S5 E6: Evaluating branded transactional email and SMS by click rate for Shopify brands with Caitlin Elgin (Head of CRM & Lifecycle, Fluency Firm)

S5 E6 PODCAST

Caitlin Elgin, Head of CRM & Lifecycle, at Fluency Firm joins Retention Chronicles to discuss evaluating Shopify transactional email and SMS by click rate.

Caitlin, Noah, & Mariah chat about Caitlin’s background in marketing and how she’s been in the Shopify space since 2014 before they even had an integration with USPS.

Caitlin has worked with countless brands who have upgraded their transactional emails from the ‘out-of-the-box’ Shopify experience to fully branded and personalized transactional email and SMS with Malomo. She shares a specific Shopify merchant use case where after they implemented Malomo, they doubled their click rate on transactional emails.

You can learn more about the services Caitlin and her team offer at fluencyfirm.com or by emailing [email protected].

Episode Timestamps:

  • E-commerce Enlightenment with Expert Insights. 0:04

  • Email and SMS strategies for Shopify brands. 1:57

  • Travel plans and e-commerce strategies. 4:32

  • Using Malomo to increase click rates and engagement for transactional messages. 8:21

  • Email marketing optimization for increased revenue. 12:10

  • Tracking emails and driving engagement. 18:32

  • Using Malomo for post-purchase emails and tracking. 23:05

  • Email marketing strategies and services for business growth. 30:04


Did you know that 20% of your website traffic hits the order tracking experience? Turn all of that customer engagement into customer loyalty. Malomo helps you get ahead of shipping issues, brand your order tracking experience, and reconvert shoppers while they wait for their package to arrive.

To see what your custom mockup of branded order tracking and transactional email/SMS would look like, fill out this form & we’ll send your custom design right to your inbox!

Be sure to subscribe to our pod to stay up-to-date and checkout Malomo, the leading order tracking platform for Shopify brands.

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TRANSCRIPT

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

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

transactional, brand, email, customer, shopify, messages, fluency, caitlin, rates, great, click, lifecycle, attribution, maximize transactional emails, increase, revenue, tracking, super, working, ltv

SPEAKERS

Caitlin Elgin, Noah Rahimzadeh, Mariah Parsons

Mariah Parsons 00:04

Greetings and welcome to retention Chronicles podcast with learnings from expert e commerce, brands and partners. I'm Ryan Parsons,

Noah Rahimzadeh 00:12

and I'm no Rahim today, if you're here, you're either on a quest for E commerce enlightenment, or you accidentally click the wrong link. Either way, we're thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet.

Mariah Parsons 00:22

And hey, even if you're not on the E commerce hype train, stick around. We promise it'll be worth your while. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a business or just trying to keep your house plans a lot. Exactly.

Noah Rahimzadeh 00:33

So before we unleash the brilliance of today's episode, let's give a shout out to our fantastic sponsor Malomo.

Mariah Parsons 00:40

They're the wizards behind the curtain, making the post purchase experience smoother than a jazz solo,

Noah Rahimzadeh 00:45

hit that subscribe button like it will increase LTV overnight, and check out our other episodes go malomo.com That's GOMALO mo.com yet

Mariah Parsons 00:55

ready for insights chuckles and possibly a profound realization or two. Here's our newest episode of retention Chronicles.

Noah Rahimzadeh 01:08

Super pumped, we have our second ecosystem episode 2020. For today, we've only only posted one we've only recorded one. So a little bit of a slower start than normal. But now we're like back to back. Mariah and I have recordings every day for the next like seven business days. Yeah,

Mariah Parsons 01:26

Season Five is coming off strong. And I love it. Awesome.

