Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to let you know upfront that this
episode has been made in partnership with mailchimp, which means it's a
sponsored episode and I've been paid to produce this conversation. I want to be
transparent about that because the whole point of this podcast is to give you genuinely
useful information you can actually act on. I only partner with brands
where I believe there's something really valuable for independent retailers and small
businesses. And as you'll hear today, that's absolutely the case here.
All of the views and reflections you hear from me are my own. Right, let's
get into it. It's a really great in depth conversation.
If you run a retail business or an e commerce brand, chances are you
already have some form of email marketing set up. You're sending
newsletters, maybe the old promotional email, and it's doing something,
but probably not as much as it could be. Welcome
to the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Catherine Edley and in the next few
minutes you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies
from insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by
my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn how
to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump in
with this latest episode. Here's what I see again and
again when I talk to independent retailers. They're sitting on a gold mine of
customer data and not using it. They're sending the same message to everyone
on their list, regardless of what those people have bought, when they last
bought, or what they're actually interested in. And as a result, they're working
harder than they need to, spending more than they should on customer acquisition and leaving
a huge amount of repeat revenue on the table. Today I'm
sitting down with Ali Wood from mailchimp to get practical about how small
retail businesses can get more from their email and SMS marketing
using the data that they already have. There are some genuinely eye
opening numbers in this conversation and some really interesting ways of looking at things that
you might not have thought of before. Thank you so much
for joining me, Ali. I can't wait to jump in and I'd love
to jump straight into the weeds. If you look at small business
retailers or e commerce brands right now, what do you think some of
the biggest challenges are that they're facing when it comes to marketing and actually
driving profitable growth? Yeah, I think it's a great
question to jump into. I think for a lot of the customers
that we speak to and the brands that we see, it's about measuring and
optimizing customer acquisition. I think there's so many different
channels at the moment and different places that you can
keep your data, track your data and if it's not, it's just
fragmented. Right. So if you haven't got everything talking to each other,
it's really difficult to then kind of figure out like
where your ROI is and where you should be investing your money.
Interestingly, one of the things that we've seen is that, you know,
brands really want to invest in being able to grow their
lists and they know that they need to now start capturing more
information. So like phone numbers for example, for like messaging.
But actually customers are getting a lot more protective over where they,
you know, where they want to put their data and who they want to give
it to. So it's kind of a bit like, you know, it's
competing. Right. So how do you kind of like cut through the noise and get
your message heard? I guess it's one of those things, isn't it, when cost
of acquisition is low and it's easy to get
customers and in a way, not that you can be more, you don't have
to be as focused, but the more expensive it gets, the more you have to
get it right, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you think about
it, you're like, you're investing in channels, you've got channels to invest in, which is
great, but then how do you know what channel is driving what? And I think
if like really good example would be like, you know, if you're doing some sort
of like targeting and you get someone that you have a niche product and you
know they're really interested in that product, you send them some great email content,
I don't know, say like skiwear and then they go to your website, they look
at the ski wear, but then you get a pop up that says 10% off
and then they click on that. Then how do you now know that they are
interested in the skiwear but they've clicked on your 10%
pop up? So you know, there's lots of kind of like conflicting
ways in which the data, if you've not got it under some sort
of like unified platform and if you're not tagging it correctly, you don't have
the right understanding of the customer. What Ali's
describing there is something I see constantly with retailers I work with.
Data coming in from multiple places, none of it talking to each other. And
founders making big decisions about their marketing spend almost completely
blind. That fragmentation problem was exactly what drove
mailchimp to rethink their platform and what they built in response is really
interesting because it wasn't just about giving teams more data
to look at. I think for us, a lot of it
is around, you know, progressing from being a very sort of like basic email
tool to something that is like much more automated
and something that's going to give you the data insights that you need. Because what
we kept hearing time and time again is, I'm really frustrated. I have a
small team, I they're stretched thin. I
don't really have necessarily the bandwidth to manage
all of the processes that I need to manage. And
then when you put data into that as well, there's a huge amount of data.
