Leveraging E-Commerce Websites

Music

Thomas: Welcome everybody to another episode of Greyd Conversations. Today’s episode is all about e-commerce. E-commerce from a technical perspective as well as from a marketing perspective. And with me in today’s show is Greg from Omnisend, and he’s an e-commerce expert. Greg, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Greg: Doing well, Thomas, I hope you are. And I’m excited to be here. I’m going to rely on you for the technical today. I’ll handle the marketing. We’ll see where we can find some synergies right in the middle there.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Synergies are the most important thing when it comes down to building a successful e-commerce business, where we have the technical part as well as the marketing part and everything needs to be together. So maybe, introduce yourself to our audience a bit and talk about what you’re doing at Omnisend.

Greg: Sure thing. So Omnisend, for those unfamiliar, we are an email and SMS marketing automation platform, built for kind of users of all levels. So especially in the SMB space, so small mid-sized businesses. But we have solopreneurs that are doing everything themselves all the way up to enterprise companies. Super intuitive platform. So if you’ve used any sort of marketing platform before, you’ll be familiar with how to how to use Omnisend.

And then we are just, a legit platform here. So 24 / 7 live customer support, regardless if you’re on a free plan, a paid plan. We integrate with plug and play integrations of most e-commerce platforms so either if you want WooCommerce, you know, Shopify of those, natures, we integrate with WordPress. So, check us out. We’re here. We’re open people.

Myself, I’ve been with Omnisend for a little over five years now, helping them grow. I’ve been in email marketing for almost 20 years now. I think I’m 19 plus, so it’s been a really long time to build that email game. So a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have stayed the same. But as technology moves, as you would know, Thomas…

Thomas: Yeah.

Greg: …everything else kind of has to follow suit and fit in with that. And that’s why we’re talking today.

Thomas: Nice. Since you already mentioned WooCommerce: a lot of our customers, especially with Greyd, use WooCommerce as their technical base for the web platform or the web shop itself. Since we are a software, which enables customers to build WordPress websites on a no code to low code base, we’re very much integrated into all sorts of e-commerce solutions inside of WordPress, especially WooCommerce.

So, for example, we made it possible in WooCommerce that you basically can build any part of the WooCommerce webshop interface with blocks, with the newly introduced site editor already. So it’s very easy actually to build custom-made solutions. For WooCommerce and for WordPress with our solution.

And, one of the topics I want to talk to you about, especially when we’re talking about keeping our customers or the customers of web shops basically as long as possible in our shop experience, in the whole shopping funnel, so to say, is, for example, that we’re, trying to achieve almost every time tailor-made content for them. And as I understand correctly, you at Omnisend to do the same thing with, for example, messaging, with emails, sort of that. So how do you achieve that?

Greg: Yeah. So you touched on something. We can probably spend four hours talking about this, the technology side. Right. So you want people to be able to scale with the business as the business grows.

We’re in a tough economic time right now, economic uncertainty right now. So as you imagine, keeping customers around longer than ever, it’s more important now, especially on a day to day side. But the goal here is that you can’t scale a business if you don’t have the technology in place. And those technologies we have, you know, a lot of companies will have 5 to 20 different vendors doing different things that those things all need to integrate with.

So when it comes to marketing, especially email marketing, which is typically a lower cost, high ROI channel, that’s got to integrate really well with the Ecom platform. So, you know, if you focus on, say, dynamic content on a web page, or product recommendations, things like that, you want those things to carry over to your emails as well.

But you want to make it easy for the user to actually build those things, right? So yeah, I, joke around, I’ve said I’ve been in email for 20 years. You know, I remember doing segmentation 18 years ago and we’d have to send a request to our IT department, do a MySQL, you know, what are the query or whatever to get the segments back. And now you can just go in there and, you know, we have AI that’ll build segments for you, but pre-built segments, right.

So the user has to be able to go in there very quickly. Use the Ecom data. So whether that’s purchase data, whether it’s browsing behavior, whatever it is, apply that over and integrate that into your email marketing campaigns, your SMS marketing campaigns. Do that in a couple clicks to make, you know, time efficient decisions and time efficient marketing campaigns, so that you can sell more.

And, you know, it’s a very high level view of it. But, you know, everything you guys are doing, we need to do on our side. We need to make sure we’re talking back and forth. And regardless of what e-commerce platform you use, what email provider you’re using, those things are kind of imperative. You gotta have them. Otherwise it’s patchwork, right? And it’s going to be so hard to scale.

Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to automate these kind of processes, because whether it’s because you have a small team and you’re just starting out with building your own platform, starting out to reach out to the customers through several channels. I mean, it comes down to the amount of people you have to work with at the end of the day. On the other side, if you’re successful and you build up a successful e-commerce platform, then you could be overwhelmed with customers coming, actually. And then you have the other problem, which is, okay you got the customers, you got the purchases. But, yeah, you want to grow, you want to scale over time. And that’s the quite important factor.