Noah Rahimzadeh 01:31

But we're super super pumped for today's episode. In particular, we've got a great partner joining us Caitlin Elgin, head of lifecycle and CRM at fluency firm, great, great partner of ours. We've worked together on some amazing brands, I think bombshell sportswear comes to mind for me, but I know you've got a few under our belt. So we're really excited to have her with us. Welcome, Caitlin, and thanks so much for joining. Thanks

Caitlin Elgin 01:56

so much for having me. I love working with Malomo transactional emails are one of my favorite things to ramble about. And so thrilled to be here.

Noah Rahimzadeh 02:05

To hear it. This is why we had you on this is great. If you could Kailyn just give us like a super quick intro and background on yourself. And then one thing that you're excited about in your personal life is how we like to kick these things off. For

Caitlin Elgin 02:22

sure. For sure. So um, Caitlin, as you already introduced me,

Noah Rahimzadeh 02:28

last name, right, Elgin? Elgin. Danny.

Caitlin Elgin 02:35

So I'm our head of lifecycle and CRM at fluency firm. So I lead a small team of strategists that support all of our clients on their email and SMS efforts. And that's, you know, anything that covers part of a customer's lifecycle with the brand. So any type of communication you could want to send them. We're helping brands come up with creative ideas, we're connecting them with tech partners like Malomo. And we're helping them sort of like flesh out their entire communications program with their customers. I have been working in marketing at some capacity have shifted all over the place from like, the creative side to social media to email to vent a little bit of all of it, but I've been in this space for almost 20 years. It's honestly loud. But I've been working in marketing for a really, really long time. But I've been with fluency specifically on the agency side for about two years now.

Noah Rahimzadeh 03:32

Awesome. And in the past real quick, before we get to the personal stuff. Where have you always been in the Shopify ecosystem? Or was there a particular sort of moment where you made? That's a really

Caitlin Elgin 03:46

funny question. I have been working with Shopify since like 2015, maybe 2014 Actually, really, when Shopify was still really, really young. And I worked with them on the brand side. And it was before they even had a USPS integration. So it was the first time you work with Shopify, we still had to like copy all the customer addresses and buy labels on usps.com. Shopify has evolved so so so much and like can't believe that was almost 10 years ago, but yeah, that's been working with Shopify and DTC stuff for a really long time. Awesome

Noah Rahimzadeh 04:31

that that does definitely put it into perspective. How far okay, sorry, I cut you off.

Caitlin Elgin 04:39

You're good.

Noah Rahimzadeh 04:40

I did about in your person.

Caitlin Elgin 04:42

Um, what am I excited about? I am excited that just this past weekend, I applied for TSA PreCheck my my goal

Mariah Parsons 04:51

in addition, I just got it this year, and it's the best thing ever.

Caitlin Elgin 04:54

I so excited. I don't know why I've never signed up for it before. I So I thought it was gonna be more of a hassle than it was and it was super easy. And now I'm just like, oh gosh, what's this gonna bring to my my traveling game because I already travel a lot. I'm from I live in New York. I'm from California. So I go bicoastal frequently and then like, what if I never done this? How much time is gonna save me?

Noah Rahimzadeh 05:21

It is a gentle, it's a life changer. I'm not even kidding. But you also like I probably had it for almost, I've probably had it for about three years. And same thing like I always was like, oh, like, I'll get around to it probably takes a long time. Obviously, it doesn't. And then you kind of kick yourself after like, I could have done this so long ago. I

Mariah Parsons 05:44

could have been so save so much time. Yeah.

Noah Rahimzadeh 05:49

On a travel note, where I don't know if you know this, but I'm, I did like a spur of the moment Portugal trip. So I'm going to Lisbon. See my sister who lives in Paris next week. So like, really spur of the moment,

Mariah Parsons 06:03

but I saw it on your story, and I was jealous instantly.

