The Email Marketing Playbook We Wish We Had

Hey there, and welcome back for another bite to chew on

We hope you had a blessed weekend and got to spend some time with your loved ones.

In today's newsletter, we're talking about everything email marketing.

This includes the most important flows you NEED to have set up, how to increase your open rate, and what to do if you're landing in spam.

But before we jump into today's newsletter, we just have 4 news we want to share with you:

1. Our 3rd co-founder, Ankit, has officially started sharing his branding, design, and UI/UX knowledge on Twitter.

Already in his first week, he's gotten 1000 followers and gone semi-viral. Give him a follow if you want to read more content about that (PS: He also has a newsletter coming up)

2. We're officially transitioning from Klaviyo to Sendlane and documenting everything in public. BOTH the good, the bad, and the ugly.

3. We just released a new episode of Chew On This, with the one and only "DTC guy" - Nik Sharma. Go check it out here

4. We'll be publicly building a TapCart app for Chew On This, where you can find all of our content/free resources/podcast episodes + shop our merch

Alright, enough news.

Let's dive into today's newsletter.

If you don't have these flows, you're ngmi

Email marketing is one of the most direct channels of communication with your customers (and also one of the most profitable)

So if you haven't gotten all of your backend email (+sms) flows properly set up - you shouldn't even think about running ads.

But…

If you haven't done that yet, and want to set it up today - here's what we recommend you'd start with

1) Welcome email

2) Abandoned Cart

3) Browse abandonment

4) Customer Winback

5) Sunset unengaged subscribers

6) Cross-sell and up-sell

7) Post-purchase education flows (how to use the product, join community, etc)

Flows, check. Now get your copy straight

Writing copy that's "meeeeh" is easy.

Getting ChatGPT to write "meeeeh" copy is even easier.

But even though it may be easy, it won't necessarily be effective.

…And at the end of the day, that's what we're after.

Effective copy. Not “easy to write” copy.

So here's a 5-step checklist that you can use to determine if your copy is effective.

Or if it's "meeeeh"

1) Put yourself in the receiver's shoes and ask, "What's in it for me"

Whenever anybody reads your copy, the first thought that comes to mind is "What's in it for me."

… and if you can't answer that question within the first couple of sentences - it's game over

2) Are you clear or clever?

Clever wins awards

Clear makes sales

Which one do you want to be?

The easiest way to lose a person's attention is by confusing them.

So pull out any sentences that are hard to read

…and any words that are above grade level 5

… and any marketing jargon that even you don't fully understand anyway

3) Provoke curiosity

Your job is to get the reader to read the next line in your email.

That's it

… and the best way to do this is by provoking their curiosity by constantly keeping an open loop

Now, why is this important?

Because otherwise, the reader will lose interest

… and you know what's worse than that?

Nothing.

But we just wanted to demonstrate what an open loop is :)

4) Meet them where they are

We've talked about awareness levels before, so we won't go into too much detail about that

But the point is:

You wouldn't talk to a stranger the same way you would talk to your best buddy.

And vice versa

So, don’t do it in your email copy either

5) The rule of one

Each email should have

One big idea/purpose

One emotion

One benefit

… and one outcome

That’s it.

Not more. Not less.

Again, don’t confuse the reader. Clarity is king

Do this if your open rates are down

List size means nothing if people are not opening your emails.

Sometimes, it’s because the emails are landing in spam (in which case you might want to check your DNS settings)

And other times…

It’s just because you are sending it to the wrong people, at the wrong time, with a boring subject line.

We used to think that simply blasting out a ton of emails to our list would result in more sales

… but we couldn’t be further from the truth

In fact, the only thing that’ll do is hurt you in the long run

Here are a few ways to increase your open rates and make sure your emails are actually getting read

1) Segment your list & Remove unengaged subscribers from the list

Segment it out by the subscribers who have been most engaged over a 14-day or 30-day period (or longer). Also, take a look at the subscribers who haven’t been engaging with your emails and take them out.

2) Spend more time on writing your subject lines and avoid buzz/spammy words 

Again, clarity is king.
And every marketer worth his salt knows that the headline/subject line is the most important part of your copy

3) Personalize your subject lines and add curiosity to them

This is self-explanatory

4) Ask people to reply to your emails

Replying to emails sends a signal to the ESP that you’re not sending spam.

The hard part however is actually getting people to reply to your emails. Here, you need to be creative.

PS: If you want to help our open rates - then don’t forget to reply to this email too 😉 

5) Segment out your apple-users for better and more accurate data on your open-rates

Ad of The Week

This was one of our best performing ads last week.

What made it work so well?

We combined UGC-creators’ ability to hook people into the video, and then used authentic customer testimonials to convince people why they should buy our product.

This tactic was recommended to us by the team at Insense - who have been helping us in sourcing top-notch creators to mix “Fake UGC” with “Real UGC” like the video below.

Try it out this week, and let us know how it works out for you