So I'm collecting this data, but how do I put it together?
And I need a tool that's going to be able to kind of give me
some real, real insights, but then also make it really easy for me to
use that with a very lean team. So one of the things
as well was though, you've got your data coming in, you've
got the actual process of email marketing and messaging that you need
to do, but then you've also got the ROI piece hanging over the top of
it. So, you know, if I've got a small team, am I making
the right investments? How do I know that this investment has
driven success for me? And I think one of the
things that's really easy to get hung up on is what did this specific
email drive for me or what did this specific
social media campaign drive? Whereas it's kind of now,
because you've got all of these different avenues, you need to look at it as
a more like, kind of like holistic approach and say, what did that strategy
do for me? How many new users did that strategy drive me? Or
how much engagement did I get from existing customers through
that strategy? Because everything's so kind of linked
and it's really hard to build a picture of that if you haven't
actually got a platform that's got all of that data linked to it.
So we expanded our e commerce capabilities, so we've got
about 26% more triggers. And so that basically
that means then that what businesses can do is automate more
intelligently using the data that they have. And one
of the things that I like around that is kind of looking at two things.
You're looking at customer lifetime value, which is hugely important,
but then you're also looking at what's the propensity of this subset of
customers that could be spending more with me are more likely
to buy a specific time. And so
the platform and the AI is giving you that data and then you're
kind of, it's automating that process so you can kind of focus more on
the creativity around it and message that you want to send to people.
So, yeah, super exciting. But ultimately what we're trying to
do is just get teams to run faster, get the AI to
review the data that you've got and say, yes,
no, this is where it could be tweaked, maybe do some A B testing
as well. And I think when you're looking at things like, you know, driving in
like loyalty examples into your email marketing strategy, they
kind of go hand in hand really. You know, you've got your loyalty data, you've
got your email data, you've got data coming from your E commerce
platform as well. So ultimately what we want to do is
increase the roi. This last point is
really important and I want to make sure it sinks in. The goal of
better data isn't more reports to read on a Friday afternoon. It's
faster, smarter decisions with less manual effort.
The businesses I see growing right now aren't the ones necessarily with the
biggest teams. They're the ones who found ways to make every
pound of marketing spend work harder. What Ali is describing,
using AI to identify which customers are most likely to buy
again and automating the right message to them at the right time
is exactly how you do that without needing to hire a marketing department.
I'm really surprised at how many customers
still just send the same email to the same person,
to a group of people, rather. Yeah, so, and I think that,
you know, it's kind of really taking it back to what's the basics that I
can do in order to understand my customer base and then
what's the message that they need in the journey that they are in
at the moment. If I'm a customer that bought from you last year and I've
not bought anything in the last 12 months, then you need to win me back.
Something's happened. You can send me a very different message to someone that
bought from you last week. Right. So. So you know, the
customers that bought last week, you want to really engage with them. You want to
get positive sentiment coming from that purchase. So you might want to get
them to make a review of the purchase that they've done, which is why you
need the review data. LinkedIn, you know, if someone's done a review and maybe it's
not as positive as you thought it was going to be, okay. I need that
data and then I can use the tools to automate responses and get them
into the right segments. You know, positive reviewers, negative
reviewers, what's the story that I want to do? And like this is where like
AI becomes really fascinating because you can just set up those kind
of sequences but you can think about what do you need to do in
order for you to engage all of the different types of customers that you've got
in your database. One of the examples I've used a few times, but
I'll say it to you, it's like, especially when you're looking at kind of like
bringing in sms and I know we'll get onto that in a minute, but do
you 100% know who your customer is shopping for? I had, my friend
was shopping for her son for Christmas and then
she gave her phone number. So she was involved into SMS. But
the content of the SMS, the tone of it was geared
towards a 14 year old boy.
Yeah, you know, so it's like, yeah, you're trying to integrate it
but she kind of got that message and it didn't land well, you
know, the tone wasn't right. And so, you know, again that's
like, it's a really interesting way that you can say, right, you know, use pop
ups and things like that. So you know, who are you shopping for? Are you,
is this a gift? Subtle things in order for you to be
able to start building up better pictures of people like without making kind of
assumptions, I think is really important. It's easier said than done,
but with a lot of these tools now that have, you know, things
integrated, you can then start making tags and putting those on them and then
giving them the right story. The
segmentation point that Ali just made is one of the most important
shifts any retailer can make in how they think about email.
Stop treating your list as one group. Start thinking about each
person and where they actually are in their relationship with you.
Someone who bought from you last week needs a completely different conversation
to someone who hasn't opened an email in 6 months. Once you start
designing for those different journeys, your email stops feeling like
broadcasting and starts feeling like a relationship. And that changes
everything about how it performs. And don't forget, even two or three years
ago, this would have been incredibly difficult for you to do. But now
with automation and AI built into email marketing platforms, there's
a real opportunity for small businesses to do more.
Imagine how more effective that message could have been
if they'd have collected more data. You know, are you shopping for someone's birthday, you
know, is it their birthday? Looking around, you know, oh, okay, I can
start looking at the fact that they bought something in May. Maybe their birthday's in
May. Oh, you know, if you've got any birthdays coming up, here's some
offers. It's just being able to kind of think about that next level down in
the data that you're trying to gather. And there's some really creative ways you can
do it now through quizzes and pop ups and you know, and you can do
that through the journey. You know, you've got email that's there
to build your story and tell people about your
brand and keep them connected. You know, longer messages and
then you've got messaging cuts through the noise.
You've got your transactional, you can link it in now to sort of, you know,
like the operational side of things. So your
orders on its way. Thanks for booking your transactional sort of stuff.
But then also kind of cutting through the noise. We've got, you know, we've got
a new drop coming, check your email in a week's time.
There's different mediums kind of coming through. But I think it's
ultimately like if you've spent the money trying to gain a customer and you've
acquired a customer and they've bought from you and they, they like what they've
bought and need to turn that data into sales. So this is really
around where you do have to spend some time on looking at your data and
the insights that you gather there and helping that to inform
what you want to do in your email marketing strategy. In simple
terms, it's kind of like having all of your data in one place, isn't it?
So it's about say so not having to go to each of your like separate
tools. So the more that you can kind of pull data from individual
tools into one place so you can start to build up that picture of someone
then you can start making better informed
decisions and get yourself kind of better insights. I think for
E commerce obviously you know, there's a lot of data in your E comm platform
so how can you pull that into your email marketing
tools and start to build up a picture of
who you've got in your database and also like it's
around how can you start to spot
your, for example like your highest value customers really kind of like
basic segmentation. So I've got all of these customers, okay, but what have
they done? I've got high value buyers, I've got
regular buyers that they buy lots of little things So I know
I could increase their average order value. How do I do that?
Then I've got customers that you know, haven't bought from me
like we mentioned earlier. So then what's kind of like my re engagement
strategy versus what's my engagement strategy? And
then I think the unified piece kind of then also really
brings in like email and SMS and messaging. And
I think before they've been pretty siloed in the sense
that maybe SMS is used to say thanks for your order, your order's on your
way, like your transactional stuff. But now actually if you bring it
into your strategy, like I mentioned earlier, like if you really want
a group of customers to read a specific email that you've created
because it's really important and you really want to tell them something
about your brand, they're going to get, I don't know,
there's like quadruple the amount of emails that you get versus text
messages. Right. So, right. If you can bring SMS
into your strategy to let them know that that email's coming so that they look
out for it. Because what we do know is that
SMS is obviously going to get onto into someone's brain
much quicker than an email in a list. But using the two together,
you can start building out that strategy,
Running an e commerce business, then you know the struggle. Not enough time, too
many tools and no clear picture of what's actually driving sales for
retailers today. Customer acquisition and growth are becoming harder to properly measure
and optimize. That's why I'm interested in what Intuit mailchimp has just
launched. Built to deliver ROI for e commerce brands, their new
advanced data driven capabilities combine unified data with
powerful automation across email and messaging. Now you can pull your
Shopify data site activity and even customer reviews from platforms like
Yotpo and judge me into one place so you can target high value
buyers, re engage at risk customers and automate smarter.
