Jeremy Weisz 4:24
It looks like products are like lashes products,
Joshua Chin 4:28
exactly lashes, eyebrows, things that you know, people would typically associate with just I would say I guess they would they are a typical kind of beauty brand type of type of direct to consumer brand. But what sets them apart is just how much they care for their their customers and how much they listen. So their brand and the type of products that they developed actually evolved over time as they graduate. gain a better understanding of their consumers and customers. And that’s a really interesting kind of progression.
Jeremy Weisz 5:07
You know, just we’ll talk about the goal, you know you have with when you first started, but what were some of the questions they were asking, before you started working together? Or
Joshua Chin 5:20
Yeah, I mean, so one of the, one of the first questions that I, that I got from from the founders was, how long is this going to take? How long do you think it’s going to take before we see results? And that’s a that’s a really valid question loaded corn, we, it’s pre loaded as well. We get this from pretty much every single founder that we work with and every single marketing team that we work with. But the fact is, what do you mean by results? Right. So that’s, that’s the, the the issue. And we obviously got results pretty much within the first one month, but it didn’t end there. Right. So getting that initial boost of, of results. And performance is really, really quick, especially when we’re starting from very kind of low Foundation, and implementing the right strategies from the get go. That allowed us to see pretty much a double in results from where they were at within the first 30 days. But that was in the first 30 days. But that doesn’t mean as much today where we are generating pretty much over one quarter of the business revenue. And that took essentially two years of optimization of partnering, of just creating new strategies and testing new ideas. And ultimately, it’s about that sustained results and performance over time versus just a one time boost is what we’re looking for. So that’s the biggest one. So
Jeremy Weisz 6:53
how long is it gonna take to get results? What’s another common question?
Joshua Chin 6:58
Yeah. Another common question. I actually did not get this from from the founders ForChics. But it’s really common that people actually have had bad experiences working with agencies having kind of experienced bad communication, just overall bad results, over promising and under delivering. These are very common issues that people face when working with agencies. And that often scars them. And it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth when they think about working with another or partnering up with another agency. And that’s why we take a very different approach to our relationship with clients. We act like a partner, essentially, thinking from the perspective of our clients, and what’s best for our clients. And one of the biggest compliments that I’ve heard from clients is that they view us as an extension of their marketing department. And they lean on to us for the latest strategies, the best insights and ideas to help them guide their marketing strategy. And I find that super interesting, because I’ve rarely, I rarely find that the case with most agencies that we work with ourselves. And that just means a lot to, to to me,
Jeremy Weisz 8:18
Josh, we’ll get into what their situation was before you started work with them. But let’s talk about if you’re watching the video portion, you’ll you’ll see what you’re looking at here. But let’s talk about the goal some of the goals.
Joshua Chin 8:33
Yeah, absolutely. So initially, when we first started a partnership, they had a pretty low email revenue percentage of their total business, about only 5% of their total revenue was driven with email, it was actually slightly lower than that of four point something percent. And they really wanted to double or even triple that amount to really create a much stronger back end revenue channel to essentially establish a recurring income for the brand and they will be heavily drudge
Jeremy Weisz 9:08
you think is just they have so much they’re focused in on that they can’t focus in, in dive deep and email. Is that one of the reasons or why do you think it is?
Joshua Chin 9:19
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That it’s, it’s just so much, you know, as as a growing and scaling brand. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with the different marketing channels and supply chain customer support and all the different struggles and fires that that you know, that they have to deal with. Along the way, while still thinking about maintaining a healthy recurring revenue. That’s hard. That’s hard to do. So that was one of the biggest pains and they were relying on very kind of typical plug and play templates at the beginning. And those weren’t working very well for them and open rates. Were just on decline. And it was deteriorating over time, especially, you know, sustained over time having low open rates at like 10% or even lower, that hurts deliverability. And that really hurts the overall results and performance of the brand. So they really wanted to fix that as quickly as possible and establish email as a profit center.
Jeremy Weisz 10:22
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And so those are the things holding them back. So now, continue on what were some more now you want certain goals, you have certain goals for them? What were those?
Joshua Chin 10:34
Yeah, so initially, we wanted to reach at least 10% of your total email revenue, total revenue being driven with email, that was the initial milestone that we, we want it to be essentially,
Jeremy Weisz 10:49
what they were where they were.
Joshua Chin 10:52
Exactly, we wanted to double your existing results with with emails. And as they kind of rebranded and kind of found a better identity around your brand, we wanted to have that alignment across the entire email channel with your customer journey. So that also contributed to the results that we’ve seen. On top of that, it was also quite difficult at the beginning to keep up with basically the high level of the high quality of graphics and the quality of emails that we wanted to maintain. Without having us in place they were, you know, they’re really lacking resources and manpower to achieve this on your own. And as we came in, we had a, they essentially added a dedicated department of email marketers, designers and copywriters on to their team without having to actually pay for a full time payroll.
Jeremy Weisz 11:54
What are we looking at here? So if someone’s not looking at the video, you were seeing a code we’re seeing a 20% off or seeing a thank you just walk through some of the these, you know, some of these designs that we’re looking at.
