The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

The Ultimate Email Marketing Playbook With Greg Zakowicz (Episode 82)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 82

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🗣In this episode of the Dropship Unlocked Podcast, hosts Lewis Smith and James Eardley welcome Greg Zakowicz from Omnisend.com, an expert in enhancing ecommerce through tailored email marketing strategies.

Greg shares his journey and insights on how to effectively boost Shopify sales using email marketing.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/UFEMu8rRWdQ

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Topics Discussed:

★ Fundamentals of Email Marketing: Importance of email marketing for driving traffic and boosting engagement in ecommerce. Basic principles of email marketing and its impact on customer retention and engagement.

★ Simplifying Email Marketing to a Playbook: Discussion on whether there is a best practice email playbook or if it should be individualised for each company. Focus on customer data, automation, and the importance of testing everything.

★ Email Templates: Guidance on how to format emails, including the copy, layout, and branding to enhance effectiveness.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

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Key Takeaways:

★ Importance of Email Marketing: Email marketing is crucial for driving traffic and boosting engagement in ecommerce. It helps in retaining customers and enhancing their shopping experience.

★ Personalization and Automation: Leveraging customer data for personalised marketing strategies is key. Automating emails and consistently testing strategies can significantly improve results.

★ Effective Email Formatting: Proper email formatting, including compelling copy, attractive layout, and consistent branding, is essential for maximising the impact of email campaigns.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-82-omnisend-email-greg-zakowicz

Have you ever achieved a six to one return on investment with your ad spend on Google ads or Facebook ads? I mean, you'd be laughing all the way to the bank. But this is possible and it's been seen all the time with with email. One of these myths is to do really good marketing, whether it's this type or that type, in this case, email and SMS marketing and these costs a lot you need to be a big player and submit. And I should put a smile on the face of anyone getting into E commerce or with an E commerce business. Our goal is to allow companies to increase your email sales faster, easier, and we're less money. We all understand that mastering email marketing is more crucial than ever for E commerce success. So let's put these insights into action and transforming your E commerce game. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Louis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked and with me is our Client Success Coach James Hadley. Now, when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs develops their own high ticket dropshipping businesses keen to build your own six or even seven figure business. My book the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy at HT a book.com to date, and let's get you started. Now sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked Podcast. Today we're diving into the essential world of email marketing with Greg Zakho. It's a leading experts from Omni sent, Greg's insights are going to reshape how you think about engaging with your customers through targeted personalized email strategies. Exactly. Here's today's episode with Greg is all about revealing how even beginners can harness the power of email to not just reach out but to truly connect with their audience. Turning casual browsers into loyal customers will cover the foundational steps first of all to build an email marketing strategy that will grow your business. And for those of you eager to kick start your journey, today's insights will provide a roadmap to making your mark in the E commerce world to get ready to learn how to set up your campaigns for maximum impact and engagement. Let's dive right in and discover the keys to successful Email Marketing. Today we're excited to be joined by Greg Zachary wits, who is from omnisend, an expert in email marketing, and we're going to be putting you through his paces asking him some questions about how we can enhance the email marketing for our E commerce businesses. So firstly, Greg, it's fantastic to have you share your expertise with us today. James, I'm super happy to be here. And I feel like I'm stepping into a gauntlet. So this should be a lot of fun here. So let's let's roll and see how badly I get beat up. Awesome. Yeah, no, no, it's just to get to that next level with email marketing. So yeah, vertical, tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey and how that's led you to the work that you're doing today. Yeah, so I'll try to keep it somewhat short. You can. I'm an open book, you can Google you can connect with me on LinkedIn and come and check out everything. But I've been as crazy as it sounds, I've been in email marketing for almost 20 years now. kind of happened my way into it. So I was working at a radio promotions company. And we started we were doing these onsite promotions, we started collecting email addresses and marketing through platforms early on. And then switched over to a different company, which the only type of marketing we did the only type of marketing was email marketing. And back then it was like requesting jQuery segments from the IT department to get your segmented list and things like that, like it was nuts. But it really got me into all sorts of different types of testing plaintext emails, HTML emails, and kind of went through the evolution that a wash your side business online East ecommerce store on the side, when I was doing that could learn a little more of the ropes. And again, the consulting for it, man just kind of grew up with it. And now I'm with AMI, Santa Didier for a little over four years, and just watching this phenomenal company grow. And you know, email doesn't change too much. Yet at the same time, it changes a lot, which is kind of weird to say, the 18 years now an email mark. So I've seen a lot come and go, I've seen the hysteria around changes, and then the stuff ultimately settles down. So hopefully, I'll be a really good resource for you. Come talk about the old the new and, and the emergence of those