Greg: Yeah. So I know we’re going to talk about automation today. So I don’t want to jump in. But you touched right. What you just said there. You touched on a really big thing. When I did consulting with clients, I used to kind of run into this as well. You get the customer and a lot of people go, oh, mission accomplished, right? We got the sale.

There’s so much that comes after that, that if you don’t focus on those things, you’re going to churn that customer, you’re going to be paying retargeting dollars to get that customer back. But you already paid to get them the first time. So I know we’ll touch on this today, but you hit on that. You hit the nail on the head perfectly by saying automate as much as possible and have the tools do the work for you. I know we’re going to get into that today. So that little Easter egg for people.

Thomas: Yeah, maybe this could be, actually the first perfect time to actually do a little screen share as well. Since you already, mentioned the possibility to, the thing what to do with the revisiting customer. We already had one sale with that specific customer. We have some information about him. So what was the last purchase?

For example, when he visits our our shop again, we could give him a welcome message, a welcome back message. For example, if we had some data stored in a cookie or somewhere else, we know what he has purchased. So maybe we already know a product which would fit perfect in that sense of his first purchase, for example. And therefore, we, at Greyd, we have a couple of solutions.

So, since we already talked about doing something with revisiting customers where they might already have purchase some of our products in our shop, we have already some data, which we can work on. And therefore, we have actually developed a solution by accident. And, Greg, you might already know conditions, for example inside of form fields. So you type in something in a form field A, get response B, for example.

And what we did is, as I told you, by accident, we developed a solution to make this possible, in an entire website scale. So we made conditions based on the different, for example, UTM parameters like ads, campaigns or cookies or user role informations available in a WordPress website. So, for example, in my screen share I will show you real quick what, for example, could happen if a user already, bought something for his living room and we now know, okay, he might be interested in some new sofa, some new couches, and we want a specifically give him, for example, a voucher or an offer with like, 70% off of all our new arrivals of couches.

So currently, by standard, we have 40% off of selected sofas on our website. And now, if we are a revisiting, user who has already maybe subscribed to a newsletter or clicked on some email marketing campaign, we can send them over with a parameter, for example, or with a cookie. And in this case, we could go with “sale equals true” as an example. And we scroll down and instead of 40% off of selected sofas, we now have 70% off if selected sofas.

We update accordingly all of our selected products in the shop itself. And he can look over what we have available in here, like the sofa or other products. And for example, if we know more about the customer and if we know the customer needs maybe more products on this homepage directly, we could even customize this by some other parameters. I will show that in the backend, because it’s really easy to do, as I already mentioned, we are a no-code to low-code solution.

We don’t rely on actual coding skills to build something like that. We have our blocks here, our structure of the website, and therefore you see our solution, which is our custom block “conditional content”, where we can specifically activate and deactivate content on specific kinds of conditions, for example, parameters. Like an individual parameter in our case here. Or we could use Google campaign parameters, form opt-in, opt-out. This is always a matrix.

So we can do if / when cycles if we want that. We can as well nest these elements. And if we want to give our visitor more options, we could for example, instead of using this section, which is currently displayed when a specific filter isn’t set, if we use the parameter “filter equals true”. We could even display this in the parameter chain and let’s say filter equals true. And instead of that section down below, now we have all of our products available.

Even with a live frontend filtering, which we could set up based on product categories. or some other taxonomies. Wer’e completely flexible in that to give the user an utmost, completely customized user experience on the frontend. In your opinion, when we’re talking about marketing campaigns or newsletters or stuff like that, I mean, what do you think about that solution in combination with the Omnisend tools?

Greg: Yeah, so first of all, I think the solution is important, right? Because it underscores the fact that people want a relevant shopping experience. And that means marketing messages. That means browsing experience, means a search experience. Whatever they’re doing. Excuse me. So what I like about that is… I love, by the way that it’s furniture, because that’s the one thing. It’s probably a really good use case for to say, okay, I’ve gone to your website, I bought a brown couch.

If I’m back on your website, chances are I’m not shopping for a brown couch again. I already bought a couch. It’s a high end ticket. But I’m back on our website. So what am I looking at? Maybe the accessories? Coffee tables? Is it throw pillows? Is it whatever it might be? So I always talk about high intent, right? We talk about high intent stages of the journey. I’m on your website. There’s some sort of intent. It doesn’t have to be high, but there is an intent. There’s a reason I’m there. So I just want to say that, because it’s important that if we can get you from one place to another and we give that relevant experience, then we could use that same old and experience to tie future marketing campaigns into it. So how I look at a couple of different ways to answer a question.