Noah Rahimzadeh 06:07

I'm super pumped. I will. I've always wanted to do like a big Spain and Portugal trip. This won't be that it'll just be Lisbon for five days. But we'll probably do a day trip. And TSA PreCheck won't help me other than my layover flights. But next is Global Entry. That's the one that I'm going to try not to put off. Yeah, I'm not going to have it for this trip. So it's like, maybe next time, you

Mariah Parsons 06:32

should go to Porto in Portugal's it's it's beautiful. We're

Noah Rahimzadeh 06:36

looking at all these like other places. It looks awesome. Kailyn. On that note, any travel plans for you that you get to use this new benefit?

Caitlin Elgin 06:48

Simply at the end of this month on Leap Day. We're having one of our semiannual team meetups for a firm so we all work remotely. We usually get together like twice

Noah Rahimzadeh 07:02

a year, or whole company. Ah, nice. Yeah, we're flying

Caitlin Elgin 07:07

everybody out. It'll be the first time I've met some of my team in person. I'm so really, really excited that hopefully the TSA PreCheck comes in by the 29th. That's That's my goal. Yeah.

Noah Rahimzadeh 07:21

We do a summer party every year. I'm alone. No, it's like one of the best, best weeks of the year for the company. And just getting everybody together meeting a bunch of people that you never have met. Yeah. It's special. That's awesome. Cool. Thanks for sharing. I love I love the new format. So Caitlin, this didn't used to be the format we used to just talk for an hour. But we'll get right into it now in the new year. So we're going to ask you to share one practical, sort of like E commerce strategy or tactic that you've in particular really seen results from or benefited from or implemented for brands who have grown as a result. So we'd love to have you share your screen and walk us through something that's top of mind for you.

Caitlin Elgin 08:06

Yeah, absolutely. So I specifically wanted to talk about transactional email and SMS with Yotpo. And you're just going to need to give me a quick minute to remember how to share my screen on Zoom.

Mariah Parsons 08:19

Technology. It'll never get easier, right? Oh,

Caitlin Elgin 08:21

yeah. So you can see a graph with click through rates, right? Yep. All right. So this is for one of our brands that was using Malomo. And they were actually one of the first ones or they weren't using Malomo. They're the first brand that we introduced to Malomo. And we got them launched on Malomo in February of last year. So this is coming up for me because this has been about a year using Malomo. And we've been going through like the 2023 results and looking ahead at what we're gonna do in 2024. And so a lot of this is really top of mind for me, but I was really really wowed in particular at the increase in click rates that we saw. So we're looking at the average flow click rate for for this brand. And the pink line is 2023. A blue line is 2022. The beginning of 2023. When we're still not using Malomo, we were hovering around a 5% click rate and the entirety of 2022. They didn't break above a 4.7. So they're already kind of stagnating in terms of click rates, they needed not necessarily needed something to bring it up. But this is a little bit lower than we were benchmarking. And I don't necessarily think Malama was even the thing that we were looking for to solve this problem. It just ended up being a big solution and big driver for it. So this this spike here between the 5% click rate to an almost 9% click rate. The only difference in that month was adding Malomo Wow. And that engagement kept To our click rates high all year long, with the exception of August when we were doing less cleaning and that drags and our stats down a little bit, not a little bit a lot. But you can see that throughout the year, we just had a much, much, much higher engagement rate by using Malomo. Also over here on really

Noah Rahimzadeh 10:20

quick before you move on, Caitlin, yeah, actually never seen like this type of a comparison before. So it's really the same. Yeah. Do you so one, let's let's really quickly define transactional, just in case there's a

