Capturing first-party data with interactive transactional emails

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

email, brand, providers, sms, click, interactive, nikki, subscription, fallback, tracking, retention, order, people, sticky, work, render, customers, design, testing, session

SPEAKERS

Nikki Tooman, Yaw Aning

Yaw Aning 00:00

Let's get started. I'm excited to walk through this topic. So for those of you who are joining us for the very first time, welcome to momos masterclass series. So we host these monthly, where we talk through different tactics and strategies to help you really level up your post purchase retention experience. Our goal with these sessions is to help give you insight on what, you know the best brands that we're seeing what they're doing to drive loyalty and repeat purchases from their existing customers. Typically, these sessions are exclusive to Malomo customers. But we decided to open this one up because of just how important today's topic is, and we've got a killer session for you today. My name is Yael inning, co founder and CEO of Malomo. And I asked my really great friend Nikki to drop some knowledge with us and she's not going to disappoint so I almost did this morning so I have we're here now that's all. So yeah, if you don't if you don't know Nikki, you definitely need to get to know her. She's co founder and CEO at at sticky digital one of the best retention agencies in the shop by ecosystem. Earlier this year, they were named the best retention agency in North America, by Apple for their incredible work in the space. Prior to that she worked at the prolific Shopify agency BVA knows attention marketing inside and out, and we're super lucky to have her share some some emerging tactics. Yeah. So we're pumped a few a few housekeeping things like I said, Please change your chat settings, engage in chat, ask questions, we'll get get to q&a at the end here. And, and then, recording will be sent to your inbox. So you'll be able to reference these these ideas afterwards. I'll give you a really quick overview of Malomo. And then I'm going to pass things over to Nikki so she can share more about sticky and then we'll dive into the main topic, which is what is interactive email? And how can you use it to capture insights from your customers, engage them in unique ways with your transactional emails. And then like I said, we'll end with some q&a. Awesome. So super quick overview of Malomo. We're an order tracking platform that helps you can take control of all your post purchase transaction notifications. So our goal is to help you control the content, timing and messaging of these emails. And then we also provide you with a custom branded tracking page that you can use to remarket to your existing customers. And our goal is to you know, help you turn shipping from a cost center into a retention channel and help you build your brand with every order. So we're pretty passionate, obviously, about transactional emails and the impact that can have on your brand. In your transactional emails are one of the most often forgotten about emails. And yet, they could be some of the most important ones to optimize to boost retention. So we've seen that these emails, see for X, higher open rates and your normal marketing emails, and 10x higher click through rates. So if you haven't touched your transactional emails in a while, you're probably leaving a ton of money on the table, which is why we're all talking about this today. So I'm going to pass things over to Nikki Nikki, did you want to share your screen and you want to need to keep driving?

Nikki Tooman 03:33

i It doesn't matter if you want to keep driving. That would be great. Okay,

Yaw Aning 03:37

all right. That work. Yeah, that works. Yeah, tell us about sticky and we'll dive into the topic.