One, we can use, say you have a pop up that comes up, right. So we can put parameters in that pop up through Omnisend, and you can have, okay, where they come from. Right. So you can put a UTM in there. Did they come from Facebook, TikTok, whatever. And you can have then cross-reference that with are they a current subscriber? Are they not a subscriber? Are they a customer? Are they not a customer? Right.

A couple of little toggles. And we can have a pop up that maybe, if we know you’re a subscriber, but you’re coming back and you’re a customer, that we don’t have to ask you, give you a pop up to say, hey, you know, join our list or join our SMS list and get 10% off. We can just do an informational pop up. Hey, welcome back. Or a flash sale 24 hours on all, you know, duvet covers or whatever. It might be 20% off, right?

So we start to tie those things together a little bit. Again, make it a little more relevant from there. You know, let’s say we’re shopping those accessories or they’re shopping a couch or they haven’t bought a couch yet. So checking out or looking in there using the product filtering there. And they click on something like a chaise lounge and then they leave the website. Well, we can use that data to integrated, again, your e-commerce platforms integrate with your marketing campaigns, your marketing platform.

So okay, Greg was over here. Checked out the chaise lounge, left. Let’s automate a message off to him. Product abandonment or browser abandonment message based on however you want to structure that. And the difference is, product is a message regarding a specific product they were looking at it. Browser is more generic, right? Think about categories. Couches, brown couches.

So we can trigger that message off to them. Say, four hours later, two hours later or one day later, just to remind them to come back. But if it’s a brown chaise, I can use that message to give them detailed product information. What do they need to know about this lounge? Why is it better than the other ones?

We can put secondary content in there to say, hey, you know, here’s some other similar top-rated products. But we can also use that to reinforce value. And why should I shop with you? I’m a returning customer. You already know you’re obviously happy with the purchase, because you’re back. But we can also say, oh, it’s a first time customer, maybe incentivize it. Maybe we’ll reinforce those value ads. Hey, free shipping, 100% satisfaction guarantee, 180 day guarantees, return, whatever it might be.

So what we’re doing is, we’re taking that person, wherever they’re coming from, they’re going to the website. We’re giving them a nice experience there. They leave the website. We’ve got that data flowing over to the email campaigns or the SMS campaigns, which, by the way, we can also sync in our plant in Omnisend to like Facebook retargeting. So if they purchase. Right, so we can hopefully reduce our retargeting costs on paid social or paid search.

And like I hate using the term flywheel, but it’s really a flywheel, right? It’s just the circular nature of it. And hopefully those messages can come back at a much cheaper cost. And it’s like a paid social or paid retargeting cost. And we just keep going, right? We move them along that next step of the journey. If they come back, we go from intent to high intent or higher intent and we just keep moving them down.

We make that experience so good, it’s hard for them to say no, I don’t want to shop with you, I want to shop somewhere else, right? They’re probably going to price compare anyways, but you’ve already gotten hooked a little bit, right? You’re going to make it hard for them to say no. And I think that’s like, these are very simple things. You showed us how to very easily do it. Yeah. Right. And it’s super easy on the the email side as well. It’s like a couple clicks.

It’s really, it takes a couple minutes to build a workflow out and it just runs in the background. Those messages are highly powerful, which I know we’ll talk about… It’s a long answer to your question, Thomas, but, yeah, you could start the pieces together. Hey, if I do this, I go over here, I get this, and that’s it, brings it back to there, and then you can fill in those gaps however you want to fill in those gaps.

Thomas: Yeah,, you mentioned a couple a couple of things which always come in mind to me as well. I mean, at the end of the day, we all use e-commerce shops to buy our stuff all the time, and we all run into shops, where, yeah, the entire shopping experience feels like almost broken, because you don’t have, like, these constant user flows where you find all your information all the time when you need it.

And one thing you mentioned, which is quite interesting, like with the whole social media aspect, because I saw this as well on my Instagram, a lot and in Facebook as well. More and more shops, especially when it comes to, like these furniture shops and stuff like that, they have images of, like completely, what’s the perfect word in English? I just need to think about that.

It’s like staged environments. So you have a perfectly staged living room with, like what? Your couch with your desk with all the little accessories. And they just have these, like, call to actions, these hotspots on these images to actually click on that and get more information. And that’s actually really interesting and especially interesting for like a furniture store, because what is a couch? What is a brown couch? What is a gray couch? How does it look? I mean, I pay like $7,000 or $6,000 for one piece of furniture.

So I want to make sure that the color is right, that it feels good. Yeah. It’s a difficult thing to sell, actually, on an online store, because you can’t sit on that couch at that point. So you need to build a good user experience, actually.

Greg: Yeah. And part of it is building trust, right? You can’t sit on the couch like you said. You’ve got to build trust between the brand. If they’ve never shopped with you, you’ve got to again convince them to buy with you. How do you do that? Well, it’s going to be relevant messaging. It’s going to be a good onsite experience. It’s going to be good customer service.

See, small things that a lot of brands don’t think about, because they’re like, oh, it’s so easy. You know, you can launch a store based on what Ecom platform you want to use in 20 minutes, right? And it’s up and running. That doesn’t mean it’s the best store, but it’s a store, right? You can integrate an email platform like you can integrate Omnisend in, I don’t know, like three minutes, right? Couple of clicks, we make it easy for you.

Doesn’t mean you’re going to send good emails. You’ve got to think through these things a little bit. And that’s where the trust building comes in. Yeah. And by the way, no one’s couches, no one’s family room ever looks like that. Right. And if you have kids, it looks nowhere like it. It looks beautiful. That’s the dream. That’s the wish. But, we all know what’s going on.

Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So, since we at Greyd try to give our users all the features necessary to build trust sections, these trust segments, actually, we made the solutions as well, to integrate in the shop interface. Such a thing that you can display an almost staged living room and you have all the different pieces and assets and accessories for your living room. So you have an entire shopping experience, almost like with little hotspots and everything else.

I can show you real quick, because that’s interesting as well. We can, for example, integrate here as well form fields and stuff like that. It’s completely interactive. I just scroll down here. So as you see here, we have a completely staged living room. And we just want to see what that couch costs at the end of the day. And we just click on that, we can directly put this in to our shopping cart if we want to. Or we go into the details page, look into like what are the options? What are the colors? Okay.

Oh that looks nice. I will buy that as well. Maybe that will be my first purchase. But I already have an entire experience. Like a shopping experience, an interactive experience to keep me as a customer as long as possible on the website. For example, what could be possible as well, if someone comes over a campaign mail through Omnisend on the website, we display, for example, certain assets here as well directly live into our hotspot block. Could be a possible solution as well.

Greg: Yeah. And that’s, you know what we’re trying to do is, we’re trying to replicate, not try to replicate the in-store experience as much as possible. You’re trying to replicate a good experience, right? And good is going to be, you know, a beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I think most people have… We’ve been shopping online long enough and shopping in store long enough that people have an idea about what good is, right?

And then can you make it a little bit better and make it more intuitive and more efficient? And I think that’s a good example of like, we keep hearing about different tools, AI and all these things that are going to, like these tools that are like, oh, it’s going to revolutionize the online shopping experience. And the reality is, we’re like, those tools are great. Some of the new ones are great, but they’re still in kind of a testing phase.

And like, is it something consumers are asking for or is it something we’re giving them? And a lot of times it’s what we’re giving them. That’s something where consumers might not know they want it, but when they get there and see it and they start interact with them like, you know, that’s pretty good, because it doesn’t change the experience enough to learn something new. It just makes it better. Right. And that’s, you know, that’s the name of the game. We make it a little bit better and we just keep going up that ladder.

Thomas: Yeah. Since you mentioned already the buzz word, which everyone is talking about, I need to ask, obviously. So, what AI integration does Omnisend already have? How do you approach the whole AI thing?

Greg: So, we use it. I mean, we’re using it everywhere and we’re continuing to build into our platform literally daily. There’s Slack messages like, hey, we put this into our platform today, you know, rolling it out to all customers soon. So we already have tools. They’re free. You don’t need them, but they’re built in the platform as well. But we really have tools on our website that are like product description generators, subject line generators, subject line testers, you know, things like this.

ROI calculators inside the platform form. You know, I build segments for your suggested segments. We have churn possibilities. So we kind of ranked customers based on, you know, are they a loyal customer? How close are they to churning? You know, things like this. We’ve got email creators. We got image creators. The update today was tone of voice with your image, with your email copywriter.

So you can have it write an email for you. But you can also put your brand tone of voice in there, which is important for you. You want to be authentic. So these things aren’t slowing down. They’re just picking up again. We’re not trying to jam everything in the world into the platform or jamming things in there that either customers have asked for. Because we are customer funded, we’re organically funded, we don’t have investors, so we need our customers to do well, because that helps us do well.

So we ask them, what do you need? And we look at those things, we say, okay, let’s build that in the platform. You know, but again, we’re trying to make people’s lives easier to make their marketing better. And that’s our goal. So when we talk about, you know, two minutes ago about how do we make the shopping experience better. We’re trying to do the same thing. But for marketers and business owners.

Thomas: Yeah, we’re currently as well starting to integrate more and more of the capabilities of AI into our system. But not that much in a content-based perspective. What we want to try to achieve, and we’re currently starting with the development of this, is that we actually empower the website or the web shop or the software itself to learn from user behavior and user data.

So we, for example, analyze the funnel of our customer. So, the customer starts browsing on to the site. So what is the way they always go? And then over time we have data about our user behavior. And then the AI for example, could start like displaying, okay, we need a call to action here. We need that section here.

Maybe introduce an image there. So over time the website itself improves based on the user behavior of their actual live users. So that’s what we’re trying to achieve. Because at the end of the day, for us that could be the most beneficial part where we can optimize how long a user is on our website. And as well from a user perspective, that they always get the information and data they need at a certain specific point of time.

Greg: Oh yeah, it’s a really good example, right? Product recommendations are one of those things that, I mean you shut down the website, right? If they’re doing this, let’s recommend relevant products. Product recommendations have been around for, you know, at least 15 years. But it’s a lot easier to do now. It’s a lot more efficient, a lot smarter. It’s a lot better, you know.

So we talk about AI from a shopping experience. So Omnisend, we do a lot of different reports. We look at the e-commerce industry as a whole, not just email marketing. We did a report a few months ago. And these are they’re not gated. They’re on our website. You can just go and click over to the resources section of reports and check them out and browse at your leisure. We did one on an AI, I think it came out like six weeks ago ish, maybe before.

About what consumers want from an AI experience with brands. All right. So we talk about all these grand things, these new platforms coming down a lot of stuff. And what do they want the most? They want the things that are comfortable and familiar to them. So it’s better product recommendations, more intuitive discounts. Right. So, more personalized discounts. You showed that before, going from 40% to 70% based on historical data.

And better customer service. And I mean, that’s the one thing that is getting better at the AI chat bots and things like that. A couple years ago, they were really bad. Significant improvement now. And they’re actually effective for most. Those are the three things people want the most. And if you think about that, again, they want things to make their experience a little bit better. They don’t want a revolutionary experience. And I think everything we’re talking about today kind of hands down, how do we do a better, quicker, more efficiently, save us time, get more sales out of it?

Thomas: Yeah. Interesting part, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look into it personally, I mean, as you mentioned, most of the time you’re researching in the internet before you buy a product, you research, you look at that platform, this platform, and the platform which gives you the best user experience at the end of the day, is the most trustworthy platform. And that’s the platform that gets the sale at the end of today.

Greg: Yeah.

Thomas: And that’s I think what everyone has to have in mind all the time, because you don’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time. Stick to the elements which work, improve them, improve the user experience at the end of the day.

Yeah. All right. One thing I want to talk about with you is as well: When it comes to scaling an e-commerce platform, right? It’s already up and running and it’s already successful. Do you have some real life customer experience you can share, with, like, companies who use Omnisend, who have a, whether it’s a WooCommerce-based platform or another web shop platform. When they scale, for example they have a lot of different web shops up and running. How do they manage all sorts of data with these different platforms?

Greg: Yeah. I’ll give you the shameless plug answer, and that’ll give you a real answer. I’ve got a whole page of success stories. You can always check them out at Omnisend.com. So it’s like, hey, how do we pick between some of your favorite kids or whatever? And I always look at scaling is hard, right? And scaling is not a quick one hit wonder type of thing. Right.

You’ve got to take, we talked about having a holistic program. We’ve got this to work right, which feeds this, which feeds this, which feeds this, which makes that better. Scaling is exactly that. Emails is that, SMSs is that, web push notifications is that, social media is that, everything is that.

So, there’s a company, you know, called, Bella Fever. A jewelry company. Right. And it’s one of these things where, you know, product abandonment. They’re like, hey, you know what? I heard someone like Greg talk about product abandonment or whatever, but again, it’s behavior based automation and intent based automation. And they went through and created a product development message. And it’s killing it for them.

And you’re seeing these incremental sales and all those sales then come in with, if I can capture you three days before someone else and you don’t go to someone else, it’s three days I don’t need to retarget you and pay to retarget you on other channels, whether it’s social search, whatever. I’ve got a cost controlled way to do that.

Worst case scenario, I know if you engage and you come back again, you still don’t buy. I’ve got now another intent signal, right? And maybe we’re checking other products, but I could still retarget. And that’s really how, like entrepreneurs will always say it’s a great life, but it’s death by a thousand paper cuts, right? Every day is a paper cut with something. I look at scaling a business kind of the same way, right? It doesn’t have to be like paper cut. Painful.

But you’ve got to do the small things and you’ve got to keep doing them well. So what I’m looking for here is automations. It’s going to send 24 hours a day. It’s being based on behavior. So what is a customer actually doing? A prospective customer actually doing? And then how do we send a relevant message to those people to get them to take an action 24 hours a day? You don’t need manual involvement outside the initial set up, which is super easy.