Joshua Chin 12:11
Absolutely. So some of these designs are actually so the ones for those of us who are watching the video, these are designs that and email templates that we have split tested and optimized over time, that has shown to be the highest converting. And the thing is, most people would imagine the best converting emails to be either really, really simple without any graphics, that’s on one camp, and another camp of people of marketers, we think about really elaborate the well designed emails with lots of bells and whistles. being the best performing emails, we have zero attachment to either any of those, those that that spectrum, we rely have just solely on what the data is telling us. And that what the data is selling is guides, our essentially our strategy around the brand around what converts best and how we design our emails. So from the point where we get a new subscriber where a new subscriber comes on to the list, they have their immediately greeted with a nicely designed email that doesn’t just look good, but also converts well. And following that with kind of a good balance between good design good graphics that convert well, and also good copy that relates to the audience persona, and the demographic that we’re speaking to. And overall, that creates a kind of a unified aligned experience across the entire customer journey.
Jeremy Weisz 13:51
Yeah, yeah, I mean, in the in the end, Josh, it only matters It doesn’t matter what we like it matters, what customers like and what the customers like and what they’re actually going to buy from. And so the next act is, well, what’s the solution?
Joshua Chin 14:08
So following up with what I’ve just kind of shared is we crafted a, essentially a customer journey around who their audiences and how what their behavior is like. What we have found is that most of the purchases happen within a one week window within that initial impression to conversion. That’s typically one week. So we invested very heavily on automations to maximize conversions in that first part of that journey, and following that as well from the post purchase journey up to the second purchase. And the third, where they were lacking initially was they weren’t paying a lot of attention to building a strong relationship with existing buyers. Here’s when we came in, we basically did a whole overhaul of flows to leverage on recurring revenue using automations. To build a strong relationship and foundation upon which upsells and cross sells can happen. We also boosted AOV on the front end, using a couple of strategies to build bundles around interests, product, products of interest, and what people really enjoy and liked. We use that and we kind of identify the different segments of people who are interested in different types of products, and created different strategies around those product interest groups. And that worked really well for us. And ultimately, that’s ultimately what we did was basically allowing the data to tell us what was working and what wasn’t. And we made decisions around the numbers versus what we felt was was right, and that really helped a ton.
Jeremy Weisz 16:02
Yeah, and just you know, the funny thing about that is, it’s low hanging fruit. It’s funny how, like a person who is purchased from us before we neglect sometimes, and they have proven to be a great customer, as opposed to spending time on the new people coming in. So I love that you did that. And so exactly, some of the bottlenecks that you identified.
Joshua Chin 16:26
Yeah. So what what we’ve seen is repeat purchases were low, exactly like you mentioned, Jeremy, it’s, it’s often easier to focus on acquiring a new customer. But the truth is, it’s actually easier to convert an existing customer. And it wasn’t a initially the strategy wasn’t, wasn’t targeted, it wasn’t tailored, and it wasn’t personalized. When we came in, what we did was we kind of identified the different segments of people with different interests, and different basically different categorizations of people. And we created content upsells, and cross sells that were relevant to those people versus kind of like a blanket strategy across the board for everyone. And that really helped a lot with generating the the level of engagement that we wanted, which translated to conversions, we also realized that flows and automations were severely underutilized with basically just the basics, the basic templates, which kind of set in place, and they were missing on a lot of opportunities for sales along the customer journey that we’ve kind of mapped out at the beginning. So what we did was we created automations, targeting specific junctures in the customer’s journey, for instance, browser vandeman, where people are reviewing products, but not adding anything to cart multiple times in a row, that presents itself an opportunity for us to, to bring to bring them back in and create a conversation around why they’re not adding products to cart and tackle objections along the way. They were also using templates pretty heavily, which did not contribute at all to building the brand identity. What we did was we kind of looked at their website, what it was, what their brand identity was like, they at that point in time, they did not have a branding guidelines. So we kind of created one for them. We had a we set them down, we discussed around what your brand was about what color schemes were converting for the website? What would it consumers cared about what kind of language to use, what kind of words to avoid. And based around that kind of customer persona we that we created a branding guideline, we basically overhaul all the flows to make sure that every every single email that customers and subscribers receive are aligned with your brand identity. And consistency.
Jeremy Weisz 19:00
If anyone’s looking at this, they see a beautiful kind of opt in, but who cares if it’s beautiful, you’ve tested it, and it works. So you can see exactly what’s in the video. It’s a color scheme, you can see some of the verbiage they use. So I would suggest if you’re listening, just the audio, check out the video of what we’re looking at as well. And the next piece, what were some of the things that you broke down there were four major parts that you broke down.