Nikki Tooman 03:43

Cool. So sticky Digital's retention marketing agency, we focus solely on the retention journey. So we do everything from email, SMS, loyalty, subscription, post purchase, really everything that keeps your customers coming back. Second, third, fourth purchasers keeps your customers sticky, hence the name sticky digital. We're a Shopify agency only. So we only work with Shopify brands, but we work with obviously the apps in the ecosystem. alomost one of them and one of our favorites because I think it's one of the most underutilized channels for retention marketing, and it's something that people don't pay enough attention to. So today, we're gonna talk about interactive emails. This is something that I'm super bullish on our agencies, super bullish on. It's something that's very different in the ecosystem today in terms of retention, marketing, and not a lot of brands are doing it, which is the reason why we're really bullish on it. Like a year ago, there was probably one Nish provider that was doing interactive emails, it was very like baseline, there was very few things that you can do with it today. There's an upwards of four or five of them in Shopify, specifically that you can do interactive emails with. And there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can use them based on what makes sense for your brand. So that's something that we're going to talk about today. I'm gonna go to the Next slide. So some of the ones that I have that I want to talk about that I think are very important to sort of like, most brands are your Order Detail email. So sort of like how can you make these Order Detail emails interactive? Like what does that look like? Subscription email. So if your subscription brand for retention, like those emails that come to your customers inbox, how do you make those sort of interactive to make it increasing your ao V, but really making it super easy and straight seamless for a customer to add on products to change their order details to change their subscription period, anything like that? Like how do you make it easy. And then to really sort of like make those weekly emails stand out amongst the rest? I think all of us today, as just consumers, you open up your inbox, and we all probably use like a junk email, when we're signing up for like brands that we don't know, if we're going to shop at, you open it up, and you have 50 to 100 emails every week from just all of these brands that you sort of find out with and so it's really how do you make yourself stand out? Obviously, you need to have a good subject line in order for them to open it. But then once you they do, how do you get them to engage with their brand and sort of like, you know, from the very beginning really get a positive feeling from the brand and really feel like this brand is offering something and offering an experience from email number one. So those are some of the ones that we're going to talk about today. So this first one is your order details, email, sorry, it's a little bit blurry, because I had to shrink it down a little bit. But this is for one of our brands that we're currently working with this is their order detail. So basically, like your order is ready to ship is the first email that goes out. That's all of the order details, the product details, everything else, the interactive piece of this email, if you look down at the bottom there, there's something that says like sign up for SMS to get tracking information on your order, it really is just a embed this brand is using attentive, so it's just an embed within the email that they can, somebody can easily put in their phone number to the actual email itself, hit Enter or Return. And basically it sends that information to attentive and you can start communicating with them through attentive. These specifically if you're an attentive user, or even it also integrates with Palladius, abuse and clay, VO SMS, and Yahoo as well. Basically all of these embeds, you can create separate lists for these people. So you know that they're coming from order tracking. So a lot of them, there's sort of like this gray area here of like, can you actually like use marketing messaging to these people, because it's a transactional email, create a separate list for these people if you're very concerned about it. And then this way, these people can start getting entered into your conversational flows for tracking, this is a really easy way to collect phone numbers. Alternatively, the other thing that I will say is, this will not render and 100% of inboxes. So that's the thing that you have to be careful of interactive emails in general only will show up in providers outside of Outlook. So if you have like a huge outlook, audience, which I've only recently come across a brand that's like 50% outlook, which was astounding to me, because that's a lot of people that are using Outlook. But if you're using, if you're like most brands, most brands, it's only five to 10% of your audience. So it's not really something that you have to be concerned about. But basically, when you set up interactive emails, it has something called a fallback. So a fallback image. So what we would recommend doing is replacing this section at the bottom where you somebody can't see this sort of like opt in area with one of those boxes that just says like text, keyword XYZ to be entered into SMS to get like tracking updates. So that should be the fallback, you always 100% of the time we'll have to do a fallback image, regardless of provider. But that is just in case you're curious like well, that will this render for 100% of people No, but that is sort of like how you cover for that. Then if you can go to the next slide. The next one is one I'm super excited about. So this is with one of our partners amo there's a couple of the of interactive emails or an email providers that do this. So on the left here, you can sort of see this as a demo of what it looks like within somebody's email box. Basically, the way that it works is when somebody gets a subscription email sent to their inbox and they're like, Hey, your next subscription order is shipping. You can add on individual products from within the email for people to add to that next shipment. And once they add the orders, it basically will add it to it and update their shipping information so that it ships immediately. You can also at the bottom there click Skip. If you're if somebody does not want to receive their subscription order immediately. One of the biggest factors of subscription churn is really people having too much product. So if your subscription brand, you'll see that like, basically, the number one reason as to why people aren't interested in your product anymore is because they have too much of your product. This is a really seamless way for somebody just be able to skip that order, or change sort of the timeframe in which somebody is receiving it. So all of these screenshots here, it's just to show you all of the different things that you can do. You can also send this to somebody and from the email, they can one click reactivate their subscription. So you can send it to people that maybe have churned previously, and just have them reactivate from within the email. Again, if you're not using interactive emails, to do this, basically, what you have to do is click through it takes them to their subscription portal, they then have to like, navigate their way through their subscription portal, and they're probably already lost. So one of the biggest recommendations that I would have personally is to at least start with if your subscription brands start with interactive for subscription, adding the one click upsells, being able to skip being able to like Send immediately. And really working on the timing from within the subscription of emails, it's very interesting, and it actually works very well. And if you can go to the last slide that I have, this is interactive campaigns. So on the left here, we have an interactive campaign that we've sent on behalf of one of our brands. This is just a standard, sign up for tax. So this is going to everybody on our email list that is not subscribed to text, we send this as a campaign. We also if you've noticed on if you're an SMS, if you're using SMS for your brand, you'll notice that a lot of providers make them confirm why to opt into text messages. We also use this sort of email, and we get a list from our providers of everybody that has signed up but has not confirmed subscription. So you can get that from your provider. Basically, everybody that has not confirmed why we also send this text message to so it's an easy way for them to just opt straight in through an email, they don't have to leave, they don't have to text a key word. And again, this also will have a fallback. So if you're curious, like this is one of those ones that we would just design the entire email with just that text keyword to this, and then we just change out the widget. And based on what inbox provider they have on whether or not it'll render, it automatically will send to the correct provider. So you do not have to segment you do not have to do anything, it will just send based on what's allowed by their inbox provider. The one on the right is one of my favorite ones. It's a campaign that we recently did for the same brand, and it was a card flip. So they basically did like the what is your earth sign. And basically all of these cards they had like earth, air, fire water, and underneath each card, if you hovered over it, it sort of shifted. If you clicked on it, it ended up showing the product and then you can click through to the product purchase. This email alone had almost 3x Four click rate, it was based on just people interacting with it. So one of the best things about interactive emails, which I should have said earlier, and why brands should use it, it's a way to almost gamify and keep your deliverability good. If you're sending these interactive emails, people are having to click on your email, and all of your deliverability is based on opens and clicks. So if people are clicking within your emails, submitting phone numbers, through your emails, clicking to do these like gamified objects through your emails, you're increasing your click rate, and basically Gmail, Hotmail, all of these other providers are going to start looking you at looking at you as a valid brand. And you'll start hitting inboxes by increasing click rate that way. There's a lot of cool other interactive campaigns that you can do as well. You can do like click to reveal you can do Scratchers, like the world is really your oyster. And like I said, there's a couple of providers that allow you to do these different interactions. And I do want to also know that this might seem like a heavy lift, but it's not the provider, Nicole, I just saw your question provider use to create the card flip. So there's two that can do this. One is spell bound.io spell bound allows you to card flip. And the other one is a mo ximo also will build out this card flip for you as well. So those are the two that I would recommend that we've actually used and it's not a hard lift at all. You just have your design team basically create your email as it is and then they have widgets that you sort of like embed the design in that will do the interaction for you. So it's already a CFS female that you don't have to do anything to. And that's basically it. Nikki