two things now. 100% Yeah, absolutely. Very, very valuable. I think also doing some of your own ecommerce selling always helps to give you that experience on the other side, you know, from actually from the sellers as well. So they just to talk a little bit more about Omni Sen because he's obviously a large platform email service provider. And yeah, tell us a bit about your role and what omnisend really is. Sure. So my role is doing things like this, but I'm a data nerd. Like jumping in. So I'm looking at data on every commerce sellers, different countries, how marketing channels are shifting how consumers are responding to those, then doing educational type things to educate merchants on, hey, you should be doing this instead of this, or how about trying this, or there's really simple ways to increase email revenue, whether you're a beginner or you've been in it for a long time that most companies either overlook, they don't pay close enough attention to things like that. So that's my job is to hopefully educate those people on what they can do to increase sales faster. On the center's platform, where email and SMS marketing provider, our goal is to allow companies to increase your email sells faster, easier, and are less money than, than the competitors. And, you know, one of these myths is to do really good marketing, whether it's this type or that type, in this case, email and SMS marketing needs to cost a lot, you need to be a big player and submit. You know, we think we've talked about it internally, where it's a myth that we bust everyday, doesn't need to be expensive. And that's where Omni sign is kind of built in, we are customer funded, you hit on take outside money, which means everything we do is customer centric. If our customers aren't happy, we're going to leave, and that's gonna make us unhappy. So the tools, we built the integrations like the Shopify integrations, these are things that are plug and play, you can integrate a Shopify store in less than two minutes, and kind of do all those things. So our goal is increase your sales faster, easier. And for less, it's really good platform. And by the way, you can sign up for free, no credit card required. So anyone today who might be interested in just want to give us a little test run, you can go sign up, you don't have to put credit cards or anything down. We have a free, free plan there as well, where you can kind of play around with stuff and see if it's the right fit for you. Awesome. Yeah, I think it's really helpful always to have a like a nice low barrier way to test out these tools and see the difference that it makes to your business. But yeah, focusing on data, being a data nerd, as you put it, I think is great, because now for this conversation, you can think about all that data that you've come across to really give us some insights as to what works really well. And before we dive into that, I just want to really lay down the foundations for people to understand, like how important this can be for your business. And but yeah, in your own in your own terms. Why would you say that email marketing is such a crucial tool for driving sales for for E commerce. There's a lot of answers to this, I'll try to truncate it. I think the one thing we're looking at now, and it might never happen might happen in you know, two to three years. But you look at the volatility of social media. And there's nothing wrong with social media marketing, right, every brand, mostly does it they probably shouldn't be doing it to some degree. But you'll look at like the Tick Tock stuff over in the US US which I am. But you look at even meta right there, Facebook, automatic Facebook ads over the last couple months, people were talking about like, it was going crazy, they were burning through cash, those channels are fine, but you don't, quote unquote, own that customer relationship. Right. They're more of a push channel, I don't jump onto Instagram at checkout ads. They're there, I accept it. They intrigue me right click on them. But that's not the reason I'm going I'm going for social purposes. email, SMS, these are first party opt in channels. And the opt in is really the crucial part. So I'll if I go to your website, and I get a pop up, it says age when your email list and maybe you offer a discount, maybe you don't, I put that email address in there, I put that mobile number in there. It's me telling you, hey, I want your marketing messages. And when I do see those marketing messages, I'm looking at them for a reason I'm not looking at them because they're in my inbox and bother me I'm looking because I'm wobbly, interested in shopping, or when I see what new products you have, there's already a buyer mindset there. So you already have the intent, the urgency built into it a little bit. It is first party so you don't have to worry about now, Tik Tok being banned there, you don't have to worry about algorithm changes impacting your dollars, you can send an email to directly to that customer, you can brand them more or you can be more creative with them. And it's low cost, right? Ads are expensive. Paid search is expensive. These things are expensive. It's a given cost and marketing. Email is not as expensive SMS is not as expensive. So you have more cost control, but it consistently performs better, too. This is the end that goes into the intent of the shopper. The first party thing, email just performs better US customers last year with Omni 770 $2 per $1 spent ROI internationally was $36. So little better than the US 361 ROI is pretty, pretty good. All right. I wouldn't complain about that. Not so I mean, if you ever achieved a six to one return on investment with your ad spend on Google ads or Facebook ads. I mean, you'd be laughing all the way to the bank. But this is possible and it's been seen all the time with with email because of the fact that you've got people that have opted in to see those emails. So yeah, quite simply, you're leaving money on the table. I think if you're not You know, leveraging email and optimizing it even once you have got it set up. So with all the data that you you've seen, and you've got an idea of how ecommerce brands are using email, I wonder if there's any familiar things that you see people do wrong, perhaps some opportunities that you see that that ecommerce brands can do better? Is there any sort of trends that you see that that made you think that there could be opportunities for people to improve? Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and we've seen a lot more of this over the last 10 years, especially in the last five years, the adoption has really gone up. But there's better places to adopt, and others is using the automation. All right. So automation is built into almost every email platform we have pre building, that's the one thing right pre automation people look at. And they're like, I don't know how to do that. It sounds complicated. You can really set these things up in a matter of minutes. So when I'm talking about minutes, I'm not talking about like 45 minutes, or three minutes, you can do these things, they're pretty easy to do. So, shameless plug for me, Sam. But we have pre built workflow templates. So if you want an abandoned cart, you want a welcome message, you want to browse abandonment, you want whatever product review message, we have these things pre built, you click on them, the things are set up, and you can customize them however you want. But you can create the workflow in four seconds, then you just need to edit the messaging. But we provide pre built email templates inside the workflows to kind of get you a start there as well. The automation is the number one key to increasing your sales and using reducing the reliance on your scheduled campaigns. And so last year, I looked at the numbers for q1, they were right around the same figures. But last year, 42% of all email orders through Amazon came from automated messages, the amount of email sends that account of four to 2%, of central 42% of our 41% of email orders. So I think in q1 This year, I was just looking at these numbers the other day, she was 38. Three. So if you think about this, these are things that are sending automatically. You're sleeping, you're in a business meeting, you're on vacation, they're sending, and they're driving revenue for brands. So that is huge. And this is the number one place where brands if you want to look for increased revenue opportunities, the automations where you go now, a lot of automations out birthday messages, there's labs purchase or post purchase, there's products review all these things here. So where do we start, three series, maybe four, I would start with they drive the most revenue, they're the most sent but where I would advise people to look is look at the shopping intent. Customer. So think about where that shopping Tensas highest cart abandonment, no brainer. They've selected a product they put in their cart. You know, there are shopping so Kharbanda messages, welcome messages, brand new subscribers, they're probably there because they're interested in shopping from someone might not be you but they're interested in shopping. So welcome messages, and then browse abandoned. So little less intent with browse. And these are browse abandoned. For those that don't know, they go online window shop, they're on your store, they're checking something out, they don't care products and on the like most people do. I always tell people, they're on your site for a reason. They're looking at products for a reason. They are shopping, right? Or they're interested in shopping later. And they want to see what new products are out there. So browse abandoned, cart abandonment, and welcome messages. These are the three I would start with forgetting to drive the most revenue, but they're all those different stages, new customer, new shopper browser that can reengage you and get you back to the store and then cart abandonment. So those are the three bar non every brand should have. Start simple. They don't have to be perfect out of the gate, send one do you want to add a second message to it just go back later add a second message to it and workflows done. Or you don't need to recreate the wheel and those are the three that are going to drive the most amount of sales for you. At the most our sense. These are also things that that can reduce your retargeting costs. So if you think about what a typical brand does, right, we got a web visitor. Ah, paid search retargeting or paid social retargeting, right? Those things we already talked about, they're a little more expensive than email. So how about to get a browse abandonment message that sends out for a fraction of a penny or, you know, maybe you're spending while dollars a month on an email plan. That goes back to same thing as retargeting message, you get them back click rates, conversion rates are extremely high on those things. They all these messages well outperform your campaigns to get you back to the site for a fraction of a cent versus 50 cents $2 Over there. The beauty of Omni sun, so we can automatically sync our customer going to integrate with Shopify. So you can have the Shopify data on there. You can have the email, web activity, all this data is in one place consolidated. We can automatically sync that to like your meta or your Google Ad properties. Say Hey, Greg went to my website set on this browse abandonment email. We got him back. Do I need If I can automatically update my retargeting segments through the platform, I met a, you know, Google ads, withhold His name, withhold his email address, don't target this person. Let's save her money here. So we want to reduce our costs overall. So it's a really long answer for you, James. Hopefully he stayed with me. I'll sum it up. Welcome cart abandonment, browse abandonment, those are my three essentials, I can go into more high performing ones, but those are the three bar not every brand should be amazing that I thought was so valuable knowing that an issue put a smile on the face of anyone getting into E commerce or with an E commerce business. Because we often talked about on this channel on this podcast about building it as a lifestyle business that we can do with ecommerce. And so knowing that you can make more money with automations, which you can do set once and forget, compared to how much money you can make with one off campaigns that rely on you to do to create them every few days. It's great news to know that automations perform better, because it means there's less time to put in bid for amazing return. So just diving deep, deeper into the automations and into the into the top three of it. That's where a lot of people was sort of action should go after watching this episode is really abandoned cart, I think would be number one, how many emails just to go more granular into the details of setting this up? How many emails within an abandoned cart flow Do you see performs really well? So I would say one obviously is your minimum, right? Champ seven habit automation unless you're sending at least one. So I always talk I mentioned before start small, right? Do what you can. Beauty is these emails don't have to be perfect from day one. They don't have to be perfect ever, they can be pretty simple abandoned cars probably easiest. Because, hey, come back, maybe offer a discount, we automatically insert the product in there have nice call to action and couple of value props. You could talk about number of messages. I personally like four messages. Spread out, I'm aggressive, I find for that fourth one will still convert for you even after a period of time you might go well they got three messages are not converting, find the fourth one that work really well. I would say at a minimum I would do to most people will have two to three. Some people and this is increasing, we'll go to four, I like four. But just do what you can with it. And where I would go is from a timing perspective. I would I'll give you the consultants cop out James, you should always test your timing. But my test everything is Saltonstall tell you I live that life I was there. In some respects it's true timing, I'll give you a good baseline and then you can tweak it and the timing is going to differ a little bit based on the price points of the products you sell, right, if you're selling $10 widgets or a 2000 hour TV, they can be longer buying cycles in there. So factor in your own products, your average order value, things like that message one I was in 30 minutes after abandonment. Most people will start in power perfectly fine. I want to capture their attention as quick as possible. So I started message one at 30 minutes after message to 12 hours after abandonment, you can do 11 and a half dollars if you don't want to do the extra 30 minutes on the automation there but 12 hours for message to 24 hours after abandonment. So 12 hours later for message three. And now we'll give him one day break the message for so let me so I've got four messages going in the first two days to try to get them back and can offer an incentive you can offer instead of later, you don't need to offer an incentive. One thing with shopping cart abandonment is think about yourself, James, I have been I do it right. I purposely abandoned a lot of things because I want to see if I get a discount later. What we all do, but the whole time you're thinking like oh man, I kind of want that right, I hope it doesn't sell out. And this is where messaging says emergency things like this. But the whole time it's in the back of your mind, like oh, I want to buy this. But a lot of times they'll just go back and buy it without the discount. So don't feel you need that discount on abandoned cart. Right? As long as you frame the message with little sense of urgency, some social proof, make it obvious that hey, we know you kind of want this should convert extremely well for you. Fantastic, it's nice to know that we can just start small and add more to the abandoned cart flow. Now, I imagine there's a graph of how well they perform. And if you continue to add more abandoned cart, emails to your abandoned cart flow, does it eventually lose the power after a certain amount of emails? Is there a reason you stop at four? Or would you consider sort of continuing beyond the initial four? I've worked with companies that have like seven messages a month might be overkill, the seven ones still convert it against nuts, right? So I would say yeah, with most message series over time as you send the messages you kind of see a slowly decline on the performance of them. They'll still convert for it now go hey, I convert on the fifth message great. You shouldn't see a huge drop off you shouldn't go like this and that it craters on your so if you're seeing that at something, let me take a look at it right there. to your audience, it's either your timings off, you don't need the fourth message based on products, you sell maybe your fourth messages five days later, and they usually purchase in three, and you want to shorten that window, right? These are all things to look at. But generally, you'll see a little bit of a decline. Now, this is kind of weird, a lot of times, you'll see the slight decline from one to two, two to three drops a little heavier. And then sometimes the fourth one goes up, right, and that's kind of your window that maybe that third one, the timing is maybe a little bit off, if you push the timing of the third one to where the fourth one is, and then you push the timing off to the fourth one, just kind of his last chance, catch all there. These are all small things to look at, you'll never know unless you start automating out. But generally, you'll see a little bit of a decline, but they should still be performed. Yeah, it's a nice opportunity, and suddenly he touched on before is how cheap it is to get back in front of the customers. And I don't know, touch points with customers is crucial. So whether that's through your retargeting on social media, after they've initially bid on your website, but a more cost effective way that we're suggesting is by getting back in their inbox when they check their emails later that day. And remember that they they forgot something. So I guess a big part of emailing, creating these automations is about enhancing the number of connections and touch points that we have with customers. I mentioned the intent state series before and this is where I would look at if you're a brand new go on. Okay, so you have all these three gotten here? I got them done, right? What do I do next? I look at the intent. At that point, I say, Okay, what other stages of customer journey would impact our business to most so some people will go, Oh, it's great to build a personal connection, let's do a birthday message. I love birthday messages, they're not going to convert as well for you, you've got to have the data or start collecting the data to slow build that point, they're great, but the long run, the dividends are gonna pay less. Always purchase are back in stock automation, these things convert much better. And so think about the stages of intent with the customer journey. And that's where to focus on, those are the things that are going to pay the biggest dividends for you. And if you're like, hey, you know what this welcome, Greg told me, this welcome message is going to do great for me. Doing okay, right? Those are places where I look at and go, Okay, what about my welcome message? Could I maybe improve? Am I talking too