Here’s what I learned this week

First off Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Go Niners!

Quite possibly my favorite DM exchange this week.

Zero fucks given is kind of my mantra.

Pandering and pretending are two things that I don’t do super well.

After nearly 40 years on this planet I want to remind everyone that we are all adults, we all are capable of making decisions both good and bad.

I’m not here to tell you what to do, I’m here to provide an opinion and provide some text on a screen that is hopefully thought provoking.

I do share with you what I’m doing as hopefully a form of creative inspiration.

The vast majority of my life is spent getting more with doing less.

More value, less time.

A big portion of this for me is I stopped pretending to be someone for someone else. Take me as I am.

Be true to yourself, you’ll be happier than trying to be someone else, I promise you.

The reschedule…

Some people hit me up just to chat, sometimes I take these calls even if it’s not clear what they are about.

Some of them are good, some of them are a waste of time, some of them become fodder for this newsletter.

If you’re hitting me up to pick my brain though, don’t reschedule, it fucks with my day, there are plenty of other ways to ask me questions that don’t require a call.

LinkedIn DMs.

LinkedIn Comments.

AND NOW SLACK!

https://join.slack.com/t/ecomwithjonivanco/signup

In fact, I’m going to move all those “pick your brain” sessions to the slack group as everyone should benefit and I don’t have to repeat myself which I find myself doing 1:1 a lot.

The goal is a supportive but direct community where people can be themselves.

Ecommerce is a small world, we all know each other or we know of each other.

It’s not about follower count, number of clients, or revenue generated.

To me it’s about pushing the industry forward by questioning previously held notions and being comfortable with trying and failing as long as there is learning.

I hope to be able to use slack a bit more as a more immediate channel to answer questions, talk through some stuff, and provide some advice where needed.

We’ll see how this goes, it’s an experiment!

But last week…

I had someone reschedule a meeting 3 times on me… which means they killed 3 slots for other people and fucked up my personal schedule.

(Name changed to protect the innocent)

They booked a paid call.

Now we’re both accountable for showing up, I prefer this.

It seems like everyone that had an agency and grew it during easy times is now an expert on running an agency and building a following

Ok so I love the expression, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

We’ve crossed into the portion of the market where the game is to sell a half-cocked dream of entrepreneurship via the agency channel to everyone and their mother.

There’s no shortage of influencers on YouTube around this space telling everyone to just start an agency, find some clients then find people that are experts in the space (usually in low cost living areas) to do the actual work.

This is literally the agency model for smaller companies and some larger ones.

There are too many people bragging about building ARR for their agency businesses. Here’s why this is silly.

A KPI usually associated with SaaS not agency work. (this is the first red flag)

These claims are wildly misleading.

1. There is no product lock-in

2. Larger companies pay more for services

3. The work is largely commoditized

4. A lot of the work is outsourced to lower labor companies to stay competitive

Product Lock-In

An agency relationship is work for hire. If I hire you to design me a welcome flow I get to keep the welcome flow, you can’t take that welcome flow away when I break off the relationship. Same goes for any Templates created, creative calendars created etc.

Larger companies pay more for services

Talk to any agency and they like the larger companies, they make more money per month on them and the workload for the most part is only marginally more, they wouldn’t take on the larger clients if there wasn’t more profit in it for them relevant to the work, it has to make economic sense.

Commoditized work

There hasn’t really been innovation in email marketing in 20 years. Sure some emails look prettier than they used to, but at the end of the day the relationship with the sender matters more than what the emails look like.

Templates all look similar, flows all follow the same presets, email types are pretty standardized, and everyone has an obsession around being on brand before the company is even big enough to be called a brand.

Outsourced work

In order to stay competitive for most agencies they need to outsource their work to lower cost of living areas to do a lot of the execution of the services provided.

Agencies love to own the strategy piece of things but outsource the labor portion to where their dollar is advantaged.

This is true also of clients, where the majority of agencies no matter where they work from are going after the US and EU market for business. You go to where brands can afford to pay for your services.

Ok this is part of what seems like my weekly love-hate relationship with agencies.

Why I hate on email agencies

Actually, a post I made on LinkedIn this week, has started to accuse me of undermining the skills of email agencies.

I’ve come to find out that this person has less than 2 years experience in the space, I love it when someone with very little experience in a space has an opinion counter to mine. It’s an opportunity for growth, more them, less so me.

Not that I’m fixed in my ways but I only talk about things that I actually have done or currently do.

I wrote:

“7. Email marketing is just following up with 70% of people that have already purchased - it's near impossible to fuck up, if it's not working, it means your product sucks and you should fix that”

I should add some more context the 70% of people that have already purchased is a calculation based on 50% of your list coming from orders, and 20% coming from people that sign up via your popups where on average 20% of those people convert.

So some context as to why I rag on agencies and their work…

I’ve been in email marketing for nearly a decade and started using Klaviyo back in 2015 before it was a platform that most agencies built services around.

I remember the days before people started saying “30% of your revenue should come from email”.

I still don’t think people fully realize where this came from, google searches and even chatgpt come up empty let alone understand how attribution is calculated around this.

So in 2019 when we were starting Formtoro I talked to a lot of email agencies.

I started to realize that the majority of what they were doing was guessing, not using and applying data. To a large extent, this is still the case.

The reason is, most email platforms aren’t set up in ways that allow you to granularly report on what’s going on, segment automatically, or build out lifecycle flows based on behaviors. It’s all manual.