Want to connect the dots between campaigns and revenue? Expanded SMS across
Europe, instant opt ins and unique discount codes help you reach customers globally
and track exactly which messages drive orders. Plus a new
Omnichannel dashboard shows what's working across email, SMS and
automations so you can optimize with confidence. And with AI built in, you
can turn insights into ready to launch campaigns in minutes. Retailers using
Mailchimp are seeing up to 30 times return on investment. And some Shopify
connected stores are generating around £32 for every pound one spent.
Less guesswork, more growth. Visit
www.resilientretailclub.com mailchimp to
learn more. Kind of going back to the idea of the unified
data. So one of the pain points that I see is, is you've touched
on it already. It's this idea of, right, I'm doing all of these things. I'm
sending emails, I'm sending sms, I am also
on socials, Maybe I'm doing organic social, maybe I'm doing ugc,
maybe I'm doing paid ads, Working with content
creators. Yeah, you know, maybe I've got bricks and mortar stores. So there's kind of
like a huge number of different things that they're doing. So I
guess it's then kind of working out. How do they actually work out which
bits were working? Yeah,
exactly. And also where it's not. So where are people dropping off?
If you have separate providers for this stuff, then
you're looking at separate reports, whereas if you bring it all into one
provider, then you can start seeing what the actual plan was. So
it's kind of going back to my original point, which was it's not
necessarily like, how successful was that one SMS or that
one email, but how did it work together as a
strategy to drive views on pages,
click throughs and ultimately purchases.
So I think it is really about trying to have
that overall vision of what you want the customer to go through
and then being able to use the AI that you have within the tools to
stop pulling out the insights so that you can see a
spike when that sms, you know, or we planned that SMS
and then actually we wanted an open rate of 40% on that email and we've
got an open rate of 42 or AB testing where it's
like, okay, well the next one, let's not send the SMS and just send the
email and see what our open rate is. So starting to
use the insights from the tools themselves to then make decisions
on whether it's worked. You have to kind of like pinpoint, I think though,
what does success look like? Because otherwise you're going to get into this, like too
much data. I don't know where to start. You know,
it's kind of very much sort of like take these things segment
by segment and kind of like drive what you're looking for.
What Ali's talking about here is a tactical shift
that unlocks everything else. Pick one goal, build
a strategy around it and measure the whole thing, not just the individual
emails. But so that might look like my goal this month is to
convert new subscribers into buyers within 30 days. I build
a welcome sequence, set my triggers, and then I measure whether that
strategy achieved its goal, not whether any single email got a
decent open rate. That's a completely different way of thinking about email
marketing than what most small retailers are currently doing. And it's
the shift that makes all of the data actually useful.
Also, you can look at things like some people prefer emails, some people prefer
messages, so which ones for which particular segment is working
for you? And last year we did some research which
was like a holiday guide and I thought that was super interesting
because one of the things you need to be thinking about now is everything that
you're doing now. And I hate to mention Christmas, but hey, hey, never
too early to talk about. It's never too early to talk about it.
If you're not engaging with your customers through your email marketing
strategy now, then what's to say that they're going to open your
email when you need them to, when you are really in the thick of it,
trying to drive that traffic that you need at Christmas, for
example. So there has to be some thought process around
that. And then starting to see the engagement rates
and then if you're starting to get engagement rates through certain types
of emails and then starting to test SMS within that
as well. So as you lead up, you know, I don't know, we've got a
bank holiday offer, there's Easter offers or, you know, whatever that
could be, then you can start logging in. I like, one of the things I
that we like is that, you know, people that like discounts are there.
