From Inbox to Profit: The Power of Email Marketing | #247 Andriy Boychuk

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Claus Lauter: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Do you, as a merchant have ever had the feeling that your online store is getting most out of your email marketing? A lot of merchants have exactly that feeling. So today we'll dive a little bit deeper into email marketing strategy, set up metrics, and find places to tweak and improve your email marketing.

For that reason, I have Andriy Boychuk with me on the show. He's the founder of Flowheum, an email marketing agency for e commerce at flowheum. com. Andriy and his family moved to the US in 2004. For launching Flowmium, Andrei spent nine years working in corporate America, advancing from a junior position to senior project manager at the Glariant Group.

He focused on designing integrated smart building design solutions. And in 2017, he created Flowmium to help business realize the full potential of email marketing. So let's dive right into it. Hi, Andrei. How are you today? 

Andriy Boychuk: Yeah. How are you? Thank you for having me on the call. 

Claus Lauter: Yeah. Great to have you on the show today.

Email marketing. I'm getting so many bad emails every day. a very difficult topic for a lot of merchants out there to get it right. How did you get into it? What do you see on a day to day basis? What are merchants doing with email marketing? 

Andriy Boychuk: I started back in 2014 was my email marketing journey, but. . I did email marketing for myself, for my own company, for my own site hustle.

 I used to work in corporate America in technology company where we were developing solutions for like smart buildings, but for commercial buildings like skyscrapers, not the residences and site hustle was, Website, a portal for Ukrainian immigrants who came to America and helped them assimilate with this lifestyle, with how, finance system works, how the bank system works.

 consider it like online magazine. to... Personalized journeys depends somebody who just came to us versus somebody who live here or somebody who planning to come to us We use email marketing to customize those journeys and to feed them, different information back in 2014, I started learning how to do it myself I took a lot of courses attended webinars and start to like doing this For myself, fast forward to late 2016, I quit my corporate job and start freelancing.

 So I started doing email marketing for other companies, but it was all over the spectrum. We are doing projects for dentists, for lawyers. And when I did my first e commerce project, I realized like, whoa. It's so easy to show the value of my work because you send a few emails, good crafted emails, targeted emails, and you see the immediate return, of that email.

So it's easier to show to my clients how much money I generated to their brand. Probably took me two years to realize that I need to nish down. So then in 2019, we start focusing only on e commerce brands. And since then we built a company now more than 80. employees in the companies. We served a lot of clients.

I don't have the exact numbers, but way over like two, 300 different brands some projects, just a few months of work. Sometimes, , some projects they was asked over the three years. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now, obviously you're seeing a lot of emails. Set up flows, automations, campaigns on a daily basis as we're going into the Q4 season.

So the strongest season of the year for e commerce versions was Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and whatsoever. What should they do to get everything right to make the most out of the sales season? 

Andriy Boychuk: I'll start from the basic answer. It's like they need to plan ahead, because, the busiest time for our sales department, I don't know why, but in November.

Why? Because people like late to the game and they're like, Oh, I need to set up email marketing, but it's like already November. And it's like, Really late. And we have to like turn them down or say like, we are not able to support you for that period of time. So the best advice that can give you like right now we're recording in September.

This will be featured in October. This is a great time to prepare for plan out the November and this two months. I would strongly recommend to put a focus on collecting those emails or phone numbers for SMS. So put heavy pressure on advertising, social media to attract those clients.

Maybe not conversion into sales, but conversion to email subscribers. Why? Because you will leverage those email subscribers when it's the season with sales. And it would be the best time to kind of convert them to first time customers or multiple customers. 

Claus Lauter: Growing your email list is obviously one of the most important parts because it's owned marketing.

Once you have the email address in your list, it's much better than running Facebook ads and whatsoever. When it comes to growing your list, what kind of strategies do you recommend to merchants to do so without. Being completely sales focused. 

Andriy Boychuk: So one strategies that work well for the past few years, many brands implemented.

