– Ecommerce brands making less than $5 million should avoid hiring an email agency as email marketing is considered dated, templated, and boring.
– Many email agencies are guessing and a spreadsheet can do a better job of outlining email marketing strategies.
– A significant portion of email subscribers may be wasted or unrealized money, and email design is not as important as understanding email numbers and profitability.Skip hiring an email agency and instead spend time creating segments in your ESP to identify unengaged subscribers. Focus on retention rather than constantly pushing sales and offers. Consider investing the $5k a month in other areas and collect more data during signup to create more interesting email campaigns.E-commerce brands making less than $5 million should skip an email agency. Email is dated, templated, and boring. There are any number of posts that state that you, as a brand, should spend $2k – $5k a month for an agency to create 2 emails per week for you, with rates of $6k – $12k for flows. THIS IS MADNESS. I’ve talked to tons of email agencies, and they are all guessing. I have a spreadsheet that does a better job of outlining email marketing than most of them. We’ll add it to our website soon. We’ve been brainwashed to accept the numbers that ESPs provide about the ROI on email as a channel without any mention of the cost to acquire the email address. Lesson time – Go into your ESP and create 3 segments off your main list. 1. People who have never opened an email over all time 2. People who have only opened 1 email over all time 3. People who have only opened 2 emails over all time. Now add those together. I just did this, and my number came out to 60%. I then looked at those that had clicked, and it was 35% over all time. At this point, I believe more than half the list is wasted money or unrealized money, however you want to look at it. But odds are if you’ve started on a track, you’re not likely to convert them past 45 days. So keep that in mind. Spend the 10 mins and create the segments yourself. But Jon, what about the design quality? I think design has a place and time, but again, most of this can be done reusing a basic template. Email isn’t an experience. The only people that gush about email design are email marketers and brands that want things to be pretty yet don’t know their email numbers. Then there’s the revenue v. profit question that everyone avoids. Great business gets 30% profit margins end of the day. Now let’s keep in mind, these subscribers showed intent, signed up (usually for a discount so high intent with a high likelihood of purchasing anyway), and now the agency is taking credit. Email is a guaranteed money maker, but 95% of the time it comes down to timing on the buyer’s part if there is no offer. Add an offer, and you’ve reduced your margins. Last note on this, statistically only 20% of people will shop more than 1x at your shop. Email is one channel to try to make people come back but as we saw, the majority of your list simply isn’t opening your emails and those that do are already clicking through.This is the shift in narrative to email being a retention channel, yet to this day all I see is sales, offers, bundles, gifts, and other things asking me to come back. That’s desperation and bribery, not marketing. You’d be better off bucking the trend and trying something new and spending the $5k a month some other place. At the least, collect more data during signup so you have half a chance of putting together something interesting.Thanks to 📧🧲 Adam Kitchen for inspiring this post.#emailmarketing #ecommerce #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco