Retention-Focused Email Marketing System 📈

This video, we're going to be going over the system that we use here@marketing emails.com to help E commerce brands significantly increase customer retention.

And no, I'm not just going to show you another basic win backflow or post purchase sequence because that is not what is going to move the needle in the long run.

So let's get into exactly what I'm talking about.

Now if you're watching this video, you've most likely just booked in to receive one of our free Klaviyo audits.

And before your call I did want to take the next 5 to 10 minutes ish to walk you through how we think about retention, the system we use with our best clients and what's actually going to happen from here, including the audit, the process, the call and everything By the time we jump on the call, you should already have an understanding of how we grow brands long term, not just how we squeeze squeeze a little bit more out of the next campaign.

Want you to come to the call equipped with as much information as possible.

We don't want to be wasting anyone's time.

So if you don't know me, my name's Angus.

I'm the founder of Marketingemails.com over the past five years we've worked with 180 brands from early stage all the way up to nine figures and above.

Some of the brands we've partnered with long term include Lelo, Vumi, Flex, Fitness Tutor, Fair and tons more that you can see on our website.

So like I said, this video we're going to be going through the marketing retention system.

Through the volume of work that we've done over the last few years, we've built a system that allows us to repeatedly get results for clients.

And for the purpose of that video, I'm going to call this the Marketing Retention System.

Super simple.

I'm not going to call it some three phase pillar, pyramid system or any crazy name like that.

It's simply just our retention retention system.

This is a structured way to use email and SMS to grow your revenue over years and not just over the next 30 days or any arbitrary short term window.

And that is the system we're going to be going through today.

I wholeheartedly believe that there's three core functions of growth when it comes to email and SMS marketing and your Klaviyo account in general.

And once you're Past that, say one to two million dollars a year mark in revenue growth stops being about, let's just send more emails and it starts being about how well you manage the three core functions I have on the screen Firstly, acquiring more new customers, secondly getting more of those customers to place a second order, and thirdly, nurturing your top 20% of customers who drive the bulk of your profit.

Now these are the three functions that I believe you can influence with your Klayviyo account that most brands do.

Now I want to touch on the third point for a second here, which is nurturing the top 20% of your customers and you would have seen that I said who drive the bulk of profit.

So to give you a sense of how important this third group is or this third function, this is an example of a brand we work with.

They do about $100 million a year in revenue and their top 20% of customers are responsible for 58% of their lifetime revenue.

So I don't know what their lifetime revenue is.

It's probably like $400 million or something like that.

58% of this has come from just their top 20% of customers.

Now these are also customers who, when you look at the data, they buy more often, they buy at full price and they're inherently more profitable.

And this is because they buy more often and they buy at full price.

They're not bargain hunters, they're not gift givers, they're your loyal customers.

So if your email and SMS isn't deliberately engineered around these three levers, then simply put, you're not putting your Klaviyo account to good use and you're leaving a lot of compounding revenue on the table.

Now some more examples of why this is important to focus on.

Say you're doing $5 million annually.

That last example I gave you, that was a brand that was doing 100 million annually.

But say you're doing $5 million annually and you improve your 365 day customer lifetime value by just 1%, that's an extra $50,000 and the only real cost to acquire that is your cost of Now say you just get 5% more of your first time customers to place the second order and that's, you know, not per month or something because that would be crazy, but just generally 5% over the course of a year.

If you're doing $3 million a year in new customer revenue, that's roughly $150,000 extra from people you've already paid to acquire.

And the only cost of that is your cost of goods.

And once someone places that second order, the probability they come back for a third purchase increases dramatically.

And this is the compounding side of retention that most brands never really tap into.

Now there are three problems that I see with most email setups and the reason that I think our mechanism or our way of doing things is superior.

And the issue is any email agency or freelancer you work with probably falls into one of these three buckets.

Now the first one is setups that are way too simple or they're cookie cutter.

Like I said, once you're past that 1 to 2 million a year mark, this is not good enough.

And this is setups where you go a few standard flows, you're sending some pretty campaigns and you call it a day.

There's no real context to overall commercial goals.

There's no link back to those three core functions and you're not really thinking bird's eye views, strategic level, how can we improve The secondly is your setup is too complex.