We are implementing for some of the brands. It's like, sign up for early bird discounts. So you are not giving them any discount today, but you letting them know if you sign up today. You will be the first one in the line to get our Black Friday, Cyber Monday discount. So you're not revealing how much discount you will give them.

to add to the strategy, when they sign up, you sending them confirmation message. Yes, we got your email. You are in our system and you will be the first one to get the email. But in that email, I would strongly recommend to include some, like, gift card or some incentives for them to buy today.

Pay something, while you're waiting until Black Friday or Monday, here's 10 gift card, 20 gift card, depends what is your, profit margin. I would not recommend to do percentage. Why? Because percentage doesn't have like such big value versus like dollar amount. some brands do have a limit.

So maybe they will give you 20 off a voucher, but you have to spend like 50. Some brands do not. like much like revenue you want to drive. So this is one strategy. Another great strategy is that also I learned probably two years ago to run giveaway, but not like Generic giveaway, like there's iPhone giveaway, make it related to your brand, but also partner up with two to five brands.

In your, who share your audience. So, for example, if you are like in well, health and wealth or a fitness industry have a one brands who sell maybe some like sneakers. Another brand sell like protein powder. Another brand sell maybe magazine subscription or something in this industry.

Collectively run one giveaway, drive traffic to one giveaway and the share list of those customers and let people know that you will announce the winner in during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or in that week, but same strategy as with the early access when they opt in, give them something, say, Hey, why are you waiting?

To find out if you want or not, here's 20 coupon watchers that you can spend today in our store. 

Claus Lauter: I like these ideas specifically , was the pre sign up for a, discount. I've never heard that , that's absolute brilliant idea. Now, the power of email lies in segmentation, and a lot of people just blasting it out to their whole list.

Give me some ideas and strategies when it comes to a good segmentation idea or strategy. 

Andriy Boychuk: Sure. But before I would like to, I like what you just said about segmentation and give you an example that we run for one of our clients. We did the split test. So we were trying to prove to the client that blasting one email to the entire list, it's not a good strategy.

Yes. Maybe you will make more money, but long term you will hurt your deliverability, which. Will hurt your revenue in the future as well. So this is the test we did and we did it five times So there's no doubt that the test is successful one campaign was a product release And we send this campaign to generic list to everybody and the same campaign.

Nothing changed except who we send it to. We send it to people who express interest in this product category. first, all in segment was a hundred thousand subscribers and it generated around like 7, 000 it's like, what's like around like 10, 000 the second segment was 10, 000 people, but it generated around more than 20 or even 30, 000.

So basically the segment size was 10 times smaller, but generate two or three acts, three or four acts of the revenue. So it shows you the power of segmentation so for Black Friday Cyber Monday, there's like four segments that we like to focus on. And also the E S P that we work with called Clario. We are a lead partner with them and they strongly recommend to focus on those. For segment as well. So first of all, it's like the AP, somebody who spend , three acts of your average order value with you or somebody who plays three plus order with you.

So it means are not one time buyer there. So they purchased three times or more with So another, like somebody who engaged with your emails depends what is your engagement means, but let's say in the last 60 days, again, if you're selling mattresses, your engagement window might be like 180 days or even like 365 days.

If you're selling, like, for example, socks, it might be like much, much short engagement window. People who purchase with you in the past. Let's say one time buyer, but they did not buy again with you. So this is great season to win them back. the last segment is people who purchased with you last year.

So they purchased last year during like November or Friday, Cyber Monday week. Hit them again. With maybe special offer incentives or maybe just a copy personalized for them to make another purchase. And by the way, so there's some brands who run zero discount during Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

And it doesn't mean that , you have to discount your product heavily. You can do maybe zero discount, but offer something that have a high perceived value.

Claus Lauter: That sounds absolutely great. You brought up one keyword and I want to dive a little bit into that. A lot of people don't know what it is, the word deliverability, and I think that's something you just explain what it is because I think a lot of people do not really know what it means to blast out to the whole list and how it impacts actually your email marketing.