And then how do we rely on those? And then to do that, we’ve got to grow our email list. So how do we do an effective pop up? So if I’m scaling today, all right, first thing I do is I get a pop up, right? I try to customize that as much as possible. And again, by customize, if you’re just starting out or you’re experimenting with it, right. It’s a couple clicks of a button and then you can get further. But collecting email addresses, I’ve got a two step form that’s collecting an SMS or mobile number.

Even if I don’t launch a SMS program, I get an indication whether my customers want them, right? They’re giving me their numbers. If they’re not, I’m good. But I’m ready to launch when I go. I’m good to go. I don’t make the mobile number a required field, completely optional. Let them close out. Don’t beat them into like, hey, 15% off for sending up for an email. And then they go to step two and they’re like, oh, for 50% off give us your phone number. Now just add the email or let it cook, as my kids would say.

All right. And then, so that’s step one. We’ve got to get the email address coming in. Step two, I set up a couple automations. Now, every single automation, regardless of the type, will perform better than a scheduled campaign message or batch blast message, even lapsed purchase or unengaged context. They perform better, but this doesn’t mean they’re all equal. So I prioritize my automations. There’s three that will drive the most bang for the buck

. Now there’s two other ones that I would highly encourage you to do. So the three I’m talking about: welcome messages. So brand new email subscribers, they get a welcome message, email message, whatever it is. Second one would be product abandonment or browser abandonment. And the third one would be cart abandonment. Those are the three. They’re going to drive more than 80% of the revenue from an automated email standpoint, I should say.

I skipped over a big thing here. Thomas, why is automation so important? So last year we do these stat reports. I dig through the numbers, right. So last year we sent over 25 billion email messages, 37% of all orders from email messages, it was 25 billion, 37% of the orders came in from automated messages. So you’re looking at nearly 40%, 2% of emails. And so 30% of the sales came from 2% of sents. That’s why automation is so critical for you. It’s not a secret why, though.

We talked about intent stages. What are they doing when they sign up for an email program. They are on your website, probably not familiar with you, but there’s something there that took them to the website. Could have been an ad, could have been a friend, could have been whatever. But there is something there. There’s an intent. Browser abandonment, we already talked about that. There is an intent. They’ve gone a step further. Cart abandonment, obvious intent.

They put a product in their shopping cart. So those are the three that are going to give you the best bang for the buck. So that’s where I go to start. And then the other two: Back-in-store messages. It’s the best performing one. It’s just lower volume sent. Because if, by the way, you can, create a back-in-store, you know, sign up on the website if you want to sell products out of stock. Put the email address in, it comes on, you trigger it off. Extremely high performing messages, just low volume.

Right. So, post-purchase messages. We talked about this, kind of skirted it early in the conversation. What do I do after I get the sale? We want to upsell. We want to cross-sell, but we also need to reinforce trust. So we had, I know this isn’t live, but as of today, the consumer confidence report in the US just came out a couple hours ago. Lo and behold, they dropped again, right at ten.

We saw it there on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, last year. Fewer overall orders, but the average order value of those orders increase. So people are spending with fewer companies, but they’re spending more with the ones they’re choosing from. You’ve got to capture the sales everywhere you can. So post-purchase, easy retention play here. And we can get in that strategy if you want. But when I talk about post-purchase, I’m not talking about just like upsell email, cross-sell email, upsell email, cross-sell email.

Those are fine. It’s good secondary content as well. I’m talking about making the experience better. So let’s use the furniture example you showed us. Bye a couch. What do I need to know about that couch? How to clean it, how to properly care for it. My idea of a post purchase is, how do I make the customer experience better? How do I make that purchase experience better? Does it benefit the customer, not the company? They will convert for you. They will come back and shop, right?

So if I show you how to put the couch cover on the right way, or I show you how to care for, to wash stains or red wine out of that couch, right? The right way to make it last, then people trust your brand. They think the product is quality. They trust you. They know your customer service is good. Those things pay dividends and those are easy. Upsells, secondary content, right? Easy. Upsell, cross-sell, dedicated message, easy upsell, cross-sell at that point. So I said a lot of things. I’ll let you ask whatever you kind of find most interesting, but those are the ones I do: welcome message, browser abandonment, cart abandonment. Three essentials. Got to have them. Build a email list to a post-purchase message. That’s my starting point there.

And then I start sinking my, you know, all my behaviors off to my retargeting, on paid search and paid social. And then you just keep the flywheel going. All right, we’re back to that flywheel.

