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Daniel Peleg: A Brief Intro
Hey, e-commerce fans, did you know that only 2% of your traffic is actually converting into actual sales? What happened to the other 98% you might ask? So today I’m interviewing my friend, Daniel Peleg who runs Email Composed, which is an agency that is specializing in helping eCommerce businesses to get more sales by setting up and optimizing their email marketing efforts. And by doing so, they are able to actually catch upto 16% of your traffic by converting them into email marketing leads, which they then can nurture and further convert into actual sales. Today, in this episode, Daniel will be sharing how he’s doing so.
- How he is optimizing and setting up Opt-ins, automations, email flows and he’s also talking about advanced strategies to capture email leads with paid advertisement.
- How he’s setting up abandonment flows, not only one but three, and he gives out much more golden nuggets in this podcast.
If you want to connect with Daniel, we have a Facebook group. Daniel will be also part of that group. And this is only for e-commerce owners so feel free to join us.
Episode Highlights
At Email Composed, we have a program where we build and implement an email marketing strategy that covers the entire customer journey. Not just the first purchase that comes from ads, but really strengthening, repeat purchases and lifetime value through email automations and campaigns. We can boost the brand’s overall revenue by 25% to 40%. (7:53)
If you’re a new store and don’t have a popup yet, then definitely get a popup up and running. That way we are able to capture anything from 8% to 16% of the visitors, as opposed to just maybe 2% who actually convert into buyers. (13:50)
We also built a browse abandonment flow for people who just browse some products on the site. These three abandonment flows alone now add around 20K additional revenue for their overall 300K revenue. That’s an additional 20K monthly. (19:25)
We created a new popup that had a more compelling copy and offer, and that, almost overnight, doubled the amount of Facebook traffic that they captured from 3% to 7%. (25:10)
Email Composed Intro
I grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel, aka the startup nation. I actually did work for Israeli tech companies and startup companies for years. At one point I started my entrepreneurial journey and left the country to start a life abroad.
Today, as you mentioned, I run Email Composed, which is a team of email experts that help direct to consumer e-com brands to grow and to scale using email and SMS strategies. Outside of that, I love health and fitness.
I’m a foodie, trying to balance being foodie with eating healthy—pretty challenging. I’m also doing workouts at the gym, generally growing and developing. We’ve known each other for about six years now and we live in the same city, but not every day, we get to sit and deep dive into our favorite topic. So, I’m excited to get started.
Daniel Peleg: The Beginnings Of Content Marketing
I got into email marketing by a chance encounter. About 13 years ago, I was working in a marketing department of a financial services company. We weren’t actually doing much in terms of emails, more like SEO and ads. We became friends with one of our clients and he told me about this new thing—selling online courses. He knew a guy who was making millions selling those courses to his email list.
Wow. Now, info products were still a new thing back then. I thought, “Hmm, that’s an interesting idea, I’m open to exploring.” Long story short, we ended up working together as business partners and managed to accumulate quite a huge email list. That was the basis for the business.
After six years of working together, I sold my share to my business partners. Since then, I’ve launched a few other businesses for which email was always one of the main revenue drivers for the business. The few attempts I made that weren’t email based, failed. At some point I took the hint and just made email my main focus.
Why Ecommerce? Why Now?
At the beginning, we just served everyone like a SAS company. We had some coaches and consultants, but at some point, people reached out from my network who had eCommerce businesses and we helped them.
We worked with them and I noticed that the value add of email marketing in eCommerce was so huge that it’s almost natural for me to want to transition to that. Right now, our team helps exclusively only direct to consumer brands that are already established. They have a product that sells and they have traffic to their site. Typically, it’s an annual revenue of seven to eight figures.
A lot of e-com brands have serious challenges growing the revenue and scaling because of things like ad costs going up and iOS updates. Also, because of revenue leaks in different parts of their customer journey, which is something that you are also super familiar with.
At Email Composed, we have a program where we build and implement an email marketing strategy that covers the entire customer journey. Not just the first purchase that comes from ads, but really strengthening, repeat purchases and lifetime value through email automations and campaigns. We can boost the brand’s overall revenue by 25% to 40%.
At Email Composed, we have a program where we build and implement an email marketing strategy that covers the entire customer journey. Not just the first purchase that comes from ads, but really strengthening, repeat purchases and lifetime value through email automations and campaigns. We can boost the brand's overall revenue by 25% to 40%.
A big advantage of segmenting, according to how people engage, is having a higher deliverability. Gmail sees that as positive signals that your emails are important and should be delivered to people’s inboxes. And when you deliver to inboxes, people read your emails.
How Does It Work For New Clients?
Once we have a new client, we onboard them, and we do an in-depth research on the brand, their audience, the content that they have, visual assets, and customer journey. We essentially become experts on that brand. Then the client is assigned a team that consists of an email marketing strategist and a project manager.
These are the people that work directly with the client and they feel like they’re part of the brand’s team. Behind them, there’s also a copywriter, someone who specializes in emails—that’s all they do. No landing pages, sales pages or anything. They’re just focused on email and SMS copywriting.
They have a deep understanding of what works for that channel. And there’s also a graphic designer, quality assurance, and a Klaviyo expert who implements everything in the email platform.
One thing that I structured very intentionally right from the start is that our team is fully remote. We have team members in both the US and Europe time zones, as opposed to traditional office-based agencies. We can source the highest quality talent without limitation of who’s available in our city or state.
Another thing; we structure the communication with the brand in a way that feels like we are part of their in-house team. We’re freeing them up from having to hire a full in-house team to do their emails. They would need an email marketer, an email designer, a Klaviyo expert, and so on. Our team kind of integrates with their own brand.
Tips And Strategies For Newcomers In Email Marketing
It is divided into three parts. The lead capture, collecting the leads that come to visit the site. The automations, which are called flows in Klaviyo and the campaigns, which are one-off sends of emails, usually timely. Black Friday Campaigns are a good example.
Let’s break that down a little bit. So, you have the lead capture stage. It’s where visitors come to your site. The official statistic is that 98% of visitors exit the site without buying and never returning. They just hit the X button and you never see them again. Even though you might have invested a lot in actually bringing that traffic to your site.
What we do at that stage is to create a machine that is designed to capture as many of this traffic as possible and get them into your system, get them into your brand’s ecosystem. The best way, and usual way to do it, is via a popup.
If you're a new store and don't have a popup yet, then definitely get a popup up and running. That way we are able to capture anything from 8% to 16% of the visitors, as opposed to just maybe 2% who actually convert into buyers.
That’s a great start. Now, once we capture them, they are inside our Klaviyo. They’re part of our email list and we start sending them the automated welcome messages.This brings us to the second part, which is the automations, the flows.
This is basically a set of email sequences that are triggered in response to events that are happening. One event that happens—we already talked about that’s when someone registers to your popup and gets into your system—we send them an email that welcomes them to the ecosystem and gets them excited about the brand, about the benefits, etc.
There are other triggers that’s in response to someone abandoning their shopping cart or, someone even having a birthday, things like that. We have a set of automations that we put in place.
The third stage is when we send those one-off campaigns that are more timely, either in response to holidays or events, or simply information, or some interesting emails that we want to send our subscribers to nurture them and get more involved, get the brand to be top of mind with them.
Common Mistakes With Email Marketing Campaigns
Our goal is to capture as much traffic as possible, convert them to buyers, but also, we want to mind the customer experience and be sure to have the best possible customer experience.
One of the biggest mistakes is sending emails that are only sales oriented. Basically, sending one sales email after another, without giving any extra value besides the sale, without giving interesting information or helping your customers solve the problems. Other mistakes can be a little bit more subtle, but I could actually give you an example from a new client that we started working with a few months ago.
It was a supplements brand, and they had a very small in-house marketing team—basically, just a marketing manager and her assistant. They were overstretched as is. When you’re overstretched, you’ll probably dread the thought of planning and creating and scheduling 10 or 20 emails a month to all your segments, nurturing them with value, and so on. Also, creating a flow two with 10 additional emails.
You can imagine that they weren’t able to get good results from their email marketing. They were generating 7% revenue from emails. We aimed to at least triple that revenue, which was very realistic to expect after we’ve seen what they have. The way we approached it was to go for the low-hanging fruits first.
The first few weeks we rebuilt their abandoned checkout flow, which wasn’t bringing as much revenue as it could. If you’re talking about mistakes that businesses make, it’s a lot around abandonment. Whether it’s customers abandoning their checkout or just adding to cart without even checking out, or just browsing the site and leaving, while with some emails, you could actually get them to complete a purchase.
The first thing we did was rebuild their abandoned checkout flow. Then, we also built another flow, which is abandoned, added to cart, which takes care exactly of those instances, where people don’t actually check out, but they added some products to their cart.
That signifies a very strong purchase intent.
We also built a browse abandonment flow for people who just browse some products on the site. These three abandonment flows alone now add around 20K additional revenue for their overall 300K revenue.
We also did a complete rebuild of the post-purchase flow, which is the sequence of emails that you get after you complete the purchase. Most people get this flow wrong. They either just thank the buyer, maybe give some background on the brand, maybe do an upsell, and that’s it. But, that’s a missed opportunity.
We have a few goals for this flow. First of all, we thank new customers or existing customers. We thank them for their purchase. We get them excited about what they purchased. So, we prevent buyers’ remorse. Also, lots of social proof, educating about the benefits and how-to-use. Nurture them throughout more than 10 emails, to start building a relationship with the brand.
In terms of generating more sales, we also cross all additional products that go well with what the person originally purchased. Once we had the flow set up, we took over campaign management. They were sending one or two emails a month, which is also a mistake that a lot of brands do. They don’t send enough emails.
We started gradually ramping that up into between 8 to 10 emails per month for different segments of their audience. Not everyone gets the same email. Now, that’s responsible for around 13% of their overall business revenue. I believe we’ll get that up to 20% in the next few months, as well.
In terms of results after three months of working with them, we’re now adding 32% to their overall business revenue with just the emails that we send. These are typical results.
Paid Ads And Email Marketing: How Do They Work Together?
That’s actually a great combination. But, first of all, emails can actually make the difference between a losing and a profitable media buying campaign. The reason is, Facebook and other platforms are becoming trickier to do profitably, because ad costs are constantly going up and eating up your margin, especially in the era of post-iOS 14; when you increase your budget, you often hit a wall where your ROI goes down and a cost per acquisition goes up.
Now, you’re barely breaking even on the front end or you’re even losing on the front end. But, you’re hoping to become profitable on repeat purchases.
But, for that, you need the most efficient machine working in the background to generate those repeat purchases. And that’s where emails come to the rescue. We have these two machines working together—the machine that brings the traffic to your site, which is your expertise, and then the machine behind the scenes converts them into either the first purchase or the repeat purchase. If the first machine hasn’t converted them already into a purchase, in the first place.
I can give you an example. We recently started working with a skincare brand. Their CPAs were going up and their ad campaigns were breaking. The revenue had been cut from 150K monthly to around 70K. They came to us because they realized that they needed a stronger email backend to generate strong repeat sales.
At that point, out of the 70K, emails generated about 5%. Less than 4k per month or so. What we’ve done is to first capture as much of the traffic as possible from their campaigns, from their ads.
We created a new popup that had a more compelling copy and offer, and that, almost overnight, doubled the amount of Facebook traffic that they captured from 3% to 7%.
Then, we completely redid their lead capture flow, to convert as many of those leads to first purchase. On top of that, we took care of the other parts of their backend conversion journey. We did it with flows such as winback and replenishment, and also by starting to send campaigns on a regular basis.
Within about three months of working together, they got a revenue increase of 26% from emails. Now, they regain their margin and there’s more cash for ads. From then on, they were able to scale their ads profitably. We were sending campaigns and not just flows. We wanted to create a more longer term relationship with customers. That way, each cold visitor that you paid for with the ads has a much higher chance of converting into a customer, and after that, convert them into a repeat customer and ideally a brand advocate.
We have a strategy for engaging dormant customers. We’re talking about people who haven’t purchased in a long while, and this is where it can dig gold by just having an automated process for it.
One way to do it is with a winback flow, which a lot of brands actually have already in their Klaviyo. But, we’ve taken it a step further. In Klaviyo, we created a segment of customers who are unengaged for several months, and then we exported them as a retargeting list. Then, we ran ads to retarget and get them back to the site. On the site, we display a targeted popup just for them with an exclusive offer. Something like, “Here’s your welcome back gift.” You can see the revenue rolling in from otherwise lost customers.
Sending Too Much Emails Or No?
The best practice is to send three to four emails a month, one to two emails a week. But, this is not a cookie cutter. You need to really look at your brand and your audience and do some testing. What we would usually do is, we start with one email per week. If the email is interesting enough, if it’s valuable—if it’s not just for the purpose of selling them something. Then, people would like it and will engage with it
It’s never too much because you’re actually giving people value. The value could be either with information about things they care about, solutions to their problems, or even just entertainment, something fun or intriguing. Whenever you send value, it’s never too much. Of course, you need to keep the frequency within something that your audience would like.
Some brands send an email once a week, and that’s totally fine. Some brands send three to four emails a week and it works for them—but it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. What you need to do is start with one email per week. If that goes well and you don’t have a lot of unsubscribes, your spam rate is low and you get good open rates.
