Data Do’s and Don’ts 

Nikki Elbaz: Anna mentioned how adding questions lowers the conversion rate on the
registration form, but how that trade off is one that they are willing to take.
Nikki Elbaz: Welcome to 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, well
talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode, well
dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire
your own email work. I’m Mickey Elvaz, the copywriter behind winning emails for eight
and nine figure sass and ecommerce brands like Shopify, Four, Sigmatic and Sprout
social. And I know that he 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.
Join us for a live webinar on crafting engaging learning experiences
Nikki Elbaz: Let’s go. First, a quick recap of the email.
Nikki Elbaz: We discussed last week that we’ll be digging into today.
Nikki Elbaz: Hey Anna, just a gentle nudge because we wouldn’t want you to miss.
Nikki Elbaz: Out on the chance to add a splash of innovation to your l and D efforts.
Wednesday the 27 March at 03:00 gmt 11:00 EDT join us and Charlie Moore from
Nestle for a live webinar that’s brimming with insights on crafting engaging learning
experiences. Brewing Nestle’s recipe for impactful learning is your ticket to discovering
how one of.
Nikki Elbaz: The world’s leading brands utilizes Powhatan to.
Nikki Elbaz: Create captivating training materials. Register now. Hosted by Charlie
Moore of Nestle, Max Edwards of Powtoon Perk up your l and D strategy insights
directly from Nestle’s l and D journey success stories to inspire your own training
endeavors.
Charlie Register: Big brands have a lot to learn about personalization
in emails
Interactive Q and a session with Charlie Register now preserve your spot now and let’s
brew something great together. Hope to see you there. Max Edwards, head of Demand
generation this.
Nikki Elbaz: Episode was such a treasure because as much as we email people say
personalize, personalize, personalize. There are so few brands who actually do it right.
And actually, this is one of the reasons that I love getting emails from big brands. I know
a lot of email experts are critical of big brands and their email strategies, and there’s
definitely truth that they send out a lot of promotions and very little nurturing, but there’s
still so much to learn from them because they have big teams and big budgets. There’s
just more that they can do and faster, too. For example, the first brands I saw.
Nikki Elbaz: With inbox preview images were the big guys.
Nikki Elbaz: Now I’m seeing them from d, two c brands, but it took a while for them to
catch up. And definitely with personalization. The impact a big brand can make with
good personalization is huge. It’s so worth it for them to use personalization data all the
time. On the other hand, because they have so many accounts, things can get a bit
vague. They need to be broad enough to be inclusive enough. Here’s an example of
this. I got an email from Sephora the other day all about how I will love this new product
drop. There were two issues with email. Number one, it was very fake product
recommendation algorithm feeling. There were a few lines in there about how we know
you love Lancome, so you’ll love this. It was so not the way humans actually talk to each
other. A more natural way to say it would be Lancome has a new product, or one of
your favorite brands has a new product, or even here’s a new product we think you’ll
like. In this case, mentioning why they think I like it can actually be detrimental because
it’s automated. But okay, that’s a bit nitpicky. At the end of the day, they are a big
company sending me an automated product recommendation, and I’m not really
looking for that human relationship with them. What really didn’t work about the email
was that Lancome has a makeup line and a skincare line. I’ve only ever bought their
makeup from Sephora. They were sending me a recommendation for their skincare.
This is not to say that they couldn’t recommend skincare to me. If you like a brand for
makeup, you might like a brand for skincare. But there was no context like that. There
was just an assumption that I will like the new product because I like the brand. Using
past purchase data can be a really powerful way to introduce customers to new product
lines or even partner brands, but it needs to be handled so differently than a straight up
similar product recommendation.
Poutoon uses data to personalize webinar flows without getting
creepy
So all this brings me to what I really appreciated about the poutoon strategy. Yes, it’s
super impressive that they actually use the data that people share. They actually create
multiple webinar flows depending on what people are filling out. That’s amazing. It
seems so rudimentary, but it’s so rare. And we’ll talk about why in a second. But there’s
something more than just the fact that they actually use their data. What’s really
impressive is that they’re using the right data. We touched on this briefly in the actual
episode when Anna mentioned how she wanted to personalize more deeply, but
without getting creepy. And this is where things get murky for us marketers because
personalization can be anything from first name merge tags to the challenges that the
subscriber is looking to solve. And that kind of deeper data, the challenges, that’s the
stuff that’s not going to feel creepy. And more importantly, that’s the stuff that won’t just
get you an open because you’re catching someone’s attention. That’s the kind of open
that will get you a conversion because you’re giving them what they want to. Go back to
the Sephora example, Lancome in this subject line caught my attention, but it didn’t get
my purchase. So takeaway number one, use data to personalize for relevance, not for
attention.