much of the brand story? Do I focus more on the sale, which I would absolutely recommend to and skip the brand story a little bit, but focus on those things. So follow the customer intent and let the automation at those high intense stages kind of drive your strategy forward. That's where we're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. And, James, I didn't mention it before, I just want to throw some context out there for numbers. So anyone listening on on the sounds website, there's a resources section, there's a report section on there, we do not get our reports. So you can just go check them out. But you can find a status report, we have an entire section automation there, that shows the conversion rates to click raise the click through rates. So you can look at the different automations and kind of use that as your starting point and be like, Okay, do that one next, because that converts really well. It I'll give you a perspective on a cart abandonment here. So an average scheduled email conversion rate. So that's going to be conversions based on the number of emails sent. Point Zero 7%. And this is looking over a billions of messages at last year, a shopping cart abandonment message converts 2.87% 2.87 compared to point zero 7%. It's not the highest converting message, one of the best, it's not the highest converting one. So if you think about that, from a conversion standpoint, say Okay, give me a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad that converts 2.87%. I'll tell you, you're doing something right. 100% Yeah, this is what we mean about leaving money on the table. It's those people that you are leaving behind, if you don't follow them up with an email in their inbox. There's nobody else on to touch on with you, Greg, because because the resources are amazing. And having you on the podcast to be able to pluck out some of these amazing figures is so valuable for people to know about where they can invest their time most, most effectively. But I wonder if there is like an a playbook for the best email strategy. So if you were to go into an omni send account and look at how many flows people have got set up how an emails within those flows, what does their sign up for look like? Etc, etc. I wonder if the answer is probably quite complex potentially. Is there something that you would always set up as a consultant? Would you go in and say, Look, this is what we need to do? How many flows, you'd create the type of signup form, or as you mentioned before, is it more so about having to test everything? There's no way of knowing until you just start adding in different flows one at a time, and then just just test from there? Yeah, really good question, James. And I'll give you a kind of a variety of answers here. So as far as testing, you need some baselines of tests. So get it go and get it automated, get it, get the pop up, activated on your website, get the numbers and then you can test from there for improvement. So don't let testing In slow progress whatsoever, just do it. Right. Action better than no action. Better done than perfect. Right. We talked about that internally a lot. So that's one answer. Sue. I mentioned the statute boards. baselines are always good to look at. Always benchmark against yourself. So be like, Hey, I'm getting a 4% signup rate for an email collection, a 2%, signup, signup rate for mobile numbers. Below, oh, the industry I read over here, or Omni sign clients gets a six and 4% respectively, I'm doing something wrong. Well, not necessarily your audience is different than everyone else's, but doesn't mean you can't approve. So benchmark against yourself, you got a forehand to try to get to a four and a half and a two and a half and then get from four and a half to a five. Right, you benchmark against yourself and you test from there. But don't let anything slow you. So that's one, right? As far as the good to look at benchmark against yourself more than anything else. To as far as doing things the right way. What I would recommend, okay, first step, get a popup on your website activated, you can do that through Romney sun, literally 30 seconds, customize it if you want, as per email address, ask for a mobile number, make mobile number optional. You'll be amazed how many people will give it to this is a frustration I run into a lot. I did a whole podcast episode with someone on this where we're just kind of bantered about this, but it'll give her the one step or two step signup form where you get the email first, he taken a second step and he's like, hey, you know and join our SMS program to what drives me nuts as a consumer is about like, Hey, join our SMS program for 15% off and I put my email address in there and then takes me to an SMS he's like, for 15% off, put your mobile number in there, my bought some brands I've subscribed to a lot, but some brands, I don't want to get those SMS yet. And I close out, I don't get the incentive for the email drives me nuts. The other thing is when I get hold of them on one form, and I just enter email and hit submit as like no SMS is required, like I don't wanna write and now we'll close out there's a lot of frustration points here. So step one, I go into a brand's website, I get a pop up going on, collect an email address, I'm collecting mobile numbers, but I'm making more mobile number options. I don't care if it's a one step forum two step forum doesn't matter to me. Both agree. Right To Be A will fortune forum. Doesn't matter. But that's how I would operate signup form. That's the first thing I would do. Right? So James, I talk about the legs feeding the wolf will lock email addresses mobile numbers, they feed the wolf of the machine, right? Email is going to starve if you don't have the email addresses. So that's why I do that first. From there, my next step of the playbook is I go to those automations because they're a fact of welcome message. I want to do that first. Right tied into now I can debate and do cart abandonment first because they're close to cash, right, these two things, flip a coin one day, I'll do one as the other. But if I'm getting new email, signups I want to convert them at a high intense stage, I'm gonna do a welcome message, I'm gonna get at least the first message sending where the one thing I find a lot of brands, and they're doing it less now, but I find a lot of brands leave money on the table for is they make the welcome message about the brand, right? It's like, oh, our story is and there's a long line of