Yaw Aning 14:59

do You for enabling these things do do you send email directly from those providers? Or can this be integrated with like the email marketing platforms that people are using?

Nikki Tooman 15:09

That's a great question. So no, everything is sent through clay, VO or braze, or whatever email provider you're using, as long as these have an like, integration, but they're all set through those providers. So you don't have to like export segments. You don't have to do any of that. It basically you send it back into your ESP. And then it is sent straight from your ESP. So all of your reporting is still out of your ESP and everything else.

Yaw Aning 15:34

Okay, awesome. So like the clicks and engagement and open rates, like data still talks to Okay, all went

Nikki Tooman 15:41

yeah, it's all in there that you don't have to go to yet another retention tool to look at more first-party vs third party data. Yes, yeah. Yeah. It's that's like the trick, right? It's like, is this another tool where now I'm having to look at like their attribution and like their click windows, but it's all reported sort of, like out of clay vo specifically for this brand is out of play do.

Yaw Aning 16:01

Okay, awesome. Okay, that's, that's great. So we're gonna jump into q&a. We already have some questions coming in here. I'm gonna stop sharing. So we can get into some of the questions. So. So what is yeah, I'm assuming like, what is used? The question is what is used as SMS subscribe, embed into an email?

Nikki Tooman 16:22

Yep. The one that we showed, we actually are testing it spellbound against ximo against each other, obviously, you can do it with both. They both say that they perform better than competitors, which we all do, right. So we're testing it, we're basically like split testing your audience 5050. And we're running the same exact thing through both. That way, we can actually see who has the better performance, but both of them have the capability to do it. Both of them. It's by far like one of the like, I could probably say hand, it's my three year old and my three year old here, but that's probably not true. Marielle, my co founder could probably hand it to her seven year old and have her seven year old do it and she would probably be able to do it. Because they're really like, you click on a button and it will just sort of like embedd The most difficult thing is connecting it to your SMS platform. So if that's attentive, you have to use white glove and have them sort of like set up a connection there. But both of these providers have wonderful step by steps for how to do it for SMS.

Yaw Aning 17:24

Okay, awesome. Ah, next next question we got does this does this work with iterable? Do you know

Nikki Tooman 17:31

actually, if there's one that would work with iterable I think that it would probably be ximo. So I would look at Zeno's first I know Zeno works with quite a handful of EFPs. And I think they actually work with more ESP if and spell bound does. But iterable I'm not sure about I know they work with sunblind. They work with clay vo they work with braise iterable might be one of them. So I would check Zeebo first.