Joshua Chin 19:27
Absolutely. So segmentation was key in driving the success of our repeat purchases and upsells as well as the entire customer journey. We optimize flows and campaigns using tons of split tests. This is where it gets a little bit boring for most people, but boring works. In email especially. We did tons of split tests around subject lines, preview text, color schemes, CTA styles and CTA copy as well as the body copy. of the email, we did a massive rebranding around their new branding guideline, as well as list utilization, we needed a metric to track how well we were doing in email beyond just the revenue alone, because revenue is kind of like an endpoint, we needed a leading indicator to tell us whether or not we are moving in the right direction. And list utilization gave us exactly that. So in a nutshell, list utilization is basically the number of people in your list, who has opened at least one email from your brand, in any given month. This is this goes beyond open rates, it tells you how much of your list is being utilized in any given month. And one step above that would be the number of people who have clicked in any given month. So that tells us how well we’re actually utilizing the existing lists. Yeah, to generate revenue.
Jeremy Weisz 20:56
Yeah, cuz it all trickles down. Like if the subject line is not on point, then people aren’t going to open it. And then if it’s not compelling, then people aren’t going to click on it. So you’re measuring all of those factors in the journey. So let’s talk about your approach and strategy, utilizing the data for optimization and fine tuning. And you talked a little bit about advanced segmentation, if you want to expand on it for a second.
Joshua Chin 21:23
Yeah, absolutely. So we built engagement metrics around whether or not people are engaging with our emails, and whether they whether or not they were active on the website, have they visited the site recently. And we excluded those, you know, on the flip side, those who were not engaged with our emails for a long period of time. So that led to an improvement in overall open rates, and deliverability, which essentially meant that all messages landed in the right inboxes. More often than not true, doing kind of targeted segmentations. And cleaning the list and exclusion segments. This led to essentially a double in open rates from 10% to over 20%. Essentially, that meant twice as many people opening and reading emails from the brand.
Jeremy Weisz 22:16
That’s awesome. Number two, and maybe touch on a few of these optimization flows and campaigns. What did you do here?
Joshua Chin 22:25
So we optimize some split tests in existing basic flows. Some of the tests that we’ve done was having a discount versus no discount and delaying that discount, using text based emails versus designed well designed HTML based emails, and kind of just letting the data tell us what’s working what’s not. And we also added additional emails to build excitement to build relationship using content in the pre purchase and post purchase portion of the customer journey. We also created some additional flows to cater to various segments and scenarios that were kind of gaps in the customer journey. For instance, we added the replenishment flow, we realized that there were groups of people who have bought before, but have not bought again, even though theoretically they their products should have basically ran out by then we created additional flows to automate that upselling process and the replenishment process. Just by applying all these strategies, we basically tripled the revenue that we’ve seen with automation campaigns with flows from 4% to 12%, in a matter of approximately three months. So this was done over quite a significant period of time. And it’s continuously optimized. And that’s how we kind of capitalize on the growth of the brand, because flows. Essentially, the it’s scalable, essentially, no matter how many, how much traffic you’re bringing, bringing into website, flows are going to scale alongside because they’re all the automated emails.
Jeremy Weisz 24:13
In the next thing talk a little bit. What we’re looking at is user generated content, social content, and targeted single upsells.
Joshua Chin 24:22
Yeah, so the type of content that we use, then the content mix, that we introduced to the brand was a big part of the success as well. We leverage a lot on existing user generated content, testimonials and reviews, that was a little bit more raw and organic, that helped a ton in just creating the level of engagement that we’ve never seen before, previously with the type of emails that the brand was sending before working reverse. And that resulted in essentially triple in campaign revenue from you know, being attributed but of 1% to triple And clocking in at essentially six figures across that amount of time that we working together, it’s amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 25:09
I’m rebranding and email design, you touched upon this a little bit before. But what are we looking at here?
Joshua Chin 25:17
Yeah. So this is essentially creating a unified and align experience and look and feel from the site to the email. And this is super important, because what we found is that if people have if, if subscribers have a aligned consistency of experience, in terms of the brand image and tone and identity from the website, and the ads to the email, conversions are much smoother, and there’s less kind of gaps and leak and leaky leakages. Because people like consistency, and they have that sense of familiarity with what they already know, that helps with building that long term relationship as well.
Jeremy Weisz 26:04
Yeah, I mean, I could see I’ve had that happen on both sides. Josh, where I was on a website, and then I got an email in one was like, like, we’re looking at like a pink background, nice visual. And then the email look completely different. And I basically I you lose, you subconsciously or consciously lose trust. When that happens, as opposed to Sacco This is you automatically have trust, because I just was looking at the site, I signed up, and now I mean, email that looks like the site. So sometimes it’s just subconscious, like you don’t even realize like you trust or don’t trust, right, depending probably how bad it it is, as far as it the the color scheme and the way it, it goes across all the channels. And then precisely and you took a note of which products were generating the most sales. So talk about this.
Joshua Chin 26:58
Yeah, so we looked at what was essentially top sellers, and what were complementary to those top sellers. And we looked at kind of natural upsells, of what people might like. And we created kind of automations around those upselling processes and cross selling process, essentially creating an additional revenue stream on the back end. And interestingly, this also meant that for every customer and every lead, and every email lead that the brand brought in, they’re making more money in the back end than they are before, which also meant that they can spend a little bit more on acquiring each customer, and still make a profit out of it. And they can outspend their competitors as a result of this.