text or a lot of text and an image telling you all about a great brand is what age started. I think it's a poor. It's a poor decision to focus the first message on that. I think people It sounds bad to say but most people do not care about your brand story at this stage. And I care about parts of it. But there are an annual website, they have some semblance of what you're offering what your brand is about. So that first message should be should be about selling. Hey, welcome to the family. Welcome to our email program. We're so glad you're here. Is there a special thanks, here's 10% off your first order. Here's the code. If you don't offer discount, see what all the fuss is about why our customers love us. Suggest some top rated products write your five star products, use social proof, put a testimonial and focus on your value. As you know we always offer free shipping on orders over 35 hassle free returns, whatever your competitive differentiator is our call to action will messages done its selling. You can have a little blurb at the bottom about eight. Find out about a brand story and then they can click and read more on your website. So that's where I go with a welcome such as my playbook for a welcome message. Add message two and three later if you want to. Those messages, I would say should typically be about introducing products, customer favorites, top sellers. Use more testimonials, any sort of social proof you have. sell the products introduce them. So that's where I go, you're probably good with two or three messages in the world. Anything more than that, you probably have a very specific niche that you're trying to fit into to get more information so that's where I go with the welcome message. Then I shoot to the abandoned cart. Perfect. No, I was just gonna jump in there and say it sorry. It makes a lot of sense to be more commercial intent with that first welcome email. But the temptation is to overdo it or add too much to it and try and really to introduce into the brand. But so it's interesting that your, your opinion is definitely to be quite commercial, especially that first message, because a lot of times people have signed up, because you've promised them a discount, because you've given them the incentive of why they should sign up in the first place. So yeah, just fascinating to hear that you'd go straight in for the jugular from the first email. I would man I'm aggressive, I told you, but this is where the money is. We're gonna get your sales right now if you have a fun brand, there's no reason you can't put your brand voice in that message. You can be commercial and funny at the same time, right? plenty, plenty of brands do it. Use your brand voice, use the images, use whatever you want to. I'll get some crazy welcome messages all the time, but it fits with the brands. So to do it, by all means, right, but still introduce the products and still introduce that shop now call to action. So cart abandonment. simples. Again, start with one message add on as you go, we already talked about I would do for that's the next step. I would do though, get that first one sending at least if you're only sending one, you might just want to be more conservative go okay, let's send out one hour afterward, I say 30 minutes, still do 30 minutes, but one hour, if you only have one message. These are even more straightforward, right? Notice you love something to your cart, get them use some sort of sense of urgency. And they're these products while lasts long. Get out, you know, get them while you last or get them before we run out something like that, you know, you want it product called action, boom, reinforce those value ads, free shipping returns whatever matters to your customers. And just rinse and repeat. Repeat that series, slightly changing messages slightly change the subject line, but the crux of those abandoned cart messages can be mostly the same. So here's the product, get a fast, here's why you should get a fast call to action. And then I do a browse abandonment that fills in the gaps, right? So I get your welcome message. I'm on your website. I don't care products yet, anyone in that middle area. This is where the Browse abandonment falls in. That's what I do. I think for the most part, one to two messages on a browse abandonment series is probably all you need. You can have a third. Now there's two different strategies with browse abandonment, product abandonment, both are fine. Both work, the difference is browse. Think about a category I go to men's shoes, I get a browse abandonment for men's shoes, right? It's not product specific. And this is again, are all the same content you have from the welcome message operated men's shoes, you know different categories, men's shoes, customer favorites, whatever it might be. Product abandonment is here's a specific product someone viewed. Let's send a message about that product. So you might have a seasonal line you might have top sellers or really high margin products that you might not get a ton of use for. But you want to sell them because you got an 80% margin on those things right there moneymakers. This is where you can automate as a single message based on that particular product to go out to someone that gives more information about the product, hey, do you know it's got these five great features or blah, blah, blah, and then do it from there? I think for browse abandonment, one, two messages for most brands will probably be just two it can always do more. The more is generally reserved for those maybe more complex products or more things, things where there's more than do wants to write different features, or specs or how tos or use cases stuff like that. So that would be my initial playbook. Again, I'm focused on those three automations. But that's where my money make. Yeah, it's just effectively using your time to really just focus on where the biggest moneymakers are, but that that is the ultimate playbook to get started with email, I'd say is the first day of getting set up. And if you've got those first automations live, you put yourself in a great position. Something else I just want to touch on quickly, because you mentioned that you would leave it optional for people to leave their mobile number. And which I think is a great idea and brings us into SMS marketing. So yeah, so when you actually collect them, maybe 50% of people or less, maybe in the UK, we're a bit more conservative with I think, giving away our phone numbers. But you will inevitably capture