Caitlin Elgin 10:35

Yeah, I realized I started just rambling about the topic at hand, which is transactional messages. Yeah, so transactional messages, anything like an order confirmation, a shipping confirmation, anything that the customer actually needs from you. So it's not anything like a promo, it's not an abandoned cart message, it's not just fluff that you want to send them, it's things that they need. And so you have permission to send these to everybody, you don't have to have somebody opted in to send them a transactional message. So that means a couple of things. One of the things that that means is that it goes to a higher volume of customers. That it because it's very, very pertinent information, and also means that customers are going to engage with it at a higher rate. So not only are you sending a transactional message to your highest largest audience, it's your highest, biggest, most engaged type of content, like you can guarantee that somebody's going to get an order confirmation from you and open it. So that tends to be a big missed area of opportunity for brands, especially if you're using Shopify or just using the out of the box Shopify notification. And I can't tell you how many huge brands I see just with a base claim template, order confirmation, it's just a huge missed opportunity. So transactional messages have what we like to call the 8020 rule 80% of the message has to be related to the transaction. So it has to be information again, that the customer needs, but that 20% You have some brand wiggle room in there. And that can look like colors, it can look like fonts, it can look like links that you put out to your website, I've heard different schools of thought on using recommended products and that 20% Although that gets a little dicey at times, but like for this, this brand that we did it with late early last year, we included links to their rewards and to their download their app. And both of those platforms have really big increases in membership last year. And that part of that had to do with being able to push it in more places. So having pulling the transactional messages out of Shopify, and putting them into clay, VO with the Malomo integration allowed us to do a couple of things that really just contributed to this massive click rating increase. It allowed us to monitor them a lot better. So we can actually see what the click rates are. Because if they're just in in Shopify, we can't really understand the performance of them. It allowed us to add, like the branding colors allowed us to add a few more images allowed us to really like modify the look and feel and the language easier than hard coding it in Shopify, you can do it with clay vos, building blocks and things like that. So made the design easier tracking easier. And then also allowed us to create a more beautiful user experience. And we can also pull in things like customers names, if we're working on adding points balance into them. So if they have if they're already a member, there will be a dynamic piece of content that says you have this many points in your list here.

Noah Rahimzadeh 14:02

And yeah, awesome.

Caitlin Elgin 14:05

Yeah. So it allows pulling it into CLEVEO really allowed us to get a little bit more nuance to the customer experience, provide them extra value, get a little bit more extra revenue, because having all of those extra links and having that extra brand moment those builds more trust with the brand gets a little bit more interesting gets people back on the website. And the more you get them back on their website, the more that they are shopping. And that was the other thing we saw when we started doing more with our transactional emails and with a branded tracking page, just what we have through Malomo. We also saw an absolutely incredible increase in revenue from transactional emails and it's one of those things that sounds counterintuitive that you don't necessarily think sending somebody an order confirmation or a shipping confirmation is going to get them to buy by It does. Does you have the experience that supports that? Then you get those like double transactions from

Noah Rahimzadeh 15:08

customers? Right? Yeah, I think the really interesting thing is in 2022, the click throughs are going to most likely, they're just going to attracting pay, like carrier tracking page up. Exactly. They're leaving. So not only, you know, are you seeing to x plus increase in click through, but all of that increased traffic is actually going back to the site now as well. And that's really where the LTV opportunities lie. Exactly. Ah,

Caitlin Elgin 15:37

sorry, I might have no, no, I have not. I have another slide told me you can see this slide too, right. Yes. Okay. So this is just a quick, quick overview case study of this specific project, like a preview of the emails that we use for it. So yeah, the other thing that happened was quarter, we've compared year over year, same quarter 21% increase in automated revenue, just automated revenue had nothing to do with like drops or anything else that was going on at the business. And then the this is q1 Is this historically a slow period, because it's coming off of like Black Friday, typically a slower sales period for them. So for us to drive a 21% increase in automated revenue, just in that slow quarter was really awesome. And the average click rate for a transactional email is 12%. He that's, to me, that's just like wild. And as we you know, spend a lot more time on deliverability metrics and performance related to that with like the Google Senator requirements and things like that. The more emails you can send that have this level of trust and engagement, the more it lifts the rest of your program, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats, that does apply here with these great click rates with the Malomo emails and boosting the rest of your sending reputation.

Noah Rahimzadeh 17:03

That's something I've not thought about. Right. Have you have you thought about that? Are you thinking about any content? Because that seems like a great point.

