Split Tests, Surveys, and Segments: 

Nikki Elbaz: My theory was that we had ourselves a little fan club, local people who
were interested in the farming community and the local food economy that Harvey was
building. They loved the updates that were built into the promotions, but for some
reason they didn’t want a membership welcome to.
Nikki Elbaz: Email swipes, where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch
your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. Every other week we’ll talk to an
email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode we’ll dive into
the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your own
email work. Guillbas, the copywriter behind winning emails for eight and nine figure
SaaS and ecommerce brands like Shopify, Four, Sigmatic, and Sprout social. And I
know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the
sky insights into plug and play actions ready to make inspiration tactical?
Nikki Elbaz: Let’s go.
Get free cinnamon rolls when you join Harvey Green with coupon
code
First, a quick recap of the email we discussed last week that we’ll be digging into today.
Nikki Elbaz: We’ll get straight to the point. Get a free bag of Orym’s famous cinnamon
rolls when you join Harvey Green. Last time we offered Orym’s we sold out in 2 hours
and this time we’re giving them away. Hurry, join Harvey Green now before we run out.
Get free aurums. Get a free bag of oryms when you join Harvey Green with coupon
code. Yum.
The first thing I want to share. It’s so easy to criticize brands’
marketing
Nikki Elbaz: The first thing I want to share.
Nikki Elbaz: Is a bit funny as a takeaway, but I think it’s an important perspective so I’m
going to share it.
Nikki Elbaz: It’s so easy to look at a.
Nikki Elbaz: Brand’S marketing and nitpick and I am totally talking to myself here. I
mean, that is my entire LinkedIn content strategy.
Nikki Elbaz: I collect interesting things that I see.
Nikki Elbaz: Around and I point out why they do or don’t work. But number one, you
don’t necessarily have the full picture. I remember one time we were working with a
client and the email that we were tasked to write had a goal of getting customers to
cancel. Yes, to cancel. That was the goal of the email. We were trying to push people
away, customers away. Now, if I came along and received this email without knowing
the goal, I would have read it and listed all the things that they were quote unquote
doing wrong and why it would increase cancellations. So number one, you don’t
understand the full picture. Number two, marketing teams are humans. Humans with
limited resources or limited capabilities, or both sometimes.
Nikki Elbaz: Usually.
Nikki Elbaz: Really, they’re really smart teams and they know they’re doing something
wrong, but they just don’t have the time or budget to do it better. Everyone knows the
best practice of don’t discount deeply always, and we love to hate on the brands that
send endless once in a lifetime sales. Often it is a really bad strategy and it’s an
intentional strategy that they are doing and it’s not great. But sometimes there’s a good
reason that a brand isn’t doing things right. In the case of Harvey, it was a timing thing.
A birthday happens when a birthday happens. Should they pretend they were founded
in August to drum up summer sales? That doesn’t work. So takeaway number one
before you tear down a company, give yourself a humility check. You’re probably right,
and that huge flashing two hour countdown will reset as students refresh the page. But
sometimes there might be room for better judgment. To this note, stay tuned for episode
28, in which I interview a really amazing founder who is full of altruism. The crazy thing
is that some people just don’t believe him. They think his offer is too good to be true
because they’re stuck in that judgmental zone. I mentioned in last week’s episode that.
Nikki Elbaz: We couldn’t just lower our offer because.
Nikki Elbaz: The old leads who had seen the higher discount wouldn’t convert. This is
slightly untrue because of the beautiful thing called segmentation. Another solution that
we could have utilized would be to segment the list by old leads who had seen the deep.
Nikki Elbaz: Discount from the holidays or the birthday.
Nikki Elbaz: Sale and make a new segment for the fresh leads who never saw that deep
discount. Ultimately, this free gift was a simpler solution, but it was something that was
on the table. It wasn’t a long term solution. If we split the list long term, we would have
to offer two offers for every promotion, and the conversions that we would see from the
old leads likely wouldn’t equal out to the amount of work that it would generate to have
two offers running simultaneously. But we were toying with the idea of running a win
back style campaign for the old leads, a sort of last ditch attempt to convert them.
Instead, we took the orums pop up as an opportunity for a free gift offer, and we did a
light research sprint to try to understand why they weren’t converting. But I’m getting
ahead of myself. That’s takeaway number four. Meanwhile, let’s wrap up takeaway
number two, which is to segment your list, but to do so with a grain of salt. At minimum,
you want to be sending to your engaged segment, but the segmentation options are
endless. Each time you’re aiming to segment, ask yourself why. How many more
conversions can you anticipate from the work of this segmentation? How much better
will the customer experience be? You need to make sure that the work of segmenting is
worth the investment.
Nearly every ecommerce opt in in the World Wide Web is a 10%
discount
Alright, now let’s move on to discounting as an opt in strategy. Nearly every single
ecommerce opt in in the World Wide Web is a 10% discount. This is true even for
brands that never discount, which doesn’t make any sense. If they’re coming in at a
discount, they’re going to keep looking for a discount. Now, it’s true that shoppers have
been conditioned to look for discounts as a whole. That’s the way the ecommerce
industry has been built. But there are many
00:05:00
brands that build sustainable growth even without relying heavily on discount. We don’t
need to lean into that conditioning right from the get go. So does that mean your opt in
shouldn’t be a 10% discount? That depends on so much. It depends on how big your
list is and how badly you need to grow it. It depends on your overall discounting
strategy. It depends on what other things you can offer. But should you default to 10%
just because that’s what your Klaviyo popup template is pre populated with no way test,
test, test. So takeaway number two, test your offers. Testing in email offers is obviously
more complicated than testing pop up or site offers, but it can still be done. But at
minimum, test those site offers.
Nikki’s ecommerce playbooks give you the perfect roadmap for using
data
Okay, now for the research sprint I mentioned earlier.
Nikki Elbaz: If you love email swipes, you will love my playbooks. They are chock full of
inspiration with dozens of examples, color coded breakdowns and all the whys and
hows and wheres and whats of all the different ecom flows. Even better. Theyre
affordable. One anonymous copywriter said, in a world full of $1,000 and $2,000
copywriting courses, being able to learn a sequence for $52 is amazing, by the way. You
can learn them for even less if you get the whole bundle another piece of feedback that
I loved. I purchased the welcome sequence playback and loved it. It’s an easy, flowing
read, and following it is a breeze. I love how it’s so actionable. It takes you step by step
through the process, but you don’t end up with a templated sequence that sounds the
same. I also love how you brought in relevant examples to prove the point you were
making. I pull it up before every welcome sequence I write. That’s a big point of these
playbooks that you don’t end up with the same thing every single time that you
understand the strategy. Just like copywriter Paul Melrose says, since using Nikki’s
playbook, starting work on an ecommerce email sequence without the playbooks would
feel like jumping out of plane without a parachute. And these are not copy and paste
solutions either. They work because Nikki gets you to understand the essential
concepts at play so you can solve your own or your clients email problems. Big love and
appreciation for what she’s given us. Thanks Nikki, but don’t think it’s all theory. Hallie
Williams says had a quick turnaround deadline on an email sequence I hadn’t written in
a while, but I didn’t even sweat it. I pulled up one of Nikki’s playbooks and voila. I had a
winning sequence in record time. Nikki’s Playbooks give you the perfect roadmap for
using the data. You have to craft email sequences that perform well every single time.
Thanks Nikki. I love your playbooks. And one last one. This one from a founder I put into
action FAQ email and the twelve hour warning email you suggested, along with two
other emails and two texts. And I got over $105,000 in revenue in the weekend from the
promo. Pretty neat. Never made so many sales via email. Your book helped me save
time to get this done. So whether you want to save time, understand things better, or
just get some amazing inspiration, go grab a playbook or two or twelve@nikielbas.com
email playbooks and yes, that link is in the show notes. Wish you were an Ecom just so
that you could grab my playbooks. But you’re in sass. Don’t worry, I got your back with
the sass success pack. Say that five times fast, okay? Don’t just head to the show
notes, you’ll find the link and grab it there.
Takeaway number four, answer questions with research. Sprint
running email tests is its own form of research
Okay, back to our show.
Nikki Elbaz: The Harvey list had a really interesting subpopulation. A large number of
subscribers were super, super engaged. They would read all the emails, but.
Nikki Elbaz: They wouldn’t click through.
Nikki Elbaz: We did see that very clear button copy did better than fun or clever button
copy, but still the click rate wasn’t matching the read rate. My theory was that we had
ourselves a little fan club. Local people who were interested in the farming community
and the local food economy that Harvey was building. They loved the updates that were
built into the promotions, but for some reason, they didn’t want a membership. I was all
set to start talking to nonprofit experts to get their insights on how they convert
armchair supporters. But then we ran a light research sprint a survey and a couple of
interviews and the why aren’t you buying? Segment had so many answers for us. It
gave us a ton of material and angles to work with. So takeaway number four, answer
questions with research. Dont just guess ask. But im going to contradict myself here in
takeaway number five. If youre just not getting customers to agree to an interview, or
youre sensing that people arent being honest with you, or your question isnt huge
enough to warrant a research. Sprint running email tests is its own form of research.
Lets take the example of my theory that we had this segment of armchair supporters.
How could I have tested this without talking to them? We could have changed their
buttons to drive to blog posts with more update style content. If the click rate went up,
that would be a good indicator that they’re just there for content. So takeaway number
five is remarkably similar to takeaway number three. Takeaway number three is to test
your offers. Takeaway number five is to test whatever it is that you need answers for.
The difference is that testing offers or buttons or things like that has the goal of
improving your metrics, testing things to answer questions testing for research has a
different goal, which is understanding your subscriber base. In the example of switching
buttons
00:10:00
Nikki Elbaz: from joining the Harvey membership to blog posts, that would have
definitely lowered the paid conversion rate, but it would be worth it in the short term to
understand what that segment needs and what’s motivating them. Two more short
takeaways. I mentioned briefly that the email was straight into the point, and that’s an
important copy principle. The easier the sale will be, either because it’s a low price point
or there’s a lot of desire or pain that needs to be assaulted. The easier the sale, the
shorter the copy can be. You don’t have to do a lot of convincing, you can just move out
of the way to allow the conversions to happen. So takeaway number six, know your
audience and offer and match it to the length of the copy and the heaviness of your
persuasion. Last thing I just wanted to point out again how crazy it is that.
Nikki Elbaz: $5 can equal $50.
Nikki Elbaz: What am I talking about? Well, the fact that people converted for the free
gift of donuts but didn’t for the $50 off membership. Clearly there were some who
werent around when they were offering the $50 off or the $100 off. Clearly there were
some who regretted not joining and decided to cut their losses and not wait around for
the next sale. But the fact remains that we have to remember the place that emotion
plays in sales. There is something so psychologically enticing about a free gift,
especially for one thats exclusive and sells out fast. And even more importantly, money
isnt just money. There is no such objective thing as valuable. Everyone is going to
define things differently and we can use that to our advantage or it will be to our
disadvantage if we forget about it and constrain ourselves to the logical numbers only
dollar amount of something that we’re offering and that’s takeaway number seven.
There is no such thing as face value and that can be a good thing or a bad thing
depending on how much you pay attention to it and how well you frame it. Thanks for
geeking out with me about that email story. If you enjoyed either of these episodes,
you’ll probably enjoy getting my emails. Plus you’ll never miss another episode. Sign up
at Nikki outbust.com subscribe subscribe and yes, that link is in the show notes