people's phone numbers. Whilst the benefits behind capturing people's phone numbers for SMS marketing. I would relate to very much the email, it's still a first party channel, it's an opt in they're only opting in to if they want to receive it. Now I would say if they opt in your SMS program, they might be deal hunters. But even the US like I signed up for a lot of SMS. I do it both for consumer purposes, but also for work. I go to some brands websites and I'm like, not yet. Right. And I'll do the email but I won't do the SMS. So even where I like I've got a separate phone number through Google Voice where I opt in SMS things from just to keep my phone a little cleaner. Because I do a lot of them. Even then I choose not to Do some brands at least yet. So what I would say here is think about if I do sign up for SMS, the brand might have an indication that, hey, this guy might be better customer than Joe Blow over. Right? So there's a little bit of maybe affinity with a brand that could be led into it. But the first party often channels, it's like email is the biggest one direct line of communication can't take it away from me. Unless they lose their phone, they get a new phone number, but that's why they set the side they want to opt out. The other thing I would say, and this is something that people rarely talk about is people are always going to unsubscribe for every major the thesis of why you always need to refill those email addresses. Well, the same thing can be true for SMS SMS is becoming a more preferred chat. So if you've got my mobile number and my email address, and I decide that email is no longer my jam, and I unsubscribe, most brands are gonna go well, we lost email address, but we could do our look alike audience and we can retarget them over here again, for higher costs. Well, now you have my SMS mobile app, you can still target me, you have all my email data, hooked up my Shopify data hooked up with a mobile number, it's all in one place, you can still automate or send promotional messages that we know will be read, they can still fill that funnel. So it's not a replacement email, but it's a pretty good complement email from that perspective and the unsubscribe from the email. But staying opted into the SMS is something that no one ever talks about saving money down the road. So that's why they should get into it. Now the other thing is automations automations for SMS perform exceptionally well, better than campaign SMS, just like email does. And the reason is that customer intent, right? Same story, I'm gonna save 50 times a day, customer intent, foul the intent there. So conversion rates for automated SMS are more than double of a campaign message. So point one, three, for a campaign, point two, eight, or SMS. These things are good, they work and you can integrate them into the exact same workflow as your email campaigns. So you just drag the node over stick it where you want, you can split it, you can have different paths for SMS and email subscribers email only, or SMS only subscribers, you can customize it. And generally, if you just have one path, tools like Gamesa will go, okay, not an SMS subscriber, just skip that step and move on to the next one. So you don't have to worry about having different workflows for different audiences. It's all at one single canvas. Brilliant. I think that's that's the speed is really essential there. Because if you've got your email set up, it's very quick to integrate and have SMS set up as well to all within the same package. So just just closing out on this conversation today. Greg, I'd like to ask you about Omni send, and why people would consider using it over other competitors in the market, other email service providers, why would you specifically recommend that people would choose Omni sent one, I'll give it the shameless plug, because I work there. But I've been around the space I mentioned, 18 years I've worked for different providers. It's a really good tool. It really is. And it's cost effective. So we've got everything a business needs, whether you are a solopreneur, whether you have a really small team, or you are a large company, we fit all those needs there. And that's how we built again, we're customer funded. So that's why we built it out. We have everything you need. We have pop ups, we integrate with Shopify, I mentioned you can integrate a store within a matter of minutes, plug and play. At the data coming over, we have robust segmentation, including pre built segments that you can just copy. Again, we talked about doing things easily do it. Have all the workflows you needed to customize both templates, we have email templates, drop and drag templates, we add Asia and have in hundreds of pre built theme templates. So you need a Father's Day One or Mother's Day want a Christmas one. Yell whatever it is Thanksgiving, one if you market in the US. Or even, you know if you do Thanksgiving, US holiday, but your marketing over in the UK, we have all these things built for you. So you can just plug and play. So there's nothing you can't do. I say that but there's nothing you can't do inside of balmy sand that you could do anywhere else. And we're just cheap, right? For most companies, so we don't lock you into your long contracts unless you want to, or month a month cancel anytime we have a free plan. So if you want to test this out, free I mentioned no credit card required to sign up for that either. So use the free plan as long as you like and then you can just slowly build from time to time. If you want to see how pricing compares. By the way, we have a free price comparison tool on our website. You can select the different email providers that you want to compare against. And we'll break it down for you cost benefits things you get in there. It makes it super easy for you which price comparisons, always one of the biggest frustration points when you're looking at different platforms. So we're like, hey, let's make it easy for you. Yeah, that's very, very transparent and very helpful to see what the differences are. But yeah, having that nice low barrier to entry, free trial, giving to give it a go, I think is fantastic. And people will definitely be making the most of it. Thank you, Greg, for sharing your insights today. That playbook is incredibly valuable for people getting started with their email marketing. So thanks for joining us on the podcast. Happy to be here, James. Thank you for having me. And I'll just say for anyone out there that wants to reach