy. When people force, you know, we're back on popups for a second. When people force you to go to your inbox, to get a coupon code, some agencies will do this on accident.
(37:33) Others will do it maliciously and say, Oh, we're driving up a tribute revenue. Cause you're forcing an email open, which I think is really dumb. You're immediately making them compete against 50 other brands in their inbox. If you're sending them a text, you're making them compete against their spouse, their friends, their hobbies, whatever it is.
(37:50) And so I'm okay accepting a lower attribute revenue, keeping them on site, putting the coupon on a pop-up and just like being like, we've had clients who I've, who we've said your attribute revenue is going to drop. The only thing that we're changing is the word the code is listed. This is better for you. So I've got beef with everyone that does that intentionally. Yeah.
(38:09) It's usually, it's like our biggest one, I would say Brad or degrees, like in the paid social worlds, people hold stuff hostage, right? Like they, they build it in their own ad account and they're in their own business manager and then the client like leaves and still there. It's a mess to unwind all that. People don't want you to hold it. So anyway, Jacob, thank you for being here.
(38:26) If people have questions, I can funnel them to you. You can always reach out to us, Andrew at foxwelldigital.com. Thanks for being on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. Thanks. The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore.
(38:51) They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. Um, and so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app now, anything you can share the better we're going to be guys, anything else you want to say on this? Yeah. Please go check us out on YouTube, rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it.
(39:10) And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So please say something nice about all of us. Thank you everyone. Thanks everybody for listening. Honestly.
