Why Your Email Strategy Is Not a Content Calendar

[00:00:00] Speaker: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook podcast and to specifically our series around the CTC Canon, where we are walking through our methodology of how we approach doing what we do across each one of our service areas. And we sit at the intersection of a data set of hundreds of brands that informs the canon, the methodology set of how we approach each of the areas from forecasting, modeling, media measurement creative, meta ads, Google Ads, and on down the line.

[00:00:33] And we see it as being critical for us to be able to have a specific point of view based on the larger data set and that, that context window that we have that helps to inform how we approach these core activities for growing direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands in a, in a way that, that provides that, that outcome for the brands that we partner with.

[00:00:54] So today, what we are gonna be walking through is email strategy, how we approach the core methodology that underpins how we approach email and affecting that channel in terms of impacting the e-commerce business. If you haven't watched the other parts of the series so far around forecasting, modeling, media measurement I would recommend starting there as it provides some of the foundation.

[00:01:18] There's a, there's a, a intentional sequence around each of these things. But we're going to dive into email strategy and our core belief around email strategy and how we approach this channel is that your email plan does not exist as a content calendar for your business, but it exists as a plan to hit the business forecast and expectation that we set at any given point in time.

[00:01:44] So how we approach forecasting is we set a forecast for every day to ladder up to the month's goal for the year. And the role of email is that we are building a plan to generate the revenue needed to hit that forecast in the specific area that email impacts. And that plan is comprised of two main buckets The flow and automation framework that exists is sort of the foundational floor for the for the email program, and then your campaigns, which are the growth levers.

[00:02:19] And the combination of the flows and campaigns gets you to the total revenue outcome for that channel, which ladder up to the business forecast. We see email as really a th-- as a three-act framework, and the sequence here is very important, which is there are all sorts of considerations around volume, deliverability creative guidelines, et cetera, that are important, that, that are very, very important.

[00:02:45] But those come in sequence and come into the decision-making framework after we have built a plan that can hit the forecast. The, the immediate responsibility is that we are delivering against the business outcome for the business revenue and the business contribution margin for that point in time.

[00:03:03] We need to build the email plan to be able to get to that objective. Then we can start to think, once we have a plan to get there of the additional pieces of the framework that come in the form of w- looking for de-deliverability identifying ways that we wanna improve the content, the brand image, et cetera.

[00:03:22] But all those are subsequent to serving the business outcome of hitting the business forecast. So we'll walk through these in sequence of what we see the framework around email being. So starting here at point one, the job of email is to deliver the business forecast. The email plan doesn't exist in isolation.

[00:03:43] It deli-delivers a specific piece of the revenue forecast across hundreds of brands, emails accounting for a median of twenty-two percent of total store re-revenue, ranging from sub ten percent up to sixty-five percent, depe-depending on the business. But email delivers a meaningful portion of the business outcome.

[00:04:01] And a critical point here is for many brands, returning customer revenue, which is primarily driven by the own channels and your email channel, the returning customer revenue accounts for most, if not all, of your contribution margin in a given time period. And the new customer acquisition in for many brands is net neutral to the contribution margin outcome, and actually can be net net negative depending on how aggressive we're running new customer, n-new customer acquisition for an individual brand.

[00:04:32] So having a plan for the remo- most predictable base of revenue, which is returning revenue that is impacted most directly by email is critical to getting to the contribution margin expectation that is going to allow you to be able to index into growth and acquisition in the any other new customer channels.

[00:04:53] When it comes to email attribution, our standard starting point is we look at a three-day click attribution window in terms of the platforms that we're engaging with, many brands being on Klaviyo, looking at three-day click, excluding any any opens for a number of reasons. This allows us to get to what we have seen as the highest most direct impact to the, the true incremental impact of the email channel.

[00:05:20] Now, this is going to be store dependent as well. There's going to be some fluctuation, but a three-day click attribution on email, excluding any of the other windows and opens gets us closest to what the true incremental impact of that revenue is without over-inflating it or under-inflating it relative to its impact.