This is where CDPs are supposed to fill the gap, but we’re still a very long way away for non-enterprise level customers.

This is why 90% of all email agencies follow the exact same formats, have the exact same blueprints for flows, find it not valuable to try new things, and still rely on the basics for success.

The best email marketing client for an agency is one that hasn’t started doing email yet.

The worst email marketing client for an agency is the ones that have everything already in place and optimized, there’s less upside to unlock.

Where we started to go wrong

I think the massive rise in the sheer amount of ecommerce email agencies has lead to a massive overcomplication of email generally.

(I’ll cover ads another time.)

We’re starting to see a lot of email and other agencies pivoting into B2B services and coaching other want to be and up and coming agencies.

These pivots are happening for a reason.

1. The TAM (Total addressable market) for brands that would pay high retainers isn’t as big as people think and for larger accounts they are required to go through agency networks for the work

2. The amount of work necessary isn’t as much as people like to pretend, I see a lot of busy work done by agencies to justify their fees

3. Simple works, consistency is more important than pretty, a pack of less than 20 well designed templates is all you need to plug and play content for years

4. Buyers have set buying time periods that you can’t control as a retention marketer, email marketing is all about timing for the reader

I was talking to my friend that’s been in email marketing far longer than I have, more than 20 years. Guess what, none of it has changed. What else I learned is that I’ve done more innovative things in email than they have in 20 years in the last 10. Crazy right?

So to the nice person that said email marketing is hard and takes a lot of skill and time.

It really doesn’t.

For all my agency friends that have email agencies, I’m willing to bet your SOPs are rock solid to the point where you can give most brands everything they need to manage their emails on autopilot within a few days.

George Kapernaros - (LINKEDIN) - dropped some resources the other day that really caught my eye, distilling down what most brands need to setup that will get them 80% of the way there.

I think this will be the future, as a commoditized industry, everyone is going to have to go beyond the normal to stand out. With more and more platforms able to rollout technology to solve these initial gaps, I can see there being less and less need for agencies that just do email design and sending.

There’s always a trade off between time and results. Your goal as a company is to understand these tradeoffs and maximize overall efficiency.

It’s just flows and campaigns.

Flows:

1. Welcome Series

2. Abandon Cart Flow

3. Abandon Browse Flow

4. Post Purchase/Review Flow/Pay it Forward Flow

Campaigns:

1. Sales

2. Product Spotlight

3. New Product Drops

4. New Product Hype Cycles

5. Back in Stock Products

6. Company Updates

7. (BONUS) Weekly Lifestyle Newsletter

Here’s the trick though, have a place on your website that just says “What’s New” make it a landing page, take the product spotlight copy from your emails or vice versa and reuse it. Create these for all your products when you go to launch them. THEY SHOULD BE ON YOUR PDPS.

When you do this properly, ooooo oooo, remember last week’s email about asset creation. (If you don’t you can read it via the link at the bottom of this newsletter)

HERE’S YOUR REAL LIFE EXAMPLE!

1. Create new product - write up your product spotlight for the product page

2. Reuse that on a landing page in a more visual format for your what’s new section

3. Reuse that in your emails for product spotlight

Now you’ve taken one thing that you should have done (looks at product pages and realizes very few people actually do this) you can reuse it for three things on autopilot, bonus, you can put this on a collection/landing page as well, or post it as a blog post in another variation or to complement a behind the scenes look of “how this was made”.

Wait, Jon, I think what you just mentioned above for content can be used across emails 2,3,4,5, and 6(behind the scenes).

Welp, would you look at that, you can also use them in 1 if you drive the campaign to your landing page copy of what’s new and change the copy to reflect the sale.

This is the kind of stuff that makes you a great marketer.

The above format allows me to be 90% more efficient than most people with email.

Which brings me to segmentation…

People think that we run a zero party data collection because we’re big on segmentation for email.

I’m not at all.

I think it takes too much time for not enough return most of the time.

Segmentation, is actually a lot more simple than you think too.

Just segment those that have purchased v. those that haven’t.

If you sell different categories of items like Men’s or Women’s clothes, segment those lists a second time down.

You want segments to be large though, with plug and play templates and blocks, consistency is what matters here.

So do this segmentation for 3 months.

You’ll start to realize that 90% of your revenue comes from those that have purchased pretty consistently.

Now the max time from signup to purchase is 45 days.

The percentage of people that sign up and don’t purchase within 45 days and do so down the road is very very small.

You’re goal is to focus on subscription to conversion rate.

If this is high, it means that you’re timing your popups correctly relevant to the customer journey, the higher this number is, the more long term compounding revenue you will make.

The lower this number is, the less long term revenue you’ll make from your subscribers.

Logic dictates that if 90% of your revenue come from those that have purchased before and the majority of people purchase within 45 days of signing up.

You have 45 days to convince people to make the action happen.

After 45 days, segment these people out and just send them the campaign emails above, over time a portion of them will purchase or naturally unsubscribe.

Remember half your list will be people that purchased as their way onto your list.

Keep an eye on your list though, if you start seeing that there’s a larger portion of your list that is subscribed but hasn’t purchased than a list that has subscribed and has purchased, you have a low quality list and you should cull it.

We’ll cap it there for this one.

The Takeaway

This email just consolidated all your product descriptions, landing pages, and email campaigns.

If you take the time to create assets whenever a new product is launched, you can reuse them across your entire customer journey to massive success.

Have a great week!

Go Niners!

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com 

Join the slack: https://join.slack.com/t/ecomwithjonivanco/signup