Thomas: Yeah, that’s actually interesting. Especially all the post-purchase messages you mentioned, because that’s the thing. We use or a couple of our customers use that as well a lot in their shops, actually. They enhance, for example, all the product information inside their shops already, that they have all the post-purchase information, for example, like you mentioned, how to clean the couch.

What is a perfect product which works perfectly with that product at the end of the day? And therefore you could actually automatically create landing pages for that with more information. You can target these landing pages all off a sudden. And therefore you could enhance your post type of the product, for example, with some similar products which fit perfect to that.

And you take all of this data and automatically launch a landing page for that with a couple of clicks, because that’s at the end of the day, for example with Greyd really easy, with our feature Global Content, where you can say, okay, I use data from my shop and I push it to another WordPress instance, which might run even on a different server, different hosting, or whatever. It’s two separate installations, but they can talk to each other, because at the end of the day, there’s always one person who has to update certain information for a product, whether it’s on an external data source, or external system just hooked up to an e-commerce web shop, or if it’s in the e-commerce solution, in WooCommerce, for example.

You update the data and maybe you have 2 or 3 landing pages for that specific product to, like, build the entire user flow. And you just update your product and it automatically takes the data and transfers it over to a couple of other landing pages. And therefore, with Global Content, you do this with one click. You even could store presets of these landing pages. And, you know, I want to just try a different landing page, with like a different, structure. For example, for a specific user group. And with the click of a button, you can just play the… I can show you that real quick. Might be interesting as well.

Greg: And while you’re loading that, let’s just fill in some of the gaps. So, feel free to load it up, and I’ll fill some silence here. So think about all the other the benefits that messages like this have. So I’ll give you an example. My wife bought some make up a couple of weeks ago, you know. She forwarded me in an email. A post-purchase email and she’s like, hey, I was giving a presentation on post-purchase, you know, and she’s like, hey, check out this email I got. And it’s how to apply that. It’s like, now you got the goods. Learn how to apply it the right way. Now, she liked the message. She went there. She’ll look at the tutorial.

But even if she’s not ready to buy, what you’ve done as a brand was established trust. You provided relevant content, not necessarily sales related, but you provided relevant content. Next time she needs a tutorial on something, whether it’s blush, whether it’s lipstick, whatever it is, she looks at them as the expert. And she’s go in there first. That’s your first touch. So like these things pay dividends beyond, like what the e-commerce platform is going to tell you as far as a sales number. So this is where that holistic thinking really is important for today’s e-commerce brands.

Thomas: Yeah. All right. So I finished up the sharing. I just open this up, okay. So for example here in our furniture store, we have like one product which could be this couch, actually. And we do want to give our users some external information in a specific performance landing page, which we could target with an ad campaign, for example. But we want to make sure that this website is lightning fast, without all of the scripts from a WooCommerce shop, for example, that potentially could slow down your website at the end of the day.

And what we actually can do really easily is, just create an external landing page. Just a really quick example. We already have all the data from the web shop available here, but there is no shop system up and running. And therefore we have the name of the product, which is the blob. And we have the pricing, we could put in some additional products as well, like for cleaning the couch or some elements which could fit perfectly, like a cushion or something like that. And if we update this at one time, because there is an update of the product. We could really easily do that.

So, for example, we go back into our web shop, which is again, on another WordPress instance. For example, let’s change just the image. We use this as our hero image. And yeah, we could update this and update for example, the price, maybe reduce the price. Let’s go with 499 instead. And we update the post. So first of all, it’s updated in my shop and it’s already updated in all landing pages without having me to log on and specifically change this here, change that there. It’s already done.

I just need to reload. And this works in real time with potentially hundreds of pages.

Greg: That’s really cool. Yeah.

Thomas: So what you can do with that is, with just the click of a button, you can first of all, update all of your pages with two clicks. You can even launch more of these landing pages. And you can fill them with all kinds of different data. So that’s actually what scaling means from a technical perspective when we’re talking about it in the Greyd ecosystem.

Greg: Yeah. And it is important, too, right? It’s a timesaver for anyone using it, which is critical. We need to focus our time on growing other parts of the business and as many parts of that business as possible. So it’s, a great solution. And useful. Yeah.

Thomas: I mean, what you negate with that as well is the potential human error. Because, yeah, if you do this all manually, you forget something here. You forget something there, and yeah, if you scale over time, it’s crucial to have all of these parts automated as well.

Greg: Yeah. So, Thomas, I’m thinking as we’re going through here with the Global Content. So I’m thinking through the automations we talked about before. And one of the first things, like, we spend so much time talking about building trust. So, welcome messages. That initial message that sends when someone’s brand new with the email program.

