Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to episode 302 of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. In this episode, we discuss how to drastically improve your email deliverability and generate double the revenue with your email marketing. Joining me on the show is Nikita Vakhrushev, founder and CEO at aspektagency.com. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:20]:
This is the e commerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome.
Claus Lauter [00:00:45]:
Welcome to the hello and welcome to another episode of the Coomer's Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to find out how you can improve your email deliverability and stay out of the spam box. And with that, generate more than double of the revenue in your email marketing. With me on the show today, aspektagency.com. joins me. He's the founder and CEO of aspektagency.com. Nikita has spent the last seven years immersed in the digital marketing world. After starting his own ecommerce brand and quickly pivoting into the agency model, he found his place in the ecommerce advertising space, and he has worked with over 100 DTC brands so far. So let's welcome him to the show.
Claus Lauter [00:01:21]:
Nikita, how are you today?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:01:23]:
Pleasure to be here. Claus. As a fellow listener, it's a dream come true to actually be on the podcast and provide some value.
Claus Lauter [00:01:29]:
Great to have you on the show. Let's talk about email deliverability. A lot of people might think that it's very scientific and very technical, and when we start throwing around keywords like SPF, DKMDmark and whatever, people will lose us. But we want to make very simple overview of what that is important. And specifically with the changes that came in place a couple of weeks ago in February, more important than ever to have you're set up, right, that your emails get delivered to the inbox. Tell me a little bit about the background and what's going on there.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:02:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Google and Yahoo mentioned or implemented a new, I guess, extra layer of security by having you set up a DKIM record, which is just another security protocol that your email service provider goes through to make sure that if your emails are being sent from nike.com that they're actually coming in from nike.com and not some spam or some nigerian prince, for example. So you want to make sure to have your Dmarc setup correctly, which is a very simple and easy to do. Honestly, if you look up DmArc tutorials, probably my video will come up first. So you'd want to have your Dmarc setup and you'd want to have your DKM setup now with DkiM. I know it all sounds complicated and I don't want to get super technical here, but all of these records do have a purpose. Now with DKM, like I said, it's an extra layer of security.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:02:50]:
And for most parts, like if you're using Klaviyo, Sendlane, constant contact, any other ESP, a lot of them have a dedicated sending domain that you can create and all of that is automatically connected with that DKIm. So it's a very simple process. A lot of people overcomplicate setting up deliverability, but it's honestly just copying and pasting a few things and making sure that everything's verified.
Claus Lauter [00:03:14]:
Now that's a technical aspect that still doesn't help you to stay out of the spam box. There's more things involved. Let's talk a little bit about that. What should you do, what shouldn't you do to make sure that your emails get delivered?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:03:26]:
So like you said, it's one part of a two part, or sometimes even a three part aspect of deliverability. You want to make sure your technicals are set up when it comes to the content side of things. A lot of brands are using image only emails. It's beautiful, it's great. You can just set them up in canva, set them up in Photoshop or Figma, copy and paste those screenshots into your email and boom, you got a beautiful email. Now the problem with that is a lot of these brands that I audit, they have these image only emails which look good, but they don't have any structure behind them. There's no alt text which describes what the images are and there's no text in general. Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, outlook, all of them are scraping your emails before they even get it to the customer's inbox.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:04:08]:
And when they scrape them, they look for the content and that's how they determine whether an email is spam or whether an email should be delivered in your inbox or your primary box, your promotions box. Whatever it is, they scrape everything that's within that email. If you don't include any details, all they get is just URL to the image that the image is being hosted on. So your email looks very, very empty. So there, when you include alt text or include more descriptions or more text or like body text within the emails, that's when you start to, I guess avoid the spam box in a sense because you're giving Google more context on what the email is about. They can't scrape those images, they can only see okay, these image URL's are being there and if you give them more context they're like okay, cool, this is about a sale or this is about a product launch. This is not harmful to the customer. So that's where we'd want to implement more text.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:04:59]:
Additionally, you'd want to minimize the URL's that you're sending. So one thing that we started implementing is we started to reduce the amount of social links that we include in our emails. So maybe just Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, just the main one within the client emails and try to reduce any other unnecessary links within the emails.
Claus Lauter [00:05:18]:
That makes perfect sense. And I think from the user ability perspective it helps to have alternative text. Obviously there's people who are visually impaired or whatsoever and they might not receive the email as you see it when you're sending it out. Now talking about spam boxes and one question that comes often is like how often should I send my emails? Obviously as a marketer you want to send as many emails as possible, but I see people also sending not enough emails. What's, what's your recommendation?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:05:45]:
I would say you can send out as many as you can, but try to keep it segmented. We try not to send out an email to someone that opened an email within 24 hours again. So let's say if I sent you an email this morning, I'm not going to send you another email later in the afternoon or in the evening because you're already, you've already gotten hit with that email. So we try to segment out the people that have it open. So if you're constantly sending, try to segment out people that have already opened. So that way you're not double dipping. Ideally we try to send out anywhere between two to three emails per week that we've seen that be a pretty good measure of success. We try to avoid the weekends.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:06:23]:
We mainly send during the weekdays, during times where it's I guess like the most common sense people that check their emails in the morning, maybe sometimes at 07:00 a.m. Or during lunchtime, between eleven and 01:00 p.m. Or 11:00 a.m. And 01:00 p.m. Or after work, anytime after five or 06:00 p.m. But not before, I guess 09:00 p.m. So the sending frequency purely depends on your strategy. But try to send out two to three a week.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:06:47]:
And if you are sending every day, just segment those users out so you're not double dipping.
Claus Lauter [00:06:52]:
I want to go into segmenting in a minute, but I want to just go back into deliverability. One of the KPI's that we always had was the opening rate. That does not really work anymore. I still have people saying I have 70% opening rate, which is misleading. Tell me a little bit about why opening rate as a KPI is not working.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:07:10]:
Yeah, a lot of that has to do with Apple. Privacy opens. So when Apple implemented iOS 14 and then 15 and 16, it started to exclude or not show that people are opening or they're over reporting that people are opening your email. So it's less of a KPI to use. We still use it for deliverability markers. Like for example, we had a client a couple of months ago. When we switched them over to the new DMArC record or the new DMARc requirements, their deliverability absolutely tanked. They went from 40% to 50% open rates to ten to twelve.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:07:42]:
Now, obviously you don't have to look into open rates, but you can see that they're getting a ten to twelve open rate and their average email order value went from 500 to 50. Something's wrong there. So if you want to dive deeper, I can go through how we were able to fix that as well.
Claus Lauter [00:07:59]:
Sure, absolutely. Yeah, would be interesting.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:08:01]:
So one of the things that we did when it came to that specific brand is we actually had to double check the actual records that we set up. So it turns out their email sending domain was completely different than their actual domain. So that was one of the mistakes that we made. So it's such a simple mistake, but it was like one letter off. So it looks exactly the same from a distance. But we just didn't clarify that that was a mistake on our part. So we were able to figure that issue. We rectified it by resetting everything up under the new domain.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:08:32]:
And we also installed Google Postmaster. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's a email tracking tool within Google that shows you your ip reputation, domain reputation spam compliance. And it's essentially like the canary in the coal mine for your email deliverability. So once we set it up, we saw that our email deliverability and our domain reputation was at like the lowest point possible. So we had to quickly pivot and start to reengage our audiences, specifically with Gmail. We started segmenting out the most recent engaged Gmail users started building trust back up with Gmail. Slowly, over time, we increased that pool of Gmail users from 500 to 1000 to 1500 to 5000, 10,000. And then eventually we were able to work our way back up to the overall list.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:09:19]:
And as we were doing that, our open rates actually skyrocketed from that 12% to 80%. And as we expanded our audience, they stayed between 70% to 80%, and now they're at around 60% to 70% with the entire audience that we send out to. So a lot of it goes down to segmenting your users properly and segmenting based off of the most recently engaged people. Otherwise, if you're sending out to a pool of, let's say, 1000 people, 200 or 250 or 200 of those people are people that haven't opened your email in over, let's say, three months, those are going to be muddying the pool to the people that might be interested in and are still engaging. But that email might end up in spam or might end up in promotions because of that 200 people. So once we clear those people out that aren't engaging, that's when we start to see better deliverability and better open rates and click through rates and revenue, of course.