out, you'll find me on LinkedIn you can find on my site and all the normal channels. Were open books. We're friendly people. Come on over. While Louis I thoroughly enjoyed that session with Greg. They're packed with actionable advice. The it's it's clear if you didn't know this before the podcast episode that now we all understand that mastering email marketing is more crucial than ever, for e commerce success. Definitely loved Greg's session. Thank you. So Greg, for that amazing breakdown of integrating email with other communication channels, like SMS and push notifications just shows how dynamic and powerful these tools can be when they're used and implemented correctly. So it's all about creating a conversation with our customers, not just a campaign. So I've really enjoyed it today. Yeah, really great session. And for our members, as well. Greg has also gone on to record some more content that will be holding in the members only area. So I mean, Greg, very generous with his time and very generous with the insights they shared. So there was loads of insights and strategies that we can implement straightaway from this episode. Definitely. And for anyone looking to implement these strategies, combining Greg's expert advice with the structured methods in my book at HTA book.com will set you up for success, whether you're just starting out, or perhaps you're looking to refine your approach, H T. A book.com has the resources to make it happen. So let's put these insights into action and transform your E commerce game. Enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might just feature it on an upcoming episode. Also, for detailed show notes and resources, head to dropship unlock.com. Forward slash podcast. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast app of choice. It helps us more than you could imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've had in from a listener of the podcast. So I will ask you this question, Louis, the first a quick reminder for you listening or watching today. If you have a question, and you want it to be answered on an upcoming podcast episode, that all you need to do is ask your question in a YouTube comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode. So that's exactly what Rosie B has done. And she has asked, Have you ever tried to use this model outside the UK? Great question. Thank you for this, Rosie and dare to address your question directly. No, I haven't personally used this model outside the UK. But I've got many friends who have and still successfully run businesses using this exact model. And in Germany, in Canada in the US. So it definitely works in other markets as well. The primary reason for me not having done that is that the UK market for E commerce is vast, and it's robust. And there's so many opportunities here and I'm already a resident here, it just seemed like not introducing additional complexities for me was a wise move when I started. And I realized that even when I started an E commerce business, I was only scratching the surface of the potential opportunities without having to even expand internationally. So you can certainly reach six, seven figures annually with one of these businesses without even having to think about looking outside the borders of the UK. So it's definitely possible. But yeah, absolutely expanding into international markets introduces other opportunities. But it does come with complexities as well. You've got different regulations, you've got different tax implications, different logistical challenges, might have to register companies in the markets, you want to there, you got to get bank accounts there. So these factors can complicate the business model, and it kind of diverts your focus away from just growing the business. You know, the the tactics that we know are proven to work well, inside the UK market start to get diluted if you are introduced the complexities of trying to introduce international trade as well. So it's important to note that the principles of our business model are universal and they can indeed be applied into many countries. The key factor is to ensure that the market you choose has sufficient demand. That's the key thing. Make sure the customers in the market you're looking to sell to are looking for the products that you're considering selling and that you have adequate suppliers there to create a nice diversified range of products that you're selling. That means verifying there's at least three direct competitors already successfully operating in that space in the market in the country that you're Looking to sell it. So for anyone who's considering this route, our masterclass program in week two, we extensively cover how to choose a winning niche. And you can apply those same criteria to other markets as well. It includes strategies for assessing your market size, looking at competitor presence, identifying how you find competitors, how you validate them, and ensuring that you can apply these principles effectively, whether in the UK or abroad. Yeah, great question. Thank you, Louis. There's a reason why it's called the home turf advantage or not called specifically just the UK advantage, because it can be used in other markets. It's just about the size of the market that we're going into. And because we are residents in the UK, and because we know the UK market is massive and could sustain large businesses. That's why we've decided to apply it to the UK, but absolutely us and relevant to us in other countries as well. So time now as well to highlight a recent review that we've had in for the podcast. And a big thank you to JJ idea for the YouTube comments. So they have said brilliant advice. I feel not alone watching your videos. Now. Thank you so much for your review. JJ, we really appreciate it. Your feedback motivates us to keep sharing valuable insights. Now, if you know someone who might benefit from this podcast, please do share it with them. Helping others get started on their dropshipping journeys is what we're all about here, and your recommendation could make a big difference to them. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you're walking away with insights and inspiration. to kickstart your E commerce journey. Grab a copy of my book The home of turf advantage at HT A book.com is a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. If you like what you heard a five star review would mean the world to us and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unwrapped podcast.