Andriy Boychuk: Deliverability is the basic foundation of email marketing. So everybody starts from what is your open rate? What is your click through rate? And those are important KPIs, but if you have a bad deliverability, meaning. People either getting into your emails, either getting to your customer inbox or not.

 If they're not getting to their inboxes, you have bad deliverability. If they're getting in, you have good deliverability. There's a lot of like technical things you need to do to improve your deliverability, but rule of thumb you need to send emails to people who engage with your email.

So you don't want to send it to somebody who stopped opening your emails two years ago, or even one year ago. You want to send it only to people who engage with your emails. And this is your job as a brand, or this is your job as a marketer, marketeer to make sure people do engage with your emails that they.

Open, this is the bare minimum. And also this is like a new Apple privacy. You don't even know if they open or not. So it's more important for them to either click in your email or maybe engage in some other way, like respond to your email. If they responded to email, this is very, very good sign to inbox provider that like, Hey, This person wants to engage with this brand.

 Any future email will be placed in the inbox. I was on another podcast episode and the, person shared that. One strategy that you can use saying, Hey, you can get the discount. If you reply to this email and the person said like, yes, I like it, but if I send it to a hundred thousand people, even 50, 000 people respond, it's like unbelievable hard to reply to each one with a discount.

So one trick or tactic you can use, you will have specific, mailbox. And set it up out of office and say, Hey, we're running this promotion, but I'm out on vacation, but I don't want you to miss the discount. So make it as an out of office response saying, Hey, this is the discount. So this way it will auto made, but it will be personalized and it would be real human being Experience.

Claus Lauter: That's really golden nugget. Haven't I have never heard that before, but that's a really good idea, a really good trick to deal with that. Now you're obviously a Klaviyo partner and I think Klaviyo is the platform. If you're on Shopify, there is actually no other option to be in my opinion. I'm using Klaviyo for years.

Very happy with it. How do you help your clients with moving over to Klaviyo or if they are already on Klaviyo, how do you help them to optimize their email marketing? 

Andriy Boychuk: I didn't say it publicly because we just have this kind of partnership with Klaviyo, but we do free migration.

 Because Klaviyo does, do not offer any services, so if there's somebody on the line because they don't have resources , to move, we help them to migrate for free. If they want to continue working with us, Of course there's a service fee, but if they just want to migrations that can leverage our service, our team, our expertise to do the migration and take it from there.

This is about migration. And the second question you said, how to set up 

Claus Lauter: once your clients are on clay view, how do you help them with optimizing their marketing?

Andriy Boychuk: First, analyze what they have, because some clients have like zero automation, for example, and we do know that automations are crucial in email marketing. And some clients, we go to their account, they have hundreds of different automations. So we always start, if they have null, Or a lot.

We evaluate what is their brand is and show them the foundation. And even if they have let's say a few thousands of automations, sometimes we notice that they are missing some fundamental automation. For example, like maybe two time buyers or win back. Or maybe Sunset Flow. The Sunset Flow is this common one who a lot of brands are missing and I have a full Video where I describe what it is and how to set it up But shortly i'll explain that Sunset Flow is somebody who stop engaging with your email and this is the crucial automations to help with your deliverability because I said before if let's say If you know that after 120 days, if nobody opens your email, the good practice would be to clean, to suppress those subscribers because they are damaging your deliverability.

So we have automation, which hits, we have a segment which triggers the automation, which says, if A person did not open any email in the last 120 days and never click on any of the emails, please start this automation. And we started this automation and typically it's like three emails. Our goal here, not to make a sale.

The main goal here is. For them to engage with your email. So we strongly recommend in this email to send a tax based emails because they have a higher chance to get to the person inbox and when they open or when they click in one of those emails. We will remove them from the sunset flow and they will go to the engage segment.