Claus Lauter [00:10:12]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter@newsletter.edu ecommerce coffeebreak.com I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with e commerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter Dot e commerce coffeebreak.com to subscribe as at 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. I think it's a very important message that you give there is clean up your list. A lot of people, just marketers, are too afraid to do that because the numbers will go down.
Claus Lauter [00:10:47]:
And with some marketers, that numbers of your email subscribers will go down massively. And obviously no one wants to see that. But it hurts your deliverability. It hurts your business. At the end of the day now, email marketing is, in my opinion, still one of the strongest marketing channels you can have. It's owned marketing, you own the list and you can reach the customers with the right segmentation in the best possible way. Now tell me, what kind of approach do you have when it goes into ecommerce d two TC brands to build up a proper email strategy?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:11:19]:
So a lot of the times, it comes down from the pop up that you see displayed on e commerce. So once you go on the website, pop up comes up. Do you want a discount? We try to gamify it a little bit. So maybe including an extra step or two, asking more questions about maybe some of the habits they might have. So for a skincare brand, it's like, when do you do your skincare routine? It's like morning, afternoon, evening, getting more data, but also that causes higher engagement, leading to higher opt in rates. So we use the popup. We've also created Facebook funnels before. So if we're having a big launch or if we're having a vip sale that's upcoming, we try to get as many leads as possible from retargeting on Facebook.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:11:58]:
So we create a custom landing page or the client creates a custom landing page, we create the form and we drive a lot of traffic there. So that builds up a lot of hype and builds up the email list. The other thing that we've done is forward ability. So when we do giveaways, we ask people to forward the email to add extra entries. When people reply to that forwarded email, they get added onto our list. We obviously want to make sure that they've opted in. So we do set up double opt in for those users. But those are the top three ways that we've grown some of our customers email lists.
Claus Lauter [00:12:28]:
It's definitely an underrated strategy that you have there. Do you also use SMS text messages with this strategy or how do you facilitate SMS at all?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:12:38]:
Yeah, SMS does get tacked onto that pop up, like I mentioned before. But we've also ran just view only advertising where you have the offer, but it's like text this number, this keyword in order to get this offer. And then they, as soon as they text that, we make sure that they want to opt in. Once they opt in, we send them that offer and the link to get that product. So we've ran that before and that has been a very cheap way to get SMS opt ins, especially if you have a retargeting pool, because those people are already familiar with your brand. It's not like you're going out to cold people and shoving an offer down their face. So that is another good way that weve gotten SMS numbers.
Claus Lauter [00:13:17]:
You mentioned one example before on how you could increase the results of an email marketing campaign. Can you give me some examples of other brands that you worked with on what a difference it makes to get email marketing? Right?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:13:29]:
Yeah, great question. So weve worked with more than two or three dozen ecommerce brands over the last year. And a lot of the times, the thing that they liked is just proper email structure. They would have the call to action all the way at the bottom. They wouldn't have a timer on the subject lines were stale and it wasn't captivating. I would say one of our bigger case studies has been little big playroom. They're a children's toy brand and they have ball pits that are very. They're premium ball pits, but at the same time, it's a high ticket product and they couldn't crack email for years.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:14:04]:
As soon as we came in, we implemented a new strategy for the welcome series, the abandoned Cart series, post purchase, cross selling, et cetera. And we were able to get the revenue from, on average, I think it was like maybe nine or ten k per month to 20 to month within the first month or so. But that's purely because we restructured their welcome flow. We ran brand new offers, so we were getting new people opted in on a percentage basis that went from 1% to like five or 10%. And I would say just restructuring the emails to be more conversion focused. So having that call to action above the fold and implementing urgency, scarcity and timers into the email. So people are actually, I would. I guess they're rushing to buy the product rather than like, oh, maybe I'll buy it later, that sort of thing.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:14:45]:
So just implementing those basics from even like landing page basics into an email helped tremendously with that brand.
