The Ultimate Workshop on Email Flows: Build, Launch, and Win BIG - Stefan Chiriacescu

In this talk, Stefani Descu discusses the significance and effectiveness of email automation in e-commerce, drawing on over a decade of experience in the field. The speaker highlights how email marketing, particularly through automation flows, has generated substantial revenue for clients, totaling $65 million across various campaigns. Descu emphasizes the importance of setting the right email marketing service and domain authentication, as well as maintaining an active subscriber list to improve email deliverability. Furthermore, they cover essential automation flows like welcome emails, cart abandonment, and new customer follow-ups that are crucial for maximizing revenue. The talk also touches on the use of artificial intelligence for data analysis and personalization in email marketing, while cautioning that successful automation relies on having strong foundational practices in place.

Uh, hey everyone. It's great to be here. It's my first time speaking in Sophia, so forgive me if I'm a bit nervous. It's very nice to be here. Uh, my name is Stefani Descu and I'm going to talk to you today about something that has successfully been working for us and for our clients for the last 11 years now. It's something that is uh generating revenue successfully.

It's very hard to be confident about SEO, PPC, CRO, change this button, change that color. But about email automation, I am 100% confident that if you're going to implement the automation flows that I'm going to be trying in 20 minutes to show you today, you are bound to have positive results tomorrow, the minute after you implement them, as long as you have traffic on your website. So

without further ado, myself fairly quickly, u I've owned e-commerce businesses before being an agency owner in Romania and in the US. I've exited them and um that was in back in college. And um I started the e-commerce today agency in 2019 together with my wife and partner. And uh today we have 33 employees, over 100 active clients all over the world. and um we do e-commerce managed

services with a great focus on email marketing and email automation. Um so I've been on both the e-commerce business owners hat and the services partner hat as well. Um why is email marketing so important today? It is the most important today because customer acquisition costs are so high right now. Ads are very very expensive and e-commerce and especially email market email marketing automation is by far the

most profitable thing you can do for yourself. Uh and just to show you this because you can find a lot of numbers on Google. You can find a lot of numbers on chat GPD or anywhere else. But we have our own numbers. We have a lot of history. We have uh a lot of clients. So we do an exercise at the end of at the beginning of

each year. We look at our results from the previous year and we had 7.3 million uh dollars in email revenue for our clients in 2021, 9.8 in 2022, 18.4 in 2024 and 29.6 in 20 uh last year in 2024. In total, it's $65 million US generated by email marketing. Why do we run this exercise? because we see uh an important aspect. On average, 70% of these $65

million US have been generated by email automation. Not newsletters, not Black Friday, not new arrivals, not sale events, but email automation. And the email automation that generated this amount of money is the flows that I'm going to be showing you and the flows that I'm going to have here. Um disclaimer if I don't have time to go over everything I will be there and I will give

you the slides so you can actually see them. It's all built in there. Uh that way. Okay. So email marketing u ROI for ads everybody knows it. 3 to 10 tops. You're going to get it from Google ads. Email marketing on average 36 to 42. That's what you're going to be able to see when you Googled it. Uh we ran our own numbers as well. This is

what our clients paid for email marketing. This is what uh our clients paid for the service providers and last year it was 1 to 94. This is why it's so important. This is why email automation is critical for anyone to have and you can implement this for yourself. You don't even need uh an agency or a specialist. You just need to follow the steps that I'm uh

providing you with especially if you're on a good SAS and you're using a good service. Okay. So without further ado, I'm going to jump straight into it. This is going to be kind of a workshop, so try to keep up. Um, I'm going to talk about AI as well, but not to burst anyone's bubble, there is no AI tool right now in email marketing that just does

everything for you. And before you even talk about uh AI and taking things to that level, you have to have the basics implemented. Every single week when a new client reaches out to us, we find out that they don't have demark setup. They don't have SPF, they don't have DKIM. These are very simple settings that you need to uh set up for yourself. It takes literally minutes.