Those people, they know about the brand, because they’re on the website. But they might not know much about the brand. Right? It’s products, value ads, things like that. So typically within a welcome series, we want to establish the trust we want to introduce in the products. So I’m sitting here, thinking that, hey, can I get a landing page campaign that has, let’s use our couch as an example. It’s the main hero image that we’re introducing in that welcome email. Is it possible for me to set a campaign just for welcome recipients when they click there? And then they’re greeted with a, you know, a specific landing page or set of landing pages for only new customers.

Thomas: Yeah, you can actually build that, because when it comes to these landing pages, we can as well use our feature Conditional Content again. Because we know, okay, that’s a completely fresh customer. We want to display this ad. If it could be a recurring customer, we could change, for example, specific parts of that. That’s obviously possible. Yeah, you could target that through, like an email campaign or just a message you wanted to do or through a social media channel. It’s obviously possible. Definitely. All right.

Greg: Good use case. Yeah.

Thomas: Perfect. So, I think, we tackled a lot of different topics today. Let’s do a little recap what we have actually talked about today. We’ve talked about or we, looked on the perspective of building websites and building e-commerce brands from different perspectives. For example, one from a technical perspective, with Greyd. What’s actually possible even with WooCommerce and the WordPress platform. From the Omnisend perspective, how to keep our customers on the website as long as possible, how to get them back when they already purchased some of our products, what could be an accompanying product. And so, Greg, what do you want to share with our customers to give a little wrap up?

Greg: Yeah. Thanks, Thomas. This was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the conversation very much. So, we talked a lot about, as you just mentioned, different automations, different things we can do. And for someone who maybe is newer to this or is listening to this and going, it sounds like a lot, right? I would just caution people that it’s not a lot and it doesn’t have to be complex. So, robust and intuitive doesn’t mean complex in advanced or overly advanced, I should say so. When I approach from an email standpoint, I look at it this way: small, simple things matter.

So, do one thing at a time, just implement it, doesn’t have to be perfect, does not need to be a perfect thing. So if you have a welcome series, you want three messages and you’ve got one done and the first one is not perfect, that’s okay. Automate it. Start sending it. Let the data come in. Let it do its job. Add the second one as time goes, go back and optimize them as time goes. Get the fundamentals down. Get your pop up collect email addresses, get a welcome message sent and get a cart abandonment sending. And again, they don’t need to be perfect.

These workflows, if you use Omnisend, we have template, a workflow. So we prebuilt a workflow. You can customize them, but you can get them going in literally minutes. So we make it super intuitive for you, make it a lot easier to set up. So I would say, focus on the small, simple things first. Don’t feel you need to be perfect. Don’t feel you need to do everything at once and just implement it from there. So it’s the turtle, right? The small, steady pace wins the race. Don’t feel overwhelmed.

If you do feel overwhelmed, contact me. I’ll walk you through it. I’ll talk you off and we’ll be good there. So, I would say that. And then for those unfamiliar with Omnisend, if you want to give us another check out, Ii you checked us out a couple of years ago, the platform is night and day from where it was a couple of years ago. So Omnisend.com, you can sign up for free. No credit card required. We have a free plan. You get 24/7 support. Even with a free plan. We have a plug and play integration with WooCommerce and we don’t gate certain parts of the platform.

So if you’re on the free plan, you want to use all the automations. We let you. So that’s the awesome part. And I mentioned we’re customer funded, so we’re approachable. We’re easy. You can get a hold of us. And if we’re not the right fit for you, we’ll tell you we’re not the right fit for you. So I would just say thank you everyone for your time. Check out Omnisend.com. Reach out to me if you have any questions as well. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me there.

Thomas: Greg, thank you so much for being a part of today’s episode. And yeah, I invite everyone as well to visit Omnisend on their website to try out their awesome product. You can combine the product with Greyd as well. We from Greyd give you as well access to a free test version. You can test it as long as you’d like. There is no limitation about functionality or the time, you can test it. And maybe already combine the test version of Omnisend and the test version of Greyd in combination with WooCommerce and, yeah, start building an awesome e-commerce platform.

As Greg already mentioned, it has not to be perfect from the get go. It’s always an iteration when it comes down to marketing campaigns, as well as building a website, doing design. Just keep starting and improve over time. Because we all build products, with which you can look at the data, you can look at the data of your visitors and over time you improve these kinds of platforms. So, yeah, check out our websites, check out our tools. We’re more than welcome to give you advice. If you have some questions, just approach us and make sure that you like and subscribe to our channel. If you’re up for it.

In our next episode, we will tackle the mysteries of multisites with our CTO Jakob and our special guest will be Robert Windisch from Syde. They developed a really nice plugin. Some of you might already know, which is Multilingual Press. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel and that you get notified when the episode will be live. Thank you so much. Thank you Greg, I hope to see you soon.

Greg: Bye bye.

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