People that only ever open up your emails if they're mentioned, if they're mentioning
discounts or your SMS, like, you know, oh, here's
5% off. Oh, I've clicked on that SMS. Okay, so you
know that they're driven by price. What have they then done on
your website that you can then pull that data from your Ecom platform
and then start putting that into your email marketing? Because it might be, oh,
I know that they're interested in, in a discount, but actually have not shown them
the right, the right product that they're interested in, for
example. So it's all these kind of like minutias. And
let's not forget that, you know, with the cost of
obtaining emails and the cost of
every other type of marketing to drive new
contacts into your base, once you've got them there, you can send as many
emails as you want. Like this is, you're free to rain.
So, you know, go through that data and test things
out and build out those relationships.
We've touched on SMS a few times, but I'D love to dig into it in
a little bit more detail because it has really evolved over the last few years.
Yeah. So how do you see it fitting alongside email?
Like what's the kind of best practice or what's working for e commerce brands right
now in terms of the combination? Yeah, I think it's, it's so it's definitely
around it not being just a standalone solution.
It's definitely something that needs to be worked into your overall marketing
strategy. And one of the things that we're seeing a lot of now is
around kind of like instant SMS opt ins.
So, so I think what we've been seeing is people have been
collecting emails and collecting phone numbers, but
not necessarily collecting the same thing from one person. And so
we've kind of now got email list and SMS lists. So we kind of need
to bring all of that together into unified data.
So being able to kind of like use pop ups to start getting phone
numbers and then linking that back to your, you know, your contacts.
One of the things I like is it's becoming a lot more
operationalized so you can link it through, through data, you can
link it to the customer journey. Thank you for your order.
Or we noticed I, I had a really great one recently where a brand
had said, I know you've looked at this product a lot
and sure you don't want to buy it, you know, sent me the link
and you know, picture of whatever I was looking at
at the time. Um, but what it means is that
now because before it was very sort of, you know, operational of the
transactional side of things, but now actually it's in the marketing team's hands and
they can get the right tone and keep the same tone as
the email marketing strategy. Because I don't think there's anything worse than
sort of like the text message just looking like it's from someone you've never
known, whereas the email's really curated. So that's really
nice that it can start to kind of become
one and feel like the same. If someone
gives a brand or a company their phone number,
they are that is there and explicitly saying to you I want to hear
from you. That's a concept that it's worth really
pausing and thinking about for a minute. When someone hands over their phone
number, they're extending a level of trust that is
qualitatively different from giving you their email address. The bar
for how you use it is higher and as you're about to hear, so are
the returns when you get it right. So I think Being sort
of like creative around what you, you know the topic that you can use to
do re engagement and like to put that into perspective. So like what does a
28% click through rate mean? Well for that particular business it was like
8,000 new MRR. So
a huge amount. And I think what we're seeing as well around sort of like
on the performance side with sms they're divi. It's kind of
delivering about sort of like 22 times ROI
when you're using SMS with mailchimp
and actually even then when you bring kind of like shopify into that we're seeing
sort of returns around 41 times the actual initial investment.
So huge, huge numbers. So I think if anyone is
thinking about it you should definitely give it a go and
use tools that have got a B testing to start like
plan and help you just you know, start small.