Mariah Parsons 17:11

Oh, I am believe me. Yeah, I've it's something that is more recently, I think it was HubSpot maybe sent an email around just like Google updates and privacy updates of looking into like sensibility, or deliverability. And I think this is a great use case that you're showing Caitlin of the click through rate. And I think people it's very easy to I guess, segment like transactional emails with away from marketing emails, but you make a great case for in the in the case of your email, deliverability, they're actually going to help each other. So yeah, it's easy, easy to, I guess, try and separate the two. But it's a great, great call out that you're making and we should definitely make that that case to more brands? Because it's a great, great pickup.

Caitlin Elgin 18:04

Yeah, it's, I think, and I even noticed this two years ago, when I first started at fluency that transactional messages were something we weren't really considering as part of a lifecycle communication. Because we were thinking of things that we trigger things that are on their campaign calendar, things that things that aren't that we control, really, and transactional messages, I mean, they are within our control, but you don't necessarily control when the customer is making a purchase, or when those go out. And they they're just kind of assumed that they happen. And I mean, that's where you you're missing the the revenue and the engagement, because you're just assuming that these are going you're assuming that they, you know, customers, get them, whatever, it's got their order information. Sure, it's pertinent. But that's, that's all that needs to be in there. Like know, if you can integrate this is actually like, this is your opportunity, your your sometimes your only opportunity to have a connection with that customer outside of your website, because not everybody subscribes to email. So sometimes this is your only opportunity to provide them a little bit of value in your brand. And if you're again, if you're not touching the transactional emails, you're just missing out on a ton of engagement.

Noah Rahimzadeh 19:17

Yeah, yeah. I love to, like we so we just released a inap attribution report that shows revenue driven from the tracking page directly in our platform. So rather than you know, your the metrics you're showing right now are all coming from clay vo directly within the Malomo platform, you'll be able to see revenue driven from the tracking page. And what it doesn't account for and it's something that you alluded to Caitlin is things like other LTV driving, like activities or promotions that you're providing in the tracking transactional emails or tracking pages themselves, like driving app downloads. Right. This is a super, super engaged audience, I have done most engaged. And it's a, it's a great time to do things like build your SMS list, drive, app, downloads, all of those things that like will help them get the information they desire and a more user friendly or like, in a manner where you know, it's the whole meet the customer where they are kind of, Oh, my God, I love it, you're

Caitlin Elgin 20:30

a quick preview of the footer of this email. We've tried a few different things here. But part of the goal is we don't want these emails to be too heavy, again, at 20 roll. So we're like, what's the most important information for us to give to the customer. And we prioritized a couple of things that yeah, if we, if we can get them engaging with any one of these three things, we know that they're going to come back and they're going to be more loyal. So if they sign up for tax paying, we got him if they, they download the app, and you can send them push notifications, and they get, you know, new drops all the time. And if they are on that rewards program, then they're probably interested in earning points. And we can send them different types of promos to earn points, we can remind them that they have discounts available to them. So really, we're focusing on any type of informational piece that we can just build a little bit more connection. Even if we have to get the customer to kind of take the next step of that connection, we're still putting it in front of them in a way that if we were just running out of the box templates, we wouldn't have

Noah Rahimzadeh 21:33

this. Right? Do you I'm just curious. And this is something that we talk a lot about getting better at, like measuring these other LTV driving initiatives from tracking, have you been able to glean any insights from that like,

Caitlin Elgin 21:48

this is a hard one to track because you kind of have to go through and manually pull that information on what's being clicked here. But we are working on that because we do want to know, we do want to know that these links are working. My it's just one of my like pet peeves with clay Vo is that if I want to know which links are working, I have to go into individual email, I have to run a visual Link report and kind of like manually glean that information. But we do track the participation in these programs as a whole and do see. Do you see where we've had increases in signups increases and retention on all of those things. And like I said, rewards membership and app membership both had really big increases last year in terms of new members and retention, I think we we increased our retention on the app like 97% Last year, because we were just using it and pushing it more. I guess like my, my tiny piece of advice is if you know if you don't use it, you lose it. So these things you gotta you gotta use them and make the most out of these apps and these features, you have all of these communication angles available to you. You just have to write get them in front of people,