Yaw Aning 17:56

Okay. Awesome. That's great. So another couple questions that we've got. You know, we talked about performance. Like if somebody's just getting started with this, like, this is a channel and they're experimenting, do you? Yeah. Where do you see people spending maybe like their their initial time and like trying to launch like a specific campaign? Yep.

Nikki Tooman 18:23

So I would recommend doing the SMS captcha, even doing a missus another recommendation that I would make. If you're unsure about adding it to like a Malomo. For instance, like tracking email, what I would do is I would add a follow up email within the same flow that is literally specifically for like, Thank you for your purchase, sign up for text message. And it's a really easy like, if there is some concern with some brands that we've worked with of like, well, is this going to like pour over order information properly, like, you know, when you're at when you're adding on tech stacks, like it is a concern. So if it is a concern of your brand, like my recommendation would be start with SMS opt in, it's a great way for people to track their information, it's a really great way for you to engage with that customer and acquire a phone number. So just create a separate email that's like a really beautiful tracking email that's like track, my order has a link for them to go to the Malomo page, but also then has that widget at the bottom, then you don't have to worry about design, it's a really low lift, and you can just send that sort of like secondary and terms of like your order tracking. So that's where I would start I feel like that probably is a lot less overwhelming than a lot of these other like really creative ideas. I will say to that we've worked with some brands, the where designers are a little bit more nervous because they're really keen on what it looks like brand wise and so like they're very specific about Like, was it gonna look like this? Is it gonna look like that? Like how does so like that sort of like an easy path of resistance so that you can prove to your team like, this is a good sort of like investment for us to be creative and sort of like be a thought leader in this specifically.

Yaw Aning 20:13

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then on that topic, too, like, are there ways to sort of like, test what the design will look like in different inboxes? Before you hit that send button? You

Nikki Tooman 20:24

definitely can. Yes. And both of the providers are very knowledgeable as well, their team's on sort of like, hey, this will not render in an Outlook inbox. So make sure your does that make sure your design is beautiful, regardless, because it's, they're gonna see a fallback. The interesting thing when when I sent the card flipping, I just so happened to be at my parents house when we sent it for that one brand. And I use, I don't use Apple Mail on my phone. I actually use like my Gmail. And so it rendered in my Gmail. I was testing something like couple months ago, and I use my dad's email address. And he actually opens it in an app. My father, I think this is like generationally. He opened it in like an outlook and so he got the fallback. And so it was really interesting to look at them side by side to see them. But they are very knowledgeable writers on what will work, what won't work, what, what inboxes it'll render on and they will also send you tests so that you can actually like see what it looks like. It's a normal test within clay VO So like, you can send test previews to everybody else, they can all look at it. And then you can make edits on it. After you've sort of like sent tests. It's not like you created in the platform and then you just have to like cross your fingers and pray it goes well, you can still preview it you can do everything like you normally would for your emails.

Yaw Aning 21:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I love it. I love it. Um, I know we're up at time um, if people want to like because like there's this is like scratching the surface there's probably a whole nother world face. Yeah, we could get into maybe we'll it might be fun to do another session with you Nick did Nikki to go through like more advanced strategies because there's a lot you can do at this channel. If they wanted like some initial like ways to like, dip their toe in and then start to level up what recommendations you have like, like best to reach out to you and Sikkim Devaney resources that they could, they could kind of because this is such an emerging channel that I think people are unsure of what to do.

Nikki Tooman 22:22

Yeah, I mean, feel free to reach out to me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can reach out to me on my email, super easy Nicky at sticky digital.io We can point you in the right direction, we can connect you with some of our point of contacts at some of these technologies, even to do a demo so that you can see again, like anything that we can to help we just really like to help brands take it to the next level and really like create an experience for brands so I promise I won't force you to work with us. I will just be helpful as

Yaw Aning 22:52

you should. Every Nikki and their team are phenomenal. They are they're absurd. They push the boundaries and they do such great work. Yeah.

Nikki Tooman 23:05

So and I promise if we do a follow up session I'll be early and I'll make sure my

Yaw Aning 23:10

time I love it no worries at all. Awesome any. So if you do have any last minute questions to like feel free to drop you know me or Nikki and email will point you in the right direction. And then would love to book a follow up session with you Nikki to dive deeper into some more advanced strategies around this stuff or didn't even just generate attention because you guys are diving deep here. But yeah, thank you everybody for joining appreciate the time. And thank you Nikki for spending some time with our or our crew. Yeah, appreciate it a lot.

Nikki Tooman 23:45

Everybody. Have a great day. You too.

Yaw Aning 23:48

We'll see you. Bye bye.