Claus Lauter [00:14:54]:
When it comes to esps and email tools, do you have a preferred setup, preferred tools or apps that you use for the email marketing? Think.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:15:03]:
Yeah, I would say the main two that were utilizing right now is Klaviyo and Sendlane. Sendlane has been a big partner with us for the last couple of months, and we've been slowly getting more clients wrapped up on that platform. Purely, it's just a cost standpoint. It has similar features to Klaviyo, but the price point is significantly better, especially now where there's economic uncertainty and Klaviyo bills are getting higher and higher because they're a public company. A lot of brands are switching from Klaviyo to Sendlane, which has been great because we've trained up on it, but at the same time, Klaviyo is still, I guess, the master in e commerce. D, two, c, email marketing. So those are the main two that we use.
Claus Lauter [00:15:44]:
You mentioned the economic situation. Do you see any kind of trends that are happening right now when it comes to DTC brands. Are they switching more to email? What's happening in the landscape right now?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:15:54]:
Yeah, I think a lot more brands are taking email and SMS more seriously because like you mentioned, its an owned media. Once you have that email, you can utilize that email and market to them. And when you do send out these emails, theyre relatively inexpensive compared to ad costs. Your Facebook ad costs could be 30 40 month whereas your Klavia bill is like 2000 per month. And the only thing that youre paying for is probably the designs. So its relatively cheap and inexpensive to get a four to five times roas or not even Roas, but just like a return on investment through email instead of Facebook ads and TikTok ads. Now on the inverse, just market trends overall, we did see a big decline in Q one this year, a bigger decline than we did see last year. So my theory is a lot of people just overstretched their budget to get those Christmas gifts and those holiday gifts to the point where in Q one, especially in January, it was a very slow month for some of our clients because there was just not enough demand for those products because they spent all their money during holidays.
Claus Lauter [00:16:57]:
Okay, that's an interesting aspect. Never thought about that. When it comes to artificial intelligence, to AI, that's all over the martech space right now. Everyone has a app, everything is coming up. I'm not sure if everything is really AI or just a marketing term labeled on an existing product, but when it comes to email marketing, are there certain areas where you see AI is really helping the marketer with their work?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:17:22]:
Well, internally, we've used it in two different scenarios. Number one, we've used it to do customer analysis. So this has been a big push for us because we used to manually go through reviews, manually go through product descriptions, that sort of thing, and now it's a lot easier because we can just copy paste an excel sheet of all positive, all negative reviews and get a common denominator of like, even with like chat GPT, you upload the spreadsheet and say, can you give me five common traits of positivity that you got from these reviews? And now we have five different angles that we can create for the email side. Can you give us five negatives? And then we can come to the client like, hey, we've noticed this negative sentiment across the products that we think once improved, we can utilize that as a selling point. So we've seen that happen a lot within the business where we've utilized AI to not only improve our copywriting, but also improve the email angles that we're using for our clients that have worked tremendously because we're hitting them right and those pain points or right in the main selling points that they're looking for. The second use case we've used is utilizing background imagery so sometimes waves or whether it's like lightning bolt or any specific pattern for a client that is just in the background and isn't the product image. We've used that a lot to help set the tone for a specific email. Maybe it's a gradient.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:18:40]:
Instead of paying for a stock image license, we pay for midjourney. And we've been able to create some great backgrounds for some of our client emails as well.
