Turning Emails into Relationships
In today's digital landscape, email marketing stands as a potent tool for not only driving business growth but also for cultivating stronger and more meaningful customer relationships. Join us in this enlightening session, "Turning Emails into Relationships: Mastering the CX Game," where we delve deep into the art and science of email marketing as a vehicle for elevating the customer experience. Discover strategies, insights, and secrets to crafting email campaigns that go beyond transactions and transform into genuine connections.
(upbeat music)
- All right, welcome back to our next session
with Mark Lewis of Nataleco.
Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.
- Thank you for having me.
- Ah, of course.
So this session is all about turning emails
into relationships.
I think Mark and I were talking a little bit more
and this might kind of evolve into more on the AI side,
which obviously we're really excited about.
But before we get anywhere, Mark,
can you tell us a little bit about your adventure
and a little bit about Nataleco?
- Sure.
So I started in Nataleco about 10 years ago.
I started as just a solo developer,
mostly originally on Magento.
And then over the years, transition more into Shopify.
And then transition more into hiring a team.
I basically, as a solo developer, I got too busy
and I realized the only way to scale myself
besides staying up to 2 a.m. every day was hiring a team.
And so that's why I grew the company.
And then I realized I really wanted to empower the merchants,
not just from a development perspective,
which is obviously very important for any calmer store.
But looking at the design, the strategy, email marketing,
really look at the top down approach of what are your needs
and then how can we help you fulfill those needs.
- Yeah.
And I love the broadness because just for the audience listening,
it's not just a Shopify agency.
You're helping out Magento stores well too, big comersors.
I assume though, with the rise of Shopify,
is there a lot more Shopify?
- Yeah, it's definitely a transition to majority Shopify
because of really the market.
And I think also the platform itself,
I think Shopify has really grown in its capabilities
and become more versatile.
I would say five years ago,
when we first started working on it,
it wasn't a good fit for most of our merchants
because it didn't have the features that they needed
and we could build or find those features
on a platform like Magento.
But over the years, they really expanded
the Shopify's capabilities and because it's so easy to use,
it's fairly stable.
It's really a great option for merchants
to kind of simplify their operations
as opposed to going with a more custom platform
like Magento.
- And, yeah, and actually one more question is,
I hope the audience finds this interesting as well too.
Like because you deal with the migrations
from one platform to another, correct?
So are there any patterns that you see
when merchants are coming to you on, okay,
I think we have to move to another platform,
whether that goes from something to Shopify
or Shopify to something else.
Are there patterns of the timing of that?
And what is that like for even the merchants
that are listening to understand
who maybe this is something I should consider?
- Yeah, I think the timing is usually every two
to three years a merchant looks at either a replatform
or a redesign.
And if you're currently happy on your platform
via Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce,
then you look at, okay, let's do a little rebranding,
a little like cleaning up our look.
If we're not happy with our platform at that point,
it's a great time to consider a new platform
with the redesign because essentially going
from one platform to the other,
you have to start from scratch.
You have to do all the coding again.
Everything anyway, so it's a great time
to leverage that to go ahead
and just refresh your brand as well.
- Okay, that's great.
And let's get into the weeks now.
And so first we'll just talk about kind of the high level,
your thoughts on the email marketing space,
email marketing as a channel first.
And then I think you and I have talked before about AI
and I love that your thoughts on this.
So we'll kind of venture into that as well.
So from email marketing,
I guess the first question I want to ask you is that
when I talk to merchants,
there's always this first feeling of like,
well email marketing is transactional,
but I also see that there's a lot of push for it's like,
no, it's actually relational.
And what are your thoughts on that?
Where should the mindset be of a merchant
when they start thinking about email marketing?
Is it transactional?
Is it really how like they should think about that?
Or is it more building relationships with customers?
I think it's both.
I think a lot of merchants start
from a transactional perspective.
And even that word transactional email,
it's been the order confirmation emails,
shipping confirmation emails,
all of those emails, they're important,
like people need to get them.
So you start at the transactional level,
but then you can look at those emails
and see what relational,
what customizable aspects can I put in those?
Even creating a little more like character around your brand,
one of the brands we work with is Oakley,
like the Oakmo company,
and they have a very strong personality around the brand.
And really look at how can you tell your brand story
in even the transactional emails?
It makes it a lot more real to the customer.
And less of like, okay,
I'm just getting this boilerplate email
that's automatically fired off by Shopify or Clavia.
- On that note, so Oakley, and correct me if I'm wrong,
I feel like Oakley had this brand
in this brand experience first and foremost,
that was really important to them.
And then they kind of figured out how to add that
to their communication channels regardless.
If that's correct, walk me through the reverse.
Let's say merchants that are listening
and agencies are listening,
like there isn't that brand presence yet.
Is that something you can start on email
and then kind of utilize throughout the rest of the company?
Or do you kind of push brands to say,
"No, you have to understand who you are first
before you start communicating utilizing channels like email
and putting brand into that?
- Yeah, I think it can be kind of a collaborative process
where I do think you need to start
with an initial brand voice
and understand what you want your brand to be perceived as.
But then through emails and open rates
and click through rates, you can test those messages
and really kind of refine that message
and see what resonates and see what actually converts.
The great thing about email marketing
is that it's very numbers based.
And so you can do a lot of testing
to see what moves the needle on the actual sales of the brand.
- Now, when I have had conversations
with certain merchants about email marketing,
I think there's two sort of mindsets.
One is that yes, we're doing email marketing.
It's just like we're sending out emails.
So then two, it's really a large component of their business.
How do you get, how do you tell your merchants
of people you work with,
obviously to get to that next level?
Like what do you have to start thinking about?
Like how it, or actually is email really important
where they do have to think about more strategically
how it fits in with the business?
Like what, cheer me a little about your thoughts on that?
- Yeah, I think there was like an old school
thinking of email marketing years and years ago,
which is like newsletters.
And you just pump out a newsletter every week, every month,
whatever.
But I think what we're seeing now is a little more
customization and less is more.
Basically, if you don't have anything truly new to say,
don't say anything at all,
because it destroys kind of your brand's attention
with a customer.
If you're spamming customers with sales every week,
they're not gonna start ignoring that,
or they're just gonna completely unsubscribe.
- Yeah.
- So when we start working with a merchant, a lot of times,
we look at how many emails they're sending,
and we try to cut back.
Sometimes merchants are sending multiple emails a week,
or even one email a week might be too much,
depending on their brand, depending on what they're selling.
If they're selling the same products week after week,
why are you continually telling your customers
about the same product in the same way?
Unless you have something new to say,
probably better to say nothing at all,
otherwise you're just gonna dilute their attention.
- Is there a template that you use?
And I'm not thinking of like a spreadsheet,
but to start that brainstorming with the merchant of like,
"Oh, I don't have anything to say outside of,
I wanna sell this next product of mine."
How do you craft like,
okay, well, hold on, let's take a step back.
Like, what should we be saying?
And maybe even, this kind of bridges us to data,
I assume as well too, of like what information you have
in order to share with them.
So talk to us a little bit about that.
- Yeah, and you can get data
from a lot of different sources.
We love heat maps, even, you know,
classes at Google Analytics to see where people
are going on the site,
where they're clicking on the site with the heat maps.
And then with email marketing as well,
you can, you know, do tagging,
you can do some automation around the interest
and trying to figure out what individual customers
are interested in, and then craft your emails
in a more customizable way,
even like using variables in the email templates of like,
oh, if this customer has a particular attribute,
if they're male or female, you know,
depending on the brand, like a clothing brand,
that matters.
You don't want us to be sending men, you know,
women's clothing and vice versa.
So whatever you can do to find those data points
and collect those data points,
and then use them to make your emails feel more real,
makes the customer feel like this is more relational
versus just an automated transactional email
that they blasted to a million people.
- And in your case with the merchants
that you're dealing with, is the data going
into the e-commerce platform?
But also I assume I'll talk about Clavio
because they're clearly the number one email marketing tool
for e-commerce brands right now.
Is it getting the data into Clavio as well too?
And I know you're a developer, Mark.
So tell us like, go ahead, get into the weeds of like,
well, you know, how do you capture this data
and where are you sending it to
so you can make those decisions
in your email marketing campaigns?
- Yeah, I mean, as you alluded to,
Clavio is definitely the market leader
in this SMB mid-market segment in e-commerce.
Probably 90% of our clients are using Clavio.
And we really look to Clavio as the kind of single source
for customer preferences because the email marketing
is so important in terms of the customization and preferences.
So it's more important for us to get the data
directly in Clavio than it is to have that data in ChuffFi.
It might be different if you're using a different email tool
or even ChuffFi does have their own email tool,
but our approach is going ahead
and trying to get it straight into Clavio
and then we can leverage it quicker and better.
We have less data issues if it's bouncing
from platform to platform.
- So as an agency, do you find yourself helping out
the merchants like capturing and then getting that data
in Clavio?
Was that an easy thing to solve?
And again, I apologize for the ignorance here,
but I'm just curious if that's something
that you work on at your agency a lot.
- Yeah, it is a lot of installing pickles
and there's code snippets that you put on different
new product pages, collection pages
to give those extra signals to Clavio.
And by default, those aren't set up.
So that is kind of a behind the scenes thing
that if you just install the Clavio app out of the box,
it's not necessarily going to give you that data.
It's not super complicated, but it's enough
that most merchants wouldn't be able to do it themselves
without a developer helping them.
- Love it.
All right, so let's take the next step,
which is we're at the AICX Summit.
So let's talk a little bit about AI and email marketing
and we'll kind of then jump into AI and everything else
that we talked about earlier.
But how have you utilized up to this point AI
for email marketing needs and then as well,
like what would you recommend for certain merchants listening
of like how they can get their hands dirty specifically
within the email marketing element utilizing
any sort of AI capabilities?
- Yeah, I mean, I think that the tools themselves
are going to keep releasing more AI specific features,
even Shopify is just trying to release that sidekick,
that kind of thing.
But outside of that, I think that you can use chat GPT,
the kind of king of AI right now as an editor,
as a brainstormer, as a copywriter.
We see a lot of clients now,
putting their brand boys, putting the assets
of their brand in chat GPT and asking it,
hey, I'm thinking about doing this and this,
give me five different email titles.
And there's still obviously a human element,
you're in control of what you pick, but it's a great,
it's a great like writing partner to bounce things off of them.
And that's been huge from the titles to the copy
and just really like leveraging the tool
to almost 10x yourself as opposed to having
to hire a team of copywriters.
- Now, as a reminder, and I assume most people know this,
but what you put in, right, is what you get out
of something like chat GPT.
So, and I don't want this to be the chat GPT series,
but I think you're a perfect fit for this,
just talk to us a little bit about custom instructions,
'cause I'm assuming you know about that.
And how important that is,
because you just talked about brand voice, right?
And so, again, it goes to the input
and making sure that chat GPT is ready
to clearly understand your business.
So then when it comes out of it, it's what you can utilize.
So, just walk us through like when I say custom instructions
that I'm making input versus output,
like can you clear that up for us?
- Yeah, so in the latest version of chat GPT,
there's basically even another layer
of custom instructions where you can create
your own custom bot.
And so, I've seen one brand do it so far,
and I think everyone should do it,
is you can create your own custom bot,
and go ahead and give it all the material possible,
and save it, and it's going to always
have that material to reference.
And then you ask the questions
that you would ask the normal chat GPT.
So it has access to the internet,
it has access to its brain,
but it also has access to all the materials
that you've given it forever, basically.
And so it can almost be like your history
in the voice of the brand
because you've fed it so much of your brand.
- All right, when you say,
and I just want to go deeper into this,
so people listening understand,
when you say, well, give it assets,
what do you mean by that?
Like what is an asset that you can upload into chat GPT?
- Yeah, so now you can upload almost anything,
you can upload images,
you can upload just a screenshot of emails of your website,
you can tell it, this is our website,
look at our website.
Really, it's up to your mind,
your creativity to decide what you want to feed
into this bot, because now it can essentially
process anything.
So I wouldn't limit what you put in it,
I would just put everything you can relevant,
obviously to your brand,
and then see where it goes.
- So as an example, right, it's like,
hey, here are our last five blog posts
that are under standard style,
and here's a logo of our brand asset, right?
And here is obviously our website and so forth,
and maybe if you have PDF files of,
I don't know, your brand for you, right?
Like get them all of that,
and that's something that you can do, correct?
- Yeah, totally.
- And again, I know this is so simple,
but it's not, just remind us, like an engineer can do this,
or you need an engineer to do this?
- You don't need to be an engineer at all,
like in the background,
obviously it's using code and everything,
but now they've made the processing of documents
and PDFs and images, very seamless,
and so anyone can just upload those materials,
and it'll save it in perpetuity.
You don't have to always keep giving it,
okay, this is my brand voice,
'cause I'm asking you a question about my business today.
Once you create that custom bot,
you can be like the Natalecobot,
it's going to retain all that information forever,
and then every time you ask it a question,
it's going to be pulling from there.
- I love it.
- So let's kind of venture to the,
after you send out some email campaigns,
have you,
you can either use examples of your merchants or yourself,
have you utilized AI tools to analyze the data,
or make tweaks to email campaigns?
So not just the input now,
and then creating the email campaigns,
what comes after,
have you utilized AI to help you with this as well?
- Yeah, so what we've done or related to that
is a lot of times we've AB tested a couple different AI prompts,
or basically we asked at a question,
it gave us two examples,
or we asked at two different questions,
and then we did an AB test of that.
Usually the subject line is a good place to start,
because you can test the open rate,
it's a very simple metric.
And then basically iterate on that, okay,
like then tell the AI, tell chat TPT,
this won the test,
and then basically he she it knows,
okay, we should go more in that direction,
and you can just keep kind of iterating on that AB testing,
and continue like basically to improve the open rate,
until at some point we've seen it kind of slope off,
you kind of hit a ceiling,
but it's a cool way to really like see a difference,
and a lot faster than the past,
where you probably be racking your brain,
of like, okay, look, you kind of come up with another campaign,
another campaign, like to test, yeah, it's a lot of work.
- I mean, that's why I think there's so much potential here,
because just the amount of brainstorming
that you can do with it is endless, right?
Like to your just very point,
oh, I gotta think of another campaign,
like within a few prompts, like here you are,
here are your next ideas,
not that you have to go in that direction,
but ideas and to start brainstorming yourself off of, right?
And again, just one other point of clarity for the audience,
right, it's really important to continue these conversations
on that same thread,
because the model understands like obviously everything
that comes beforehand,
and then you don't wanna start a brand new thread,
because then you're starting from scratch really.
But Mark, maybe kind of last subject,
let's kind of broaden this out a little bit,
I know we talked about this before we started,
or on our previous conversation,
but just utilizing AI across your entire business.
We were just talking about email marketing,
but outside of email marketing,
where have you suggested to start utilizing AI
across customer experience, wherever that might be,
and tell us a little bit about those conversations,
and your recommendations for people listening?
- For sure, for sure.
You know, we at Nataleco really promote everyone to use AI
as much as possible,
and look at it as like a 10x tool for you.
It's not so much about like,
oh, people are gonna lose their jobs,
it's more about like you can become 10 times
more powerful internally.
And so, you know, think the simple things
of like just responding to a customer email,
running through chat DPT,
that can provide very valuable feedback of basically like,
oh, maybe you could tweak this, maybe you could tweak that.
And you know, not super relevant to CX,
but like even development, coding,
I think that like kind of the possibilities
for a team to use AI to really 10x themselves,
are basically limitless.
And you know, I know that there's a lot of fear
about losing jobs,
but I think that if you give your team the message of like,
no one's gonna lose their jobs,
you're just going to be that much better.
I think that's really empowering for them
to basically try to increase their productivity
versus thinking like, okay,
if I start using AI,
then you know, five people on my team are gonna get laid off.
And that is a fear at some companies,
you know, they're gonna use that as a call savings tool.
But I think that's going to be like a losing game,
to always look at it as like, okay,
we can cut these costs, we can lay off these people
as opposed to really like doubling down on your existing team
and trying to empower them to be better than they are.
- What would you tell someone that wants to learn
but doesn't know where to start, right?
It's like, where do you go to better understand
how to utilize for this business?
Like maybe would you go to an agency?
Would you go, like I don't know,
like where would you suggest?
- Yeah, I mean, if you don't have an existing agency,
I think the value of working with an agency
is that you get what I call cross pollination.
Like we are exposed to so many different brands
because we work with them and we're using,
we're working with them in a fast pace
versus, you know, a brand that only has an internal team,
they only know what they know
and technology and e-commerce is changing so fast.
It can very easily, you can get tunnel vision
of just knowing what you know
and having an agency, even if they're not, you know,
full time, even if they're not replacing your team
as like a sounding board can be basically a breath of fresh air.
Like we were on a conversation
with a potential client the other day
and it was just a sales call, we were like,
oh, maybe you think of this, maybe you can do this
and they're like, oh, like you've already helped me
in 30 minutes more than my existing single developer,
you know, has helped me in two years.
So I think that that kind of external perspective
is really helpful for a lot of brands that, you know,
just really get in the weeds
because they're just kind of on the day to day.
- Yeah.
I wanna just call that out
'cause it's something that actually,
I didn't realize until this point, Mark, which is,
you know, if you think about yourself,
compared to an agency, like you have so many partners
that you work with, you have to always be on,
at least I know in our sense, like here at Customer,
when new features are coming out,
especially right now with all these new AI features,
we release a lot of information to partners first
and foremost before anything else.
And so here's like a very value added,
or I should just say it's a value add
for talking to an agency because they are probably the ones
that are responsible for really understanding
what's happening right now.
I'm sure it could be exhausting,
but is that ring true for you and your team, Mark?
- Definitely.
- You look at one of the biggest things
working with our partners as education
and education for our team so that we can educate the clients.
I know on your side as a partner,
it's very hard to speak individually to every client,
and so a lot of times if you broadcast it out
to the agencies, they're able to also disseminate it.
And we have weekly monthly meetings with our clients
and our goal is to try to understand the ecosystem
as much as possible and the new features in the ecosystem.
And then suggest based on the clients' goals at that point,
I'm like, oh, by the way, did you know that customer
has this new feature?
Sounds very applicable to your current goals
have you considered it.
And that kind of conversation is sometimes just a game changer
because like I said, they're so in the weeds
of just like they know what they know,
it's amazing for them to be able to get
that kind of external spark.
- I love it.
Maybe last thing again, just to wrap everything up
in a box here.
If you're starting with AI, let's say more,
I think it leads to email honestly,
just because of our conversation, I agree,
where there's so many easy things to do.
Tell us one more time how you would start
if you want to utilize AI, specifically in the email channel.
Go ahead, just give us a few quick examples.
- I would say, honestly, just go to chat PPT.
I would sign up for the $20 a month plan
and I think it's worth it and ask it,
hey, what do you think of my latest email?
And just start from there of just kind of getting inspiration.
I think it kind of leads itself to the next thing,
and as you start experimenting with using AI
in an external tool, then you're gonna appreciate it
more in the internal tool as well.
Whenever customer releases a new AI feature,
you're gonna look at it more positively and say,
oh, this is something that really can make me so much better
versus, oh, this is something that I don't understand,
I don't control, maybe I'm just gonna skip it
because I know what I know.
- Right, right.
- Great.
Well, Mark, thanks again for all the time
that you're giving us, the expertise around email,
marketing and AI, and look forward to talking to you again.
- Yeah, thank you, Ryan.
- All right, thanks everyone.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)