But the rest of people who did not engage with this automation, we need to suppress them or unsubscribe them from your platform. In this case, Clavier, like, for example, for you, it would be Clavier. Why? First of all, you're paying money those subscribers. Second. They are hurting your deliverability.

 There's zero value and actually there's negative value in keeping those people in your account. And third, by unsubscribing, it doesn't mean you're losing them. They're still in your system. But you will not be able to send them emails. So they are able to resubscribe in the future. Yeah.

I 

Claus Lauter: think it's a crucial step to re engage people, to become more engaged on your list and also to clean your list. I know a lot of marketers and merchants out there are too scared to clean their list because it might really in the first place, huge dip on numbers they have, but you're a hundred percent right.

It helps with the quality of your list and it saves a lot 

Andriy Boychuk: of money. So here's one more thing. For example, for you, since you use Clavio and it may be possible in other ESP to create a segment for people who stop engaging with your emails, but they are visiting your website. You can create that pop up.

Specifically for them and not to opt in, but announce like, listen, we send you a few emails, you're not opening. So check your spam folder or something. So this is like you are able to show them personalized message only for those group of people. And this is how you can recover some of people.

They will probably check your spam folder and like, Oh, you're in spam and click on spam, which will also improve your deliverability. You 

Claus Lauter: said before you're working with a lot of brands, who's your perfect customer? Are you working with specific niches or verticals or industries more than with others?

Andriy Boychuk: So majority of our brands are in CPG space, consumer packaging groups, so like food, beverage, cosmetics. And another majority of our brands are like fashion and apparel. So closing shoes, accessories. So those are two biggest group, but we don't shy away from any industry in e commerce space. 

Claus Lauter: How does the typical onboarding process look like?

Andriy Boychuk: after we provide all the accesses that we need, we have a kickoff call and before the kickoff call, we have a discovery questionnaire. Extensive form where client provides us all of the information, branding guide, brand voice, their stats, kickoff call, and after kickoff call, the first step we do a relate everything they have in the account, we create a customized email marketing strategy for automations, as well as a marketing calendar for campaigns.

Then we present it to the client. And then after the client. Approve it. Sometimes they don't do approve on the spot. Sometimes we need to make fewer revisions. So after they approved, we start working on what we presented. And during this initial strategy, we also present them three email designs with a copy for different one for campaign, one for welcome flow and one for abandonment card, because those like different groups of emails.

So client can see and provide us feedback. 

Claus Lauter: Okay, that sounds great. How does your pricing structure look like? 

Andriy Boychuk: our email costs is like between 500 to 900 per email, but it depends how many emails you need per month. Higher the volume of emails, the lower the cost per email.

Claus Lauter: Okay. That makes absolutely sense. Now, before we come to the end of our coffee break today, are there any thoughts or ideas that you want to share with the listeners that we haven't talked about yet? I

Andriy Boychuk: we discussed already the deliverability. Brands needs to focus. A lot of brands disregard this. It's very crucial and important right now. It's hard, inboxes.

for other brands who just starting out or maybe don't have any email marketing place yet Start at least with One email for automation. So maybe welcome, abandonment card, and post purchase when somebody purchased. This automation have at least one email in each. So we are, we're talking about three emails.

do you need more? 100%. But those are like the fundamentals that will set you for success in the future. . 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now you have already given a ton of good tips and golden nuggets away. Where can people find more about you guys? 

Andriy Boychuk: Yeah, you can simply go to Florian, F L O W I U m.com.

We have a podcast, we have a blog, we have a YouTube, everything. We share a lot of free content that you can learn. You don't have to even hire us. But if you don't have bandwidth to do it, I would like to talk to you and maybe there's some opportunity for us to partner up.

Claus Lauter: Yeah. I've checked out your website. There's really a ton of good resources out there. So I would recommend our listeners to go there and have a look. Andrew, thanks so much today. I could talk for hours about e commerce marketing because I love it a lot, but e commerce coffee break is coming to an end today.

Thanks so much for your time and talk soon.