Noah Rahimzadeh 23:04

right? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just it's very similar to what we talked about all the time, which is like anything you're doing across the rest of your customer journey, you can easily plug into the post purchase journey, because all we're doing is adding a new page right within the theme, right? So anything you're doing across the rest of the theme, anything you're already doing in email, taking the 8020 rule into account, of course, but you can leverage those other programs in the transactional channel just as easily as you're doing across the rest of your your journey. Yeah, absolutely. Love that. My final question, and then Mariah, if you have anything I'll pass to you is it looked like you started seeing like pretty immediate results. Once you watch you plug Malomo in. I'm curious, like, what was the setup process? Like? And was it? Is it what appears that like, once it was on it just started producing?

Caitlin Elgin 24:03

Yeah, um, that's a good question. And I'm sorry, I wish I had more charts for you. I mean, you can see that from January to February that click rate increases immediate and consistent, and that we saw throughout the whole year. And then I think the things that even brought the click rate down are unrelated to Malomo. The setup process is pretty simple in terms of enter terms of like what needed to be built out. I think that the longest part of the process for me personally was actually getting the emails to be under size. Because the amount of like dynamic content and things that you have to put into an email and with the size of this clients, customer cart, we've frequently run into emails or clips, which isn't the worst thing to happen, but not my favorite. So that was one have the bigger challenges is just like how can we make these emails be have the information that I want, but not become oversized, too quickly. And that was just some like coding things back and forth, mostly rolling out the tracking pages really easy. And it did really seem like it immediately improved the customer experience. We saw revenue on, I think month over month, like right away. It just wasn't the clearest comparison, because January had a couple of different factors in February besides the Malomo thing, but when you look at the year over year comparison, we're like, wow, yes, that really did make that like 20% difference in revenue year over year and a slower quarter. So yeah, we did immediately see very high open rates, very high click rates, we heard very few customer service complaints, which is actually something I was a little bit nervous about. Because when you take the transactional messages out of their native platform, I'm always a little bit worried that you're gonna miss something in the coding, like the variables not going to come through, right, or you're going to miss certain things. And we did have some weirdnesses like global E, and other tech partners in that regard. But that's already been smoothed over and isn't a thing anymore. So some of the issues that we saw when we were starting this aren't actually issues anymore. Honestly, I just remember it was be pretty smooth, pretty simple to get it launched. And we did see the benefit pretty much right away.

Noah Rahimzadeh 26:28

We'd love to hear it and

Mariah Parsons 26:30

ask for better than that. Right?

Noah Rahimzadeh 26:33

Yeah. Any questions from your end? Brian?

Mariah Parsons 26:35

Yeah. Well, Caitlin, I saw you when Noah first mentioned it, the revenue report that Malomo launched, I saw you react and because I can see, you know, you but on the recording for viewers, you had a I think you'd said like, Oh, I was waiting for this, like excited, something along those lines. So I would love to hear more, because we're talking about revenue. Obviously. It's been a core point of chatting with you today. I would love to hear just like quick takeaways, because we did just launch that. So and I haven't really gotten to chat with any anyone on the brand side. Yeah. So I'd love to hear that.