[00:05:40] The starting point for any email program is that automations are the foundation. They carry the floor. They're the most predictable revenue source within this channel. And there are there are 10 core flows that exist that should exist for any brand, and if there's any gaps related to these, these are the immediate focus as it relates to automation.

[00:06:00] So any brand should have a welcome series, an abandoned checkout, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, site abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, sunset engaged, back in stock, subscription reminder if subscription brand, loyalty points if there's a loyalty program and then price drop if that is relevant based on the product strategy as well.

[00:06:19] The back in stock, subscription reminder, loyalty points, and price drop are all what we see as tier two flows. And then the remaining the remaining eight flows welcome series down through sunset engage are tier one that have a really high impact on the outcome. And of those, welcome, abandoned checkout, and abandoned cart are tier one high impact flows that are going to carry on the majority of revenue for many brands and are critical to this.

[00:06:44] But any brand as the starting point should understand where they exist, where their automation roadmap exists relative to the core automation matrix, so each of these automations that should exist in the program, where there are gaps, and then shore up those gaps and, and build those out over time. As we move on from automations, which we see as the floor of the program, we get into the ca- the territory of campaigns, so building out a campaign plan to be able to drive the revenue outcome needed.

[00:07:14] And there are multiple component parts of what it looks like to have a strong campaign plan with a high level of predictability of revenue and allow for all the levers that we need to drive the growth. So the first step in building out a campaign plan is understanding that not all campaign sends are cr- are created equal.

[00:07:32] Campaign types have distinct economics related to them, and there are four core campaign types that we assess for a brand and look at the relative impact of each to understand how that will play into the email plan that we build. Promotion, which is your higher, your highest leverage type campaigns, discounts, sales, GWPs, product-oriented campaigns, novelty-driven launches, restocks, collections, content campaigns which are gonna be brand stories, education, social proof, et cetera and then loyalty loyalty campaign points, reminders, VIP offers, store credits, referrals.

[00:08:07] Each one of these campaign types for every brand has a very distinct revenue per recipient and and con- relative to the other campaigns that exist within the build-out have distinct behavior that we're expecting to each. So separating your historical campaigns into these four core buckets is gonna serve as the foundation for us to understand what these four campaign types are going to contribute into the future.

[00:08:32] And then at the-- for each of these four core campaign types, you have resends which is going to be a modifier against each of these campaigns, so really a fifth campaign type that's a modifier of the four that are gonna be resends of the promo content, product, and loyalty emails. So what we do from the start is we analyze the historical email program of every brand that we work with.

[00:08:54] We look at starting with the flows and automations, where there's gaps that exist. We look at pa- the emails and bucket them into the four core categories in addition to the resend modifiers, and we get a really good understanding of each campaign type, what the contribution to the business outcome is going to be for that distinct one.

[00:09:14] From there, what we do is we build moment orchestration around the marketing calendar. So, there are distinct cadences as it relates to send volume and frequency based on the type of moment that we are engaging in that every brand should have a playbook against. On a standard content product feature day, you're going to send one to two emails and expect a daily rev lift that's pretty-- that that's pretty predictable.

[00:09:42] For a promotional day, sales, discounts, GWP, you're going to have an AM, a midday, and PM email, so likely three sends, if not some variation against that, that's going to go after each one of those audiences. For launch days, so that's gonna be product launch and restocks, you're gonna have teaser email, launch email, SMS and then social proof follow-up.

[00:10:05] So that's gonna be a combination of multiple emails and campaigns. And then sales events, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, anniversary campaigns, you're going to have multiple sends over multiple days that are going to span announcement emails, reminder email, VIP loyalty send, last chance email, and then extended extended offer if that plays into it.