You maybe work with someone who they think big picture, they're a visionary, they want to build really, really complex structures because they think that's what's going to move the needle.

Then you end up with all these hyper personalized automation webs and really clever segments and definitions.

But the campaigns in the core flows are weak, inconsistent or they're non existent.

The fundamentals aren't there.

So the fancy stuff that they layer on top, it doesn't really move the needle.

And for context I want to make it really clear I'm not on campaigns and flows.

That's what's going to drive 80% of your performance.

I'm a wholehearted believer in great campaigns and great core email flows are what's going to drive about 80% of our results.

The more advanced strategies, however, when you build these on top of great fundamentals, that's where the next sort of 20% comes from.

And it's a 20% that is also important for brands that are doing 5, 6, 7, 10, $100 million a year.

That that real that 20% cherry on top of klaviyo performance.

That's what's going to separate you, that's what's going to improve your customer retention and that's what's going to compound into great results.

Now the third pillar here.

So I said there was three problems.

Problem one was the too simple.

Problem two was too complex.

But the third problem here, is people who are short term minded and this is the dangerous one in my This is when an agency or a freelancer or an in house manager, they get so obsessed with short term campaign revenue that that they're willing to cause long term damage to their email list.

And your brand just to chase wins over the next 30 to 60 days.

And a lot of the time this might not be the agency, the freelancer or the marketing manager's fault.

It could be the direction from above on what people are actually focusing on.

And like I said, that's usually KPIs surrounded around short term campaign revenue.

And this is the way it usually plays out.

An agency promises an arbitrary growth number, say within 60 days, they go, we're going to improve your whatever by x percentage within 60 days or you'll get your money back.

Or you've got a marketing manager who they've been put on the chopping block or they've been put under pressure where it's like, hey, you're not hitting your KPIs in the next 30 to 60 days.

You need to hit this revenue from your Klaviyo account, something like that.

So the brand then comes into things expecting quick and flashy results.

But to hit those numbers, whoever's running the account, the agency, the freelancer, they resort to aggressive tactics.

They'll start sending heavy discounts constantly, blasting super broad segments, pushing more and more promotions, building aggressive spammy flows.

They might move the 10% discount in the abandoned checkout to 15%.

They might move the 10% discount to send after one hour instead of three days.

You know, they'll tweak things in the account that are obviously going to lead to short term benefit and a short term increase in attribution.

But then you extrapolate that out over the medium to long term, your deliverability tanks, the quality of your email list starts to erode, your engaged subscribers start to tune out and you lose the ability to profitably scale through email marketing.

That becomes a liability, not an asset.

And worst of all, it distracts every single person who's working on your account from the things that actually increase customer lifetime lifetime value.

And that's the exact cycle we've designed our system to avoid.

So in saying that, let's get in to the actual process, what we do and how we approach things differently to avoid these three issues.

Like I've said, this is the marketing retention system.

So instead of treating email as just campaigns we send, we treat it as an operating system for retention.

Predictable thing that we can install and that we can live by.

Now I should have, sorry, missed my line here at a High level.

It's built on two big ideas and that's going to be firstly, your quarterly strategic sprints.

So every 90 days we choose a primary focus from one of the three functions I mentioned above, which was the acquire new customers, the increase the second order rate, or grow revenue from your top 20% of customers.

You choose something from these three functions and that focus sets the tone for everything we do that quarter.

So it's going to depend on what your commercial goals are.

Maybe you're someone who's really focusing on improving your new customer acquisition.

That's going to be a focus.

Maybe you've got new customer acquisition dialed to a T, but you're struggling with ltv.

CAC is starting to rise.

You can acquire customers, but it's not inherently profitable or it's not insanely profitable, so you want to increase that second order rate.

Or maybe your business has been around for five, 10 years, you're doing 50, 60 million a year and you really just want to focus on building that cult following from the top 20%.

These are examples of how you can apply one of these three functions to your commercial goals.

Now what we do from that is we create a deliberate campaign calendar architecture.

So your content calendar, it should not be, this is what, you know, what should we send next week or I've had a great idea, let's make an email campaign out of this.

We want to actually create a plan that's designed to hit the quarterly focus that we landed on here.

Maintain your email list health and deliverability while still driving consistent cash flow.

Most agencies, they're going to think in terms of, you know, what can we send this week.

A lot of brands do that too.

They're busy, they come up with ideas, they execute.

That's great, but it's not going to be what takes you to the top 1% of performance.

We prefer to think in terms of what does this quarter need to achieve and how do our weekly email campaigns build, build up to that.

So like I said before, tying back to what's our overall goal here in our quarterly strategy spread, then how can we build an email calendar that's going to help support this?

That's the philosophical difference in what we do.

The quarterly sprints force us to think beyond the next week.

We design things top down for a reason.

We start with the quarterly strategy that forms the monthly strategy, which forms the weekly strategy.

This gives us enough time to design, launch and iterate on the higher impact projects.

So might be new life cycle flows Reactivation journeys, VIP programs, whatever it's going to look like from that top down down direction.

This keeps us focused on those three core functions instead of getting lost in random ideas or, you know, we get distracted by, hey, we want to try to do these seven different things and you don't do any of the seven well whatsoever.

They will become mediocre and they ensure your calendar is working as a system, not just a series of disconnected emails or you know, isolated email ideas, which is where a lot of lapse in results comes But at the same time, we're not going to ignore the short term.

You're in E commerce, we know cash flow matters.

Our system is designed to balance that short term execution with long term email list and LTV growth.

That's the philosophy.

So let's run through the process in a little bit more depth.

But I also have a video on my YouTube breaking down exactly how we think about campaign calendar production.

I sort of alluded to here that you don't want to be creating a series of disconnected blasts, rather you want to think of a holistic strategy with your campaign calendar.

To touch on it briefly, our campaign calendar needs to be able to appeal to all of our email list across a month.

So people who are less engaged, people who are colder, people who, you know, they have objections, we need to build more trust with them and people who are ready to convert.

So we need to build a campaign calendar which nurtures people down that funnel.

I have a full rabbit hole of content on that, so I won't touch on that in this video.

But it is a core part of the way that we So how does the month to month, week to week, quarter to quarter process actually work?

So from here and what you've just booked in to receive is your order.

This is step one.

You're most likely watching this video just before we've got the audit done.

So here's how it's going to work.

We're going to hop on a 15 to 30 minute call to get the context we need on your brand.

We'll get the access we need to your klaviyo.

Over about a week, we'll conduct a comprehensive order outlining the changes we'd make across flows, campaign strategy, segmenting strategy, deliverability, opt ins and sign I'll film a 15 to 20 minute video walking you through all the findings, explaining them, explaining my thought process.

Now this is free, you've already booked in, there's no strings attached.

However, what happens next is if we do think we can help you, there will be a proposal at the end of the audit which will run you through exactly how we would help you, our packages and the associated pricing.

Now, step two, we deliver you the audit.

Hypothetically, you decide you want to work with us, this is what would happen.

We have a two part onboarding process.

This takes about three to five days.

In the first call, we're going through foundations and priorities.

We're going to tick off all the admin stuff, we're going to align on goals together, clarify what's most pressing in the first 30 days and start mapping out which of the three core functions needs to be prioritized.

Then we go away and we go into a bit of a deep work or a research phase.

Behind the scenes, we're going to be diving into your brand, your niche, your customers, your competitors will build your initial content calendar, will create key documentation around your tone of voice and the way we want to position your brand, and we'll complete a secondary internal audit on the account focused on opportunities in the short term.

Secondly, we'll have an official kickoff call.

So around three days after call one, we hop on a kickoff call.

This is going to, this is where we'll present your first month's calendar, the brand Persona and tone of voice, documents, and a roadmap for your email flows.

What we want to build in what order and why, we'll walk you through everything.

You can ask any questions, we'll improvise, we'll riff a little bit, we'll tweak where we need to and just to make sure we're fully aligned before we move into execution phase.

Thirdly, step three, we commence work now, Now onboarding, is completed.

We'll expect your first campaign to be sent about 7ish days after our kickoff call.

Now, the first one is always the slowest.

It's where we're learning your brand, your nuance and your preferences.

In the first few weeks, you'll probably give us more feedback than usual, especially if you've got a technical product or a very, very specific brand voice and that's normal.

And it's exactly how we get to the area where we've nailed it faster.

So I want to make clear the brands that lean into collaboration during onboarding get the best long term outcomes because we're aligned from day one.