Caitlin Elgin 27:11

Yeah, um, so Malomo has had some clear apps like absolute wins for us that have been really easy for us to define clicks being one of them. Like, clearly, this is a high click rate, that people are clicking on these emails. And that makes absolute sense to us. Where it gets weird is just honestly absorbing the idea that somebody is going to make a purchase in such quick succession. Right? It doesn't sound normal, that somebody's going to place an order, get an order confirmation, and make another order. It doesn't sound. So proving that was the challenge proving that this was actually like documentable, true behavior that this is real attribution and not like CLEVEO, attributing the purchase to the order confirmation or weird things like that. So initially, the reporting was a little hard to understand, because you had to go through through parties to get at it. I had to go we had to trust clay vos attribution, or you had to trust GA's attribution, and neither of it felt not trustworthy enough to be alert. Yes, yeah, customize, it just felt like it needed to be taken with a huge grain of salt for us to understand it. So it was like, almost like too good to be true. Reporting. Um, so the more stats that we can get to support this and understand this, the better. And I think with the tracking page, one of the issues I wanted to have better reporting for was just like, what is the traffic look like? How are people flowing through this? Where are they going? Where did they come from, because they don't always come from email. And I tried to remember I had a conversation with one of your colleagues about this early on, pointed out, like, if you can't tell me how they got to this to this tracking page, then we're missing a piece of information here. Because if I don't know that it's direct email traffic, and I'm trying to attribute it back to clay VO, like we're missing a piece of information. So there were some gaps in the reporting, I think was the big thing for me. And so I'm excited to see like, what the gaps have been filled and what other information we can have. Because I think we could get a lot more nuanced with the information that we put on the tracking page, because the tracking page honestly all of this has been set and forget it for us. We just love set it and forget it, in the sense that I don't want to be working on these things all the time. But I do know that we can do more. We could do more creative testing, we could try different CTAs you could try different headlines, different collection pages, like that kind of thing. So that's, that's honestly like on my roadmap for 2024 with our Malomo brands is like what can we test To just see how much more we can do with this.

Noah Rahimzadeh 30:03

Love that? Yeah, I think all of the attribution points Kailyn are super fair, like, as we've talked about, you're not you're certainly not the first person, nor will be the last who's raised those concerns. And they're, they make a whole lot of sense. I was just talking to the shipbob team today about a lot of that stuff as well. So it's top of mind, I think the cool thing about what you mentioned testing wise and segmentation and all that is you like we let we let brands and agencies build as many pages as they want on an account by account basis. So like, there's no you can have 100 different segments with 100 different tracking pages if you wanted to do. So I love the idea of testing, because it's like a free, very easy thing, low hanging fruit thing that you can do to to add value. I want to want to get wrap up here pretty quickly. But is there anything else that you wanted to show, Caitlin that we haven't gotten to yet?

Caitlin Elgin 31:03

Um, no, that was kind of it in terms of like, just the stats and stuff that I'd pulled down for this conversation specifically. I mean, really, again, just driving home that transactional messages, I mean, even on the SMS side, I don't even really touch all the SMS side. But that if you don't have transactional SMS turned on, I don't know what you're doing. These things are just almost no brainers. If you have the integrations and the capability to do things with your transactional messages, I just highly, highly encourage the brand to consider it because, again, it is your absolute biggest reach is transactional messages because they could go to anybody.

Noah Rahimzadeh 31:46

Yeah, yeah, we talked about cliques in this data. Like I said, I've never seen it like this, like year over year. It's really awesome. But we and we talked about cliques today, the the metric that we talked about a lot is just like, specifically, on the open side, we see messages opened 3x more than marketing emails. And

Caitlin Elgin 32:09

he's fine. I'm just gonna, yeah, pop into one more stack. View. Yeah. Our open rates on these are awesome. This is the fulfillment confirmation. Oh, that's actually lower than I thought, because that's all time let's go last 90 days. Yeah, they do tend to be above 50%. Yeah, unless we're running into. I mean, we've run into a couple different things with this brand with like bot traffic and things like that. But we're still seeing incredibly high click rates and incredibly high open rates and really low. If you were to look down at like the deliverability never, hardly ever see issues with the spam or unsubscribe rates here.