Then you can try adding another email, like a second email per week, see how the stats are, wait for a few weeks and analyze your stats. If you see that this still works well, you can either continue or even ramp up the number of emails, but if not, one email per week is great.
Optimizing After Setting It All Up
First of all, Klaviyo is a great platform because the tools that they give you for analyzing and optimizing your revenue, and performance in general, your deliverability—it’s top notch. You can’t get any better than that.
First of all, we examine the stats on a weekly basis and see how our open rates are. If there is an issue with open rates, then you need to look at your subject lines, you need to look at the people you send to. Are you sending to the right people? Are you sending to people who are engaged? If someone hasn’t opened your emails for a few months, then it might not be a good idea to send them an email. You can exclude them.
Then, you get higher open rates. The idea is, just look at your data, analyze them and see what levers you can pull to improve them. The second one is going into what Klaviyo calls, the benchmarks menu, or the benchmarks facility in Klaviyo. There, you can compare your own stats, whether it’s for flows, campaigns, SMS, or even the general business stats, like your average cart value.
You can compare them to other brands that are similar to yours. They take a sample of brands that are around your revenue bracket and around your average order value, and some other stats. They compare them with your stats and they give you an indication whether you should improve your open rates.
Should you improve your unsubscribed rates? Do you have any problems with the order value, the conversion rate of the emails, anything that you can think of…? You will get a lot of good hints on what you need to optimize. What are the problem areas? You go into testing mode—split test—as much as possible. You never know what works. You can have a great, wonderful theory about, let’s say, emojis in your subject line, “Oh, people would love it.” But, you never know. You never know for your specific audience, as well. You need to always test. Once you do the split test—which is also very easy to do in Klaviyo—you get an idea of what works.
Customer Segments: Recommendations
Segmentation in Klaviyo means that you are sending emails that are targeted for specific parts of your audience, either according to their engagement, their properties, or things that make them unique in some way. Let’s start with engagement, because it’s what most people do.
You want to send emails to people who are engaging with your emails and avoid sending them to people who either became dormant or haven’t purchased for a long while. You can be very targeted with them as well.
For example, if you have a lot of people who were first time purchasers and then didn’t purchase anything for a year, you can have a campaign targeted for them. But, it doesn’t mean that you should send them each and every campaign.
What we do is, we define just a particular segment for people who have either opened our emails within the last month, two months, or three months. We target only them, or if they clicked on an email, we can put them inside that engage-segment, as well.
There are a few other criteria. For example, if they purchase within a certain period. This is one aspect of segmentation, just going for people who are involved with our brand, and we want to communicate with them more. That gives us two things.
First of all, we don’t annoy people who are not interested in our emails. And the second thing, we help our deliverability. Meaning, how much our emails are being delivered to recipients, Gmail and other service providers.
They look at engagement metrics. They see if the people that you send emails to—are they opening your emails? Are they clicking them? Are they marking them as spam? Gmail looks at it, and if they see that a lot of people are not engaging with your emails, they will just assume your emails are uninteresting or even spam. And they will move your emails to the spam, which lowers your deliverability.
Gmail sees higher deliverability as a positive signal that your emails are important and should be delivered to people's inboxes. And when you deliver to inboxes, people read your emails.
The second part has to do with sending the right message to the right people.
Let’s say you are a pet supplements brand, and you have customers who are dog parents, and some customers who are cat parents. If you just send everyone the same campaign with dog and cat food, you’re breaking the number one rule of marketing, which is—send the right message to the right people, at the right time.
What you can do is to identify the customers who are dog parents, put them in a segment, and then dedicate campaigns for them. When you have the second segment of cat parents, you send them dedicated emails. That’s just an example. You can find a lot of other properties about customer’s interests.
For example, if it’s a skincare brand, you can send a quiz or have one on your site. Basically, it will segment them according to their skin type or their certain preferences that they have. Be sure to send emails that are relevant only to them.
Resources To Help People Starting Out
I think Klaviyo is doing a great job at educating the BTC community about email marketing. My go-to recommendation for anyone looking to learn more about email marketing: go to the Klaviyo website. They have both beginner and advanced tutorials there. Also, our aim at Email Composed is to also educate and share the knowledge that we’ve gained from working with so many brands.
We do that both on our blog and also on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. I tweet regularly with email marketing tips and strategies. Twitter is a great place to both learn and connect with people who are at the top of the marketing game, in the BTC world.
I’d highly recommend it for anyone who’s not there yet—to jump on board.