Get a professional if you don't know what they are. It literally takes minutes to set up. And another very important thing is part of the basics is using the correct email marketing service. Um before you even move in any direction, you have to have the correct service for your store. You have to look at what CMS you are on. Shopify, Magenta, WordPress, Presto Shop, Open Cart and

so on. And then you have to find an email marketing service provider that integrates correctly with your CMS. What does integrates correctly with your CMS mean? It means it needs to be able to register the activity of your visitors and your customers. You need to be able to see what page they are on, what product they're looking at, what are the attributes for that product, uh when

they add something to the cart, when they search for something on your store, when they go to the checkout page. These are all steps that you need to be able to record with your email marketing service provider. And the good news is if you're on Shopify or Magento, WordPress, uh, Woo Commerce and so on, there are services out there built like Clavio, Omniscent, Brevo, the Marketer. Uh,

there are services out there that do this out of the box. You don't have any sort of development requirements. Just install them and they work. They are able to deliver this for you. But the service is critical. We get big brands reaching out to us and they're when we ask them what service are using they're using I'm not going to name names but they're using CRM basically

which are not able to see the cart the checkout page they're not able to see the customer journey on the website. So the service is critical. It's probably one of the most important things you need to take into account. Um, so choosing the right email marketing service, setting up your domain authentification, and cleaning up and maintaining your subscribers list and fairly quickly, we've had u clients reach

out to us with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and only a small percentage of that was actually even active. Every single time a new client reaches out to us, at least 40% of their subscriber base gets removed because they haven't opened any email in the last 6 months and received at least 10 emails. This is a simple rule that you can implement. It depends of course on

your business, but just take it into account. Have I sent this person 10 emails? Have they opened zero in the last six months? Remove them from our current senders list because they actually hurt you. When uh your open rates go up, when your click-through rates go up, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Verizon, they see you as a safe sender. They take your emails and they put them in the

inbox. So, by increasing your open rates, by removing all of that junk subscriber uh subscriber base, you actually get more out of your uh list of subscribers. Okay, so I'm u actually going to move further because again time is very very short and I've covered these mostly. This is very important. The these are two very important links that any one of you can actually use. MX Toolbox

and the Google Postmaster. You any company in the e-commerce sector should check these two links every month. It takes one minute. It allows you to see if you're blacklisted. It allows you to see how you're doing with Gmail. And let's face it, most of your subscriber base are going to be on Gmail. So, if you have a problem on Gmail, you're going to see a spam or

abuse report or something ClickUp. You are most definitely going to be able to see that you have a problem with your entire list. So, check these two lists out because you want to avoid spam and you want to improve your deliverability. Deliverability is critical. Send emails out that are relevant to anyone who opens them. When you send out a coupon code, don't just send out an email

with a coupon code and that's it. Because only 0.01 0 1% or 05% out of your openers are going to find that useful because they're going to place an order. The remaining 99.9% of the people that haven't placed an order are going to see that email as being irrelevant for them. So, make sure you add some information in there that's useful for them, trending guides, top selling

products, useful information. One thing we did was adding jokes for one client. And when we stopped doing that, the client reached out to us saying, "Hey, I actually got an email from a guy saying that they loved our jokes." Give something useful in any newsletter you send out. Improve deliverability and you're going to get more results. Uh this is bounce rates, spam complaints. Of course, if you

have spam complaints, you definitely need to look at what it is that you are sending. Uh engagement rates and deliverability. This is also very important. something we see most, not most, all clients that reach out to us um get wrong, which is the more text and the fewer images you have in an email, the better deliverability that email will have in the inbox. And you don't need

more than 600 pixels in width for any image in order for that to actually render well on pretty much any device. If you want to do like super closeup, you can do 900. But don't compare your emails to Amazon's. Don't compare your emails to your biggest competitor who's a corporation that has a sender reputation that is much much much higher than yours. No. Use as much selectable

text in an email as possible, as few images as possible. You're going to get inboxes. You're going to get results. Preparing for the journey. These are going to be some very important questions that you need to answer for yourself. What are our current efforts in this direction? If the answer is this, it's bad. Uh, what ESP are we using? This is you can kind of get to

this fairly quickly, but is it the right ESP for yourself, for your company? What is the status of our list of subscribers? How many are active? Simple rule. Make a segment. Last six months, received at least 10 emails, opened zero emails. That's it. How do we integrate email marketing into our marketing planner? And super important question, do we have a marketing calendar? Over and over again, we

see clients that have digital marketing doing something on PPC, SEO doing something on SEO, email marketing existing there somewhere in the crowd and no marketing planners. It's not possible today. You make an article on SEO, you use that information from the article to introduce something interesting in your campaigns, on social media and so on. So have a marketing calendar and include email marketing in there. And finally,

what are the subscriber entry points? do we actually have where people can subscribe to our newsletter, pop-ups, footer and so on on social media. Okay, without further ado, this is the blueprint that we typically build out for any new client. And in the middle here you see email automation. And of course over at the top you're going to see this whoever I send this uh the slides