Claus Lauter [00:18:48]:
Good point. To have an image that is not only the product image just slapped in with a white background, but really make it relatable to the text or the topic that you're sending in. Our great tip there. Now you have worked with more than 100 DTC brands. Who's your perfect customer? Are there any specific niche or verticals that you work more with?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:19:09]:
I don't specifically look at niche because, you know, when we worked with D to C brands, a lot of them are in the same cash conversion cycle. The only difference sometimes is they're a big one time product or they're a small one time product or they're a small recurring subscription. So I do prefer working with a subscription based model businesses because it's a lot easier and you get a higher LTV from the customer once they're on a subscription based, um. So when we do capture a customer, there's way more value added there. But I would say the big thing that I look for isn't even in the specific brands, but more so the business owners like business owners that are looking to grow and are looking to improve every aspect of their business to make sure that it's an absolute firehouse in a good way. Of course we want to work with people that grow. We're a team of growers and we're a team of that is always pushing the boundaries and pitching new ideas to our clients and we want to make sure that that's translated on the other side. We've had naysayers that we worked with before and it's just tough to get new ideas or new ways to market with them because they're just going to be like, no, we're going to stick to what we've done before and it's like we're evolving.
Claus Lauter [00:20:17]:
Good point. Yeah, I like to work with people that are on the same page like I am. It makes it just so much easier to see results. Walk me through the typical onboarding process for a new client. What steps are involved? How long does it usually take to get up and running?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:20:31]:
Yes, that's a great question. And this has been a pain point that I've went through personally where the onboarding for maybe other vendors that I've used, it has taken me three or four weeks sometimes and I hate that I signed up. I want to start utilizing the product. So our onboarding process is actually under five business days, if anything, if sometimes less than that, depending on how fast the customer or the client can get us the, the assets that we need. So it's pretty straightforward. After an audit process and after we've agreed to the terms that we're going to be working on, we just invite them to the slack. Provide them video training hosted by yours truly where I go through and walk them through the entire system, how we work together. Slack, any account invites that we might need, asset gathering.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:21:18]:
And once we get all that information, we have an onboarding call for about 45 minutes to an hour, make sure that we have everything. And then we're off to the races creating emails. And we typically have the first email ready for a review for them within ten business days.
Claus Lauter [00:21:32]:
Okay, that's very straightforward. I'm with you. You want to get up and running as quick as possible. And obviously as a client, you want to see results as quick as possible. And that sounds great. How does your pricing structure work?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:21:44]:
Yeah, so we're actually a flat rate pricing structure we depend on or it depends on the amount of emails that they're doing. So we have a base service that we do include like segmenting a b testing, pop up optimization and creation reporting. All of those things are within the basics, but the price differentiates depending on how many emails they need created and that comes down to the strategy. So for some clients where they come in and they're like, hey, we need our flow strategy completely redone. So then it's like, okay, we're going to be doing 20 emails the first month and then we're going to be doing five to seven the following month to just handle the campaigns. Or we sometimes spread out the flow strategy over the first three months if they want to split that cost up. So it depends on the client, but yeah, it also depends on the amount of emails that we're doing before our.
Claus Lauter [00:22:34]:
Coffee break comes to an end today. Is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:22:39]:
I mean, I would say just keep an eye on your deliverability. Install google postmasters if that's the only thing you learned, just install that and watch your deliverability and watch your domain reputation. Make sure that you have your segmentation set up. And I think those are the main points that I'd want to highlight. And I guess if you want to audit, we also do provide audits for your email marketing accounts, so it's free. Just submit your info and we'll get back to you within one to two days with things that you can improve on your email side.
Claus Lauter [00:23:07]:
Okay. No, I think that's a great offer because sometimes you just don't know how your deliverability actually looks like. You think everything is in the green and it might be a complete nightmare and you're not aware of it. Where can people find out more about you guys?
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:23:19]:
Yeah, it's aspectagency.com comma a S p dash T agency.com. And if you want to learn more about what we do, we actually publish YouTube videos on the weekly. Just look up my name and you'll find out a bunch of email marketing tips that you've probably never heard of.
Claus Lauter [00:23:34]:
Okay, I will definitely check it out. Nikita, thanks so much. I will put the links in the show notes here, just one click away for all listeners. And now a lot of people would get in touch with you to figure out if their email deliverability actually works or not. Thanks so much for your time today.
Nikita Vakhrushev [00:23:46]:
Thank you. Claus.
Claus Lauter [00:23:48]:
Hey Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast. And even better, if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode.
Claus Lauter [00:24:10]:
Have a good one.