Collecting customer feedback is like breathing oxygen for brands
Okay,
00:05:00
so now let’s talk a bit about why brands don’t personalize, even though it creates such
an amazing customer experience. The biggest obstacle is that you need the data to use
the data. Collecting customer feedback is like breathing oxygen. For some brands, they
just do it day in, day out. But like rocketing to Mars for other brands, a, whole production
and a, ah, scary one at that. By the way, that’s why I made my customer interview
packet for just dollar 37. It has everything you need to run customer interviews with
confidence, email templates, goal setting sheets, checklists, and 114 questions divided
by your research goals. Check out the link in the show notes I love how the POWH
team looked at data collection. Anna mentioned how adding questions lowers the
conversion rate on the registration form, but how that trade off is one that they are
willing to take. It’s worth it for them to get fewer committed registrants than more
registrants who won’t even show up. That data is valuable to them in its own right, and
they see how it pays off even in the short term of registrant quality. Another thing to
notice, by the way, is that they made those fields optional and they get plenty of
responses. So clearly it’s not actually impacting things that much. So takeaway number
two is to collect data. Interviews, reviews, polls, whatever, wherever. It’s so critical to
understand what your customers need. The next obstacle is finding the right data within
the data that you have. Like I mentioned, they’re not just using basic data, they’re
digging into the challenges and using that, because that’s the powerful stuff. Here, by
the way, is where my $43 campaign ideation masterclass comes in in just 31 minutes. It
shows you exactly how to generate endless email ideas from customer reviews. So
takeaway number three is to use the right data. Like we mentioned in takeaway number
one, you’re aiming for relevance, not for attention. Hey, let’s say you do an exclusive
deal. That interview packet and masterclass I mentioned, check out the show notes for
a special link to a bundle. They’re usually dollar 80 together, but you can snag them at
20% off until September 1. My goodness, where did the summer go?
Another big obstacle is that it’s complex to set up personalized
variations
Ok, back to personalization obstacles. Another big obstacle is that it’s complex to set up
personalized variations. And I’m actually a big believer in not blindly personalizing just
because it’s a big practice, but making sure that the personalization you’re considering
is really going to pay off. Like in the case of POWH. It totally did. Especially since their
example isn’t even that complicated. Sure, it’s a bunch of different webinar flows and it’s
a bit last minute, but it’s not so complex. But sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. I
had a client once who, for every single email we wrote, wanted a variation that would go
to lapsed subscribers. We would include more win back style language in those
variations and it just didn’t make sense. He was paying for all these extra email
variations. His internal email person had to spend the time making the extra emails and
sending them to that segment. Even reporting was more annoying. And for what?
Lapsed subscribers aren’t great subscribers. Sure, they have potential and you can
reengage them and convert them, but their potential is way limited. And it wasn’t even
like they were getting special offers that would entice them more. It was just slight
changes in language. Something so subtle. So takeaway number four, weigh the
complexity of personalization versus the output and the value it will give you. Last
objection, and this one is close to home. A big objection to using data for
personalization is that you don’t trust the data. Why do I say this is close to home? Well,
I have a lot of copywriters and marketers on my email list, right? And that segment of
lovely humans loves to get lots of emails, especially to spy on, different variations of
emails. So when someone tells me they’re an ECOM founder, are they really? Maybe
they just want to get the emails that ECOM founders get. They think that stuff is better
than the stuff I share with ECOM copywriters. There are ways around this. There’s
behavioral data that’s always going to be a lot more accurate, but I just kind of default to
sending everything to everyone and feeling guilty and barefoot shoemaker about it. Oh
well, win some, lose some. So I guess takeaway number five is to lean more on
behavioral data than on the data that you ask for.
How to improve without seeing metrics: Email replies are my favorite
metric
Alright, now that we cover data objections, let’s actually go back to the first thing we
talked about in the episode, which was how to improve without seeing metrics. And
honestly, email replies is my favorite metric. Don’t get me wrong, I love me my metric
dashboard, but there is a lot of guesswork. Yeah, they open, but did they like it? Why
didn’t they buy? Getting an actual response to an email is so much more enlightening
and specific, and it just brings home that whole human connection idea. So it’s not
really a takeaway, but we’ll turn it into one anyway. Number value those replies, read
them, respond to them, and use them.
Plain text emails have their place in ecommerce email strategy
Okay, last takeaway, Anna mentioned how PoWH can get away with templates, but
ecomm brands can, and this is something that is so misunderstood. Plain text emails
are amazing and they totally have their place in ecommerce email strategy. But
designed emails do so much. They really showcase the product. They get people
wanting the thing. And I think this boils down to the fact that SaaS products are typically
solutions, while Ecom products are typically delighters. True, a lot of ecom products
solve problems, but they’re designed to be delighters too. Receiving a physical package
in its own right is a delightful sort of transaction. So takeaway number seven yes, a lot
of ecommerce discounted promo heavy graphic, no strategy. But just because many
brands are leaning too heavily on that doesn’t mean those
00:10:00
pretty little emails don’t have their place.
Thanks for geeking out with me about that email story
Nikki Elbaz: Thanks for geeking out with me about that email story.
Nikki Elbaz: If you enjoyed either of these episodes.
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