Noah Rahimzadeh 32:52

And that's a great point as well, again, going into the privacy changes and all that. So yeah, love it. This is obviously speaking our language. We certainly don't like it's not a requirement to talk about Malomo or post purchase, but we absolutely love it when our guests do so. Yeah. reinitiate that. Beyond

Caitlin Elgin 33:15

that, Senator requirements, almost all of my brands have been doing deliverability score checks, okay, and looking for areas of like low performance and anything that's driving up like the spammer unsubscribe rates, and again, transactional messages rarely get spam complaints. Right. So that score.

Noah Rahimzadeh 33:37

So outside of the transactional sort of like, post purchase, implementation and everything that you just walked us through, talk to us a little bit to round us out about other services that fluency provides and the types of brands that could benefit from fluency services.

Caitlin Elgin 33:56

For sure, well, we are a full stack growth marketing agency. So we do a little bit of everything. We are actually currently working on expanding our creative services. So right now we do, we do offer design services for your email, but we're working on expanding that to paid media as well. So right now, as a business, we really have like two main sides of the business, we have the lifecycle and CRM side. And then we have the paid media and SEO side. So we work with like small medium businesses that are really like at a strategic growth point where they're maybe not growing as fast as they want to be or growing faster than they can keep up with. And they need the support to keep scaling that growth. Our teams come in, and we really act as like an extension of the business. So on the paid media side there are doing all the buying, they're doing all of the creative testing, they're doing all the setup for the ads, and we're eventually going to be doing a lot of the design work for that as well. On the email side, we are like I mentioned at the top of this. When we do, we'll touch anything that has to do with a customer's lifecycle. We'll do that the pop ups, the transactional messages, your welcome series, email, SMS, we're doing a lot more with push notifications now, because channel diversification becomes more important with these Google Senator requirements. So yeah, at any anytime a message that you want to send to a customer, we're helping you figure out what that message should be. And we work with a lot of different brands, mostly DTC, mostly Shopify brands, we have done a couple of b2b brands. And it's kind of an interesting mix. We've done quite a few health and beauty, we have a handful of skincare brands right now, a couple of fashion brands, the one that we were talking about today, it was a fashion brand, specifically a couple in the food and beverage space, but mostly like more medium sized businesses that have been around for about a year or so maybe a little bit longer, depending on the brand. But almost all of them come to us because they're like, we can't handle all this ourselves. There's so much there's so much there's so much data, there's so much creative, content creation, there's all this stuff that needs to go into these programs. So we just become an extension of their business and help them really succeeded that.

Noah Rahimzadeh 36:21

Love it. Love it. Yeah, I mean, just speaking from what I know of fluency, I know that our merchants really do have seen like outsize results as a as a result of working with your team, when you've helped them on the Malomo setup, and then support. So we are super appreciative of that can't recommend the fluency team enough. Last thing, Caitlin, just let our listeners now and we can drop this in the show notes too. But how can they get in touch with you or or fluency if they're interested in learning more?

Caitlin Elgin 36:54

Yeah. Or websites fluency firm.com. We are, I mean, just because we're a business, we're most active on LinkedIn. So definitely give us a follow on LinkedIn. We share a lot of cool information there. We've been doing a lot more thought leadership and blog posts and things like that. Our founder, Jacob also has a fun, LinkedIn follow if you want to hear his ongoing thoughts about marketing. And yeah, you can also drop us a line at Hello at fluency firm just for general request or you can hit me up Katelyn at fluency firm.com for any lifecycle requests, yeah. Amazing.

Noah Rahimzadeh 37:34

Amazing. Love it. I'm loving the new format of these episodes. Mariah Yeah,

Mariah Parsons 37:39

they're fun. Yeah, I really like them. And that was great. You know? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of

Noah Rahimzadeh 37:45

her she ate you keeping up with us. And this was awesome. Can't wait to get it out. Thanks so much.

Caitlin Elgin 37:52

Yeah, of course. Good. I hope I didn't ramble too much.

Mariah Parsons 37:55

Oh, not at all. Not at all. So