[00:10:24] But the-- this calendar is not-- the email plan and calendar is not built by how many emails per week. It's built by moments and their mult-multi-touch orchestration. Each moment type has a playbook, and the playbook determines the send count, timing, and audience for each. So we can understand the types of emails historically in the program and in what moment that we are in, and we can start to build the right orchestration around each of these moments to have the right volume of sends at the right cadence to be able to capitalize on those campaigns This is the initial starting point for what serves as the foundation of the email program.

[00:11:02] Again, against the automation matrix, we assess to make sure we have all the core flows existing in our program. If we do not, then we build that in to continue stacking the, the floor of automations that we have. From there, we look at historical campaign performance bucketed into each core campaign type to get an understanding of, for those campaign types, what is their distinct contribution?

[00:11:26] And then we define a playbook around moment orchestration for so, so for each specific moment and marketing calendar type, what is the right cadence around each of these channels that should play into it? Now we have a shared understanding of the automations, the campaign types, and the orchestration around each of these moments that should exist to deliver the business outcome.

[00:11:50] From there, those are the core components that are used to build into the email plan. And we have, at CTC, built into Statlas, our tool a section called the Email Plan, where we're able to look at all the existing flows their expected revenue contribution, add in the expected campaign types and the orchestration around each of these moments for the month mapped to the marketing calendar, and get to a clear idea of what the revenue projection is against that plan for each of those ingredi-ingredients.

[00:12:18] And then we can understand, is there a gap that exists relative to that? And the b- and the target that we need to achieve for the business outcome for that month. That serves as the starting point and the foundation for the program. Now we get to the place where we can start to move past building the core plan to serve the business outcome and think about how much upside exists within our program and how much more volume we can push.

[00:12:46] There are different ways that brands relate to the amount of campaign volume, the expectation around the impact to deliverability and unsubscribe rates. And what we'll say is that across hundreds of brands, what we've seen consistent-consistently is that every brand has a distinct send cadence for their campaign calendar but it is inconsistent across the dataset.

[00:13:13] There are some brands that are sending one ca- email campaign a week, and there are some brands that are sending 10 email campaigns a week or more. And the reason we landed on that number of campaign send cadence is in many ways there's not a consistent framework around, around that. So- How should brands think about the upside that exists in their email program and the additional volume that they send is really important.

[00:13:38] Once the plan hits forecast, additional sends can add profit. Revenue per email decays with volume, which is expected, but what the data shows is that total profit, profit opting- often keeps growing as efficiency falls because the marginal cost of each email is near zero. This holds for most brands in our portfolio.

[00:13:57] It doesn't hold universally. So the important thing here to understand is because we have a desi- defined subset of audience that we're after, we are going to see revenue per, per recipient fall as volume increases as expected. But because the marginal cost is, is so low relative to these additional sends, in many cases, it's margin accretive to increase the volume of that.

[00:14:21] So we look at this for every brand. We look against deliverability guardrails to understand where we sit relative to that expectation and to understand how much headroom we have in our email cadence per month to define what that will look like in in the future. That is the main constraint, deliverability on on the send volume, and many brands have a lot of headroom as it relates to the deliverability, the spam, spam rate or complaint rate, and how much they can index higher volume.

[00:14:52] There is another constraint that exists relative to pushing additional volume, which is list decay, right? So the if our, if our list is decaying over time, we're not adding in net new subscribers at a re- at a ra- rate that's replenishing or growing relative to the folks that are leaving our list, that is also gonna inhibit us from driving up more volume from our email campaign program.

[00:15:13] So we look at the list growth over time. We look at our new, active, reactive, at-risk, and churn segments to understand how many customers we have within each of these customer segments. We look at our net subscriber growth or decay over time to then assess what needs to be done related to our pop-up opt-in programs and new customer acquisition, and make sure that we are bringing in enough new customers so that we can continue to push more volume out against our list as well.

[00:15:42] So, so to solve this ca- decay problem, pop-up optimization, paid list growth, and then organic growth channels that are laddering into this list growth are going to be are going to be very important as well. Volume and cadence only work if the email is worth opening. So there are clear parameters around the email creative infrastructure that are important for us to also understand also understand what we can drive from the program.

[00:16:13] Core ingredients, subject line and preview text, offer clarity, mobile rendering, A/B testing cadence, writing short, tease don't tell. There, there are things that we see across our data set of emails that, that produce a better click rate and a better outcome. Six core elements of strong email creative are that the headline answers what's in it for me immediately, the CTA appears above the fold, education sections build trust without asking for the sale immediately, multiple CTAs feel contextual, not repetitive, usage context reduces purchase friction, single column clean hierarchy.

[00:16:48] The email creative must have these core components and ingredients to be able to be most effective at driving the click. And when it doesn't, that is something that we are adjusting for as well and the, the last piece of this, which is critical, is the audience and segmentation piece. So segments are not just audience filters, they're a promise about relevance.

[00:17:13] What we want is to deliver the right offer, the right creative to the right person at the right time, and to figure out how to do that more and more and more, right? We're not interested in sending higher volume of campaigns to the same list over and over. We're interested in increased relevant volume.

[00:17:33] The core engagement segments are gonna be your engaged 30, engaged 60, engaged 90. And it's important that we have mutually exclusive segments layered into these as well. It lets you track the size of each bucket over time. If the 30-day tier is shrinking and the 90-d-tier is growing, your list is cooling, even if your total list size is flat.

[00:17:52] So it's important to have these core engagement segments defined and track against what they look like. The engagement segments tell you recency, but then what we also wanna layer on is lifestyle- lifecycle-based segmentation. So lifecycle segments tell you where someone is in, where someone is in relationship with the brand.

[00:18:09] You have customers that have never purchased, so subscribe, but no order on the record. You have customers where it was their first time purchase, right? Th- w- this is probably the most critical lifecycle moment. This is where a one-time buyer either becomes repeat or churn. Then you have your active repeat customers, two or more orders within the expected repeat purchase r- window.

[00:18:27] You have lapsed customers, has purchased before, but not within expected repurchase window. And we layer these engagement and lifecycle pieces together. And the most precise sends combine both dimens- d- dimensions of segmentation. A never purchased subscriber in the engaged 30 tier is a high priority conversion target.

[00:18:45] A lapsed customer who has dropped to engaged 90 is approaching the point of no return. Cross-reference these two segment types serves the highest leverage opportunities in the list without requiring a complex sending infrastructure. And so this is how we think about delivering and increasing the impact of the email channel in a way that's relevant to the consumer and is ultimately gonna grow the relevance of that content to that person at that point in time and allows us to expand volume without negatively impacting some of the core efficiency metrics that we are concerned with as well.

[00:19:21] So as we step back The first role of email is to deliver the business forecast. We do that by making sure we have the core automations in place, we have the, and that we have an email calendar send plan that has specific email types and orchestration around marketing moments that have a revenue expectation related to each.

[00:19:42] Then from there, we understand how much more volume is available to us related to the where our program is at, and we start to layer in additional campaigns that are aligned with the segmentation strategy and the right creative practices to p- to push more of this revenue over time. All this comes together in the email plan that operationalizes this at CTC.

[00:20:07] It's a per-client operating document inside Statlas. It commits email to the returning revenue forecast, builds, builds the calendar by type mix, tracks the flow performance against be- benchmarks, monitors both constraints, deliverability, and list health, and then surfaces upside that exists within the program and the guardrail.

[00:20:25] It's a revenue commitment, campaign calendar, automation matrix at list health and campaign growth over time that allows us to understand what our email campaign, email plan needs to deliver that's connected to the, to the business forecast. It is not a content calendar. It is a mechanism that is producing in most cases, the majority of a brand's contribution margin over time.

[00:20:48] These are the layers that are necessary to have clear understanding and predictability around what your current email plan is expected to deliver and where the gaps and opportunities exist. This was the CTC Canon series on email strategy. We'll be coming soon as we work through other components of how we approach our core methodology at CTC informed by our data set.

[00:21:13] Thanks for hanging.