You'll see really good numbers and then you can kind of grow with,
grow with the tools as you get more comfortable using them and, and kind of
think about those use cases, right? Think about those segments who could start with who
are the low hanging fruit? Maybe like you say the people who were good customers
you haven't bought for a while or something like that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
You know who are your most loyal, your most engaged? Do you have their phone
numbers? If not, you know, use your email marketing strategy to
drive that engagement and get that data. Think about what you then want
to offer them through for giving you that data. It's kind of like, it's
always like a give to get, you know, you give me your phone number, what
am I going to give you? This is you know, and I always think as
well like even if you're taking it back to the bones of people sitting there
thinking oh I've got a massive database but I've got a really small
engagement rate. Okay, well maybe you need some new, a
new, new people. So what can you give that? So if
you, I think the wine guide's a really good example or you know, if
you are you know, booking hotel rooms, you know,
like explain what, you know, local area guides. I don't
know what think about the value exchange for
someone giving you the personal information and how then you can
make that email be seen within the inbox or the
sms. I mean the SMS is, is pretty much seeing the stats there prove
that. But I think with email, you know, again you can, this is where you
can use AI within email which is going to start doing you know,
helping you improve like a lot of the content
but then the marketing team can start adding on top of that around
tone imagery. I mean, and even like, sort
of like we integrate into Canva. So like all your imagery can just really be
sort of like edited over into emails as well. So
it's kind of a little bit too easy at the moment.
Well then it's gotta be about the quality of the message, right? Exactly, exactly.
What's coming next for small business marketing? Obviously so many
changes at the moment, but how do you think it will change over the next
few years? Where do you think it's going? I mean, you can't not
say AI, can you? In answer to this question. Really?
Yeah. You know, lean teams can use AI
to think about like the, the functional
side of things. But to your point that you just mentioned, it's like how do
you then use your, the human assistance to lay over
that to make sure that you've got the brand tone,
that your strategy that you're considering is, is
relevant and the journey that you want to take your customers on? I think for
me the journey, even as a consumer, if I think about
that, I think that's really valuable and really potent. So
if I engage with the brand and I'm not sure I've never shopped with them
before, but then they build my confidence, you know, this is how easy it is
to return. This is why we, you know, this is why our business is here.
This is, these are our values. And you start getting engaged with that.
You can automate those journeys that I'm going to go through and you can
concentrate, the humans can concentrate on the messaging so that the
messaging is really like interactive for me. So
I think it's a lot around that. And I think again, like we have to
kind of like circle back to how do you unify the data?
The data is only going to grow. So how do you make sure that you've
got right tools to be able to analyze
and also like to be able to, you know, we do say to quite a
few of our customers around cleansing data quite regularly. So I think
actually like, you know, we've gone through, we need to collect all the data,
but actually doing a nice cleanse and then seeing where
you're at and looking at some of the gaps that you want to
fill or potentially outline those ones that have, you know,
you think that you can re engage is much
more successful than just blasting everyone, looking at
who you've got on your lists and making sure that they, that they still exist.
Number one, because yes, a certain number of email addresses just become obsolete each
year because people change and then. And also that they're
still interested and that you're only sending to the people who have the
potential to be engaged. Really? Yeah, I think so, if you look at it. So
it's sort of like bringing your data together and making sure that it's clean
data, automating as much as you can through the
AI tools and then reviewing with your analytics
and, you know, keeping that circle going. And then you've got like your amazing
humans that work within your business to get your tone and
your brand. So here's what I'm taking away from this
conversation. The retailers who are going to win over the next few years aren't the
ones with the biggest budgets or the biggest teams. They're the ones who are the
smartest about the data that they already have. Clean your data,
connect it across your platforms, use it to understand what different
groups of customers need from you, and then automate the right message to the
right person at the right time. If you're not yet using
SMS alongside email, the numbers Ali shared today are worth
taking seriously. 22 times return on investment on
SMS alone and 41 times when you bring your Shopify data into
the mix. Those aren't vanity metrics. Those are the kind of numbers that can
fundamentally change the economics of a small retail business.
If this has got you thinking about your own strategy, come and find me over
on Instagram at Resilient Retail Club and drop me a message. I'd love to hear
what you're going to try first. And if you're feeling overwhelmed and now, like your
to do list is even bigger, don't forget you can start small. You can start
with one small step. You don't have to do everything all at once.
You can also head over to resilientretailclub.com
mailchimp to find out all about the Mailchimp platform. See
you next week.