And I wanted to actually show You a real example of one of our clients.

So this is a more extreme example.

They're a super technical product.

This is, you know, a product that goes a lot of research goes into it.

We've known the brand for about three, four days.

Couldn't be expected to get it right from day one.

But the client had a ton of changes in the first round.

He actually messaged me and said, you know, kind of did these even get proofed before being sent for review?

We'd made a few errors on the technical specifics of the product and there was a bit of confusion.

I let him know first couple rounds will have the most feedback.

He said there's going to be a lot of initial changes.

About four weeks later.

We've just completed our first month together.

Get the same message.

We get this message from the same Very happy with the work you guys are doing.

By far the best external team we work with.

The brands who work with us and collaborate during the onboarding process get the best results long term because we're aligned from the get go.

We're not going to be perfect from day one.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you, hey, we're going to nail everything from the first day and we're going to be perfect.

It's not what happens.

We're human.

We're wrapping our head around your brand, your baby, something that you've created and formed from scratch.

We need to learn it.

The more feedback and the more you work with us in this initial few weeks, the better the results are going to be long term.

And this is a living, breathing example of this now ongoing.

What do we actually do once onboarding is done and we've sort of kicked things off?

Now, this is where the quarterly, the monthly and the weekly execution comes into We set a primary focus each quarter.

Like I said, this is around the new customer acquisition, the second order rate or top 20% of revenue.

That focus is what's going to shape the projects, the flows and the experiments.

We prioritize in the account and we then use a regular monthly call to align on the next three Now, each month we lock in next over a call, we'll send you a full report on performance and key metrics.

We build and update any required flows, we roll out a B tests and we execute the projects tied to our quarterly focus.

Now, example of this might be you need to learn more about your customers for new customer acquisition.

So one of our quarterly focuses is to acquire more zero party data from these customers.

We Roll out as one of our initiatives, a post purchase survey designed to follow up customers who have bought with you twice, asking some key questions as to what led them to be a customer that bought twice.

Similarly, we might roll out a similar survey to customers who only bought once, ask them some questions, compare the differences, adjust top of funnel one, improvise, adapt, overcome, whatever, keep rolling.

Now that's where we'll execute these projects month to week to week.

This is pretty much our execution phase.

Every week you're going to see a, what's coming up message on Mondays, so we'll let you know what's in the pipe about Wednesdays.

We'll send you a performance update on the account, how the last week's campaigns go, any outliers we need to be concerned about, or any outliers we can use as a positive and run into more lessons, campaigns, flows, designs coming through for approval from you.

This is what you're going to see week to week ongoing auditing of your account for quick wins.

And we'll look to share insights from other accounts we can potentially apply to yours.

I.

E.

We ran this a B test over here.

It works really well.

We're going to apply it So in short, we set the direction backwards.

Rather than thinking, what can we do this week, what can we capitalize on?

We're thinking, what do we want to achieve quarterly?

Then what do we need to execute monthly?

Then what do we need to do week by week to achieve these goals?

You run through this cycle two, three, four times over the course of a year and you really start to feel the compounding effect of our quarterly goals.

You've got more second orders, healthier lists, and a much stronger base of repeat customers.

Now I've been doing email marketing for six years now.

I started out sweating ugly email templates when I was just 19 and I did the reps every single week since then to the point where we're now a team of over 20.

We work with nine figure brands and if you're looking for, and I want to make this clear, and part of this video is obviously to show you our process, the way we do things, our, philosophy, why I think the way we do things is superior.

But, I also want to make really clear the way that we focus.

If you're looking for a plug and play team who can just copy and paste for what works for another brand and charge you cheap prices, or a glorified designer who's just going to follow your orders and we're just going to sit here and take crap like we're probably not going to be a good fit.

But if you do want to work with retention strategists, we think in systems, we care about your list health, we care about your long term goals.

And you want your email and SMS to be a real profit center over the next one to three years and not just the next one to three weeks, then I'm confident we're going to be the right team for the job.

At the very least, run you through a very good audit process and support you through implementing it we're looking forward to the call.

I hope this video gave you some clarity on the way we operate or at least just pull back the curtain and showed a bit of transparency for you.

I'm keen to walk you through your audit.

I look forward to getting the access and we'll touch base, soon.