to you have the entry points. And from email automation you have to map out the journey so that it is clear what happens on any single action a visitor is making on your website before the purchase and after the purchase. And I'm going to try to quickly go over why um why what are the most important flows any e-commerce business needs to have. And this is again

based on our numbers. This is based on $65 million worth of email revenue. The welcome flow generated 26% of all automation revenue. Welcome flow means new subscriber flow. Uh subscribing get 10% and you're going to see what happens next. Site abandonment gets 3%, browse abandonment 5%, cart abandonment 20%, checkout abandonment, what? Cart abandonment and checkout abandonment. Yes, they're two different things that they need to be treated

differently. 24% and new customer flow 10%. I'm going to cover these flows with you and how you need to build them. And that's actually going to get you almost 90% of that entire email revenue stream. New subscriber flow fairly quickly. So, you need to have two pop-ups, one for desktop, one for mobile, because you want to be able to AB split test them separately per device. And

you need to have an incentive. Absolutely mandatory. Need to have incentive. Otherwise, it's just not going to work. People are not going to give you their email address because they want to stay up to date with your latest and greatest because they want something in exchange. Uh, three emails. You use the incentive to convert new subscribers into new customers. you have our um default delivery dates and

what we typically try to communicate through those emails. Site abandonment. Site abandonment happens when someone abandons your website before they look at the product This is typically traffic that's coming from brand protection campaigns. Most e-commerce businesses have brand protection campaigns online. They land on your homepage or on specific landing pages, but life gets in the way. You grab their email address using an incentive and again life

gets in the way and they exit your website. You send this is site abandonment and you send them of course your most popular products and or your most popular categories in email one and email two. This is typically AB split tested. You want to get them back and you want them clicking on products examples. Going to quickly skip over them. Those are our clients. Browse abandonment flow.

This happens when people look at a product and abandon the website. U browse abandonment is something that's actually very important and very relevant. You want to show the product that was that the visitor was looking at and top selling products and top selling categories. You have to AB split test this. Bigger catalog sites, sites with more products are going to typically get a better result out of

showing the top categories. Small marketplaces, i.e. uh smaller websites are going to get better results from showing popular products. Two emails delivery within two to four hours and delivery with within one to two days. Cart abandonment. Cart abandonment flow. This is very important because this is something that almost everybody gets wrong. Uh cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are two very different things and they act in two

very different ways. So, cart abandonment happens when people add something to the cart but do not initiate the checkout. Why is this important? It's important because they use your cart for two reasons, for one of two reasons. Sometimes even both. One is they use the cart as a wish list and they just add it there, save it maybe for later. And if your cart doesn't save the

products, please, oh, please test it and make sure it does save it. I I saw that it's a problem, okay, for some companies, but fix it because it's extremely frustrating when you go back and you lost 30 minutes worth of adding products to the cart. That's one. And two, because they're searching for your products on Amazon or whatever local marketplace they like to use most or competitor's

website. So, this is a neat trick that we learned many years ago, and I'm going to focus on it. I'm not just going to skip through. First email goes out 2 to three hours after the abandonment process happened just as a reminder. But the second email doesn't go out one day later. It goes out 23 hours after the original abandonment happened. Why? Because people abandon not just

because of wish list and or looking at competitors, but because life gets in the way. Our lunch break is over. I had to take my kid to school. You know, I had to do something at that specific time during the day. So, I try to send email number two 22 to 23 hours before that happened on the previous day. We've AB tested this several times on several

clients with a lot of traffic and it works really well. Email number three, one to three delays and ideas about what you can add in those emails over there. Check out abandonment flow. Super important. 24% of the email automation revenue. You want to make sure that you get as much as possible out of this one because you're paying a lot of money today. A lot of money

for every single click you bring on your website. When you bling bring that click on your website, you want to make sure that if they are on the checkout page, you are incentivizing that order at least once per customer lifetime. At least once. Get that first order out of them because you've already spent the money with Meta, with Tik Tok, with Google, and so on. Okay. And

then you have the same thing. Delivery within 2 to 3 hours for the first email. Delivery within 22 to 23 hours for the second one after the abandonment event happened. And email number three, pressure support. Use everything you have in your artillery and get that sale out. New customer flow. This is the final one that is fundamental for us and it is as critical as the checkout

flow. Even though it generates less revenue, it's maybe even more critical actually than the checkout flow because most companies don't have a new customer flow. They just send out your order confirmation email and that's that. But um today when ads are like so expensive, generating the second order from a new customer is worth its weight in gold. The 10% revenue that you get from this uh email

flow is worth so much money. So much money when you calculate the actual cost it would have you would have had to invest if you if you had done remarketing campaigns on Google on Meta and so on. So we try to get three things out of the new customer flow. Number one, we try to get the uh of course the thank you, the sincere thank you, the

where you can find us on social media, the message from the CEO if possible or an interesting thing about the company itself, something embarrassing, something that shows there's a business behind this, our physical store if we have one, anything that creates a connection. Email number two is also very important. We try to use it to answer frequently asked questions in order to be helpful. If your customer

support says one out of five customers call asking how long it's going to take to ship, what's the warranty, how does this work, and so on, it's definitely on everybody's mind. So, put it in email number two. Because not only this is going to be helpful, it's going to educate your subscriber into understanding that you send useful information, useful images, useful emails. So, it is relevant for

them to open your emails. And this works really well with our primary goal for the new customer flow, which is to generate a second purchase within the f the first 30 days after that order has been placed. Whatever incentive you're going to use, it's going to be cheaper and more profitable for you to generate that order than by paying a remarketing campaign using ads. Use an incentive

and get that order. uh from that firsttime customer and also very important is today most of the traffic and most of the orders you get come from ads for most companies not all of them but for most companies if you look at the average number of pages per visit for customers that came from an advertising campaign you're going to see the number is extremely low they don't

get to know your catalog they see your ad on Facebook they click the product maybe they click one or two more products but they go add to cart and check out. They don't know your brand. They don't know your site. If you give them a reason, they will come back and this time they have to find something that's useful for them. They get to they get to

learn more about your business. It's it's priceless. We've been doing this for six or seven years, emphasizing how important it is and always putting our foot down with clients and explaining that this is super important. and we haven't changed it. It's working. Okay. Uh right on time because there's really not a lot you can do with AI nowadays, not what we do. Uh I'm I'm going to

tell you what we use AI as an agency for our clients. We use it primarily for data analysis. You know, when once you launch these flows, ideally you would be running AB split tests. So you would continuously and constantly try to improve the open rate, the clickthrough rate by changing the sending times, the subject lines, and the content of these emails. For clients, we've been doing this

for 5 years. We are keeping track of all our tests in spreadsheets. Duh. And uh, of course, they get to be really big. So over time, the risk is you're going to run the same test again. It used to take us hours to make sure that any idea we get and we want to test out hasn't already been tested two or three years ago. But with AI

right now, you just dump the spreadsheet in and you say what test you want to run. Even better, you ask it for ideas if you're having a bad day and it tells you, "Oh, you already ran this 3 years ago in April. The result was that." Okay, of course, double check it. It tends to hallucinate from time to time, but for the vast majority of it, you're

going to save a lot of time analyzing this and you're going to save a lot of time by also finding out interesting things about your customers, segments, personalization. How can I segment my customers based on brand, based on gender, based on customer, based on purchasing times of day? All sorts of very interesting tidbits that you can have just by loading up your sales data and your visitors

data. And be super careful with anizing the data. GDPR, you don't want to load, of course, personal information from customers into chat GPD, but you can definitely use services like GPT for all. You just download them on your computer. It's your data. It stays there. doesn't go on the internet and uh it's much less powerful than chat GPT but more than enough to do something that would

take me or any one of you weeks to actually analyze and go through it. It does it in minutes. So use it for and that's going to lead into personalization because you're able to build out uh personalized flows and for AB testing. I mentioned that already. For campaign planning, load up your last 12 months worth of data. See what worked, what didn't work in the same time

last year. Load up your last 48 what didn't work in the last two years in the preview in the month that that has to come. And have it give you ideas. Find out what you what you need to be sending. And uh for design and content, use midjourney, use chat GPD. Um image generation. Don't just, you know, show a ring. Show a ring on a hand. Show

put it on a model. Use it for image analysis. I think that's pretty much it. I just want to make sure I mention this. Um, AI is powerful, but only if your fundamentals are strong. If you don't have demark setup, I'm sorry to say this, but no amount of AI will help you because your emails are not going to get in inboxes. So, yeah, this is pretty

much it. uh this is what you need to do but I'm going to be there if you need the slides or anything like that I can uh send them over to you as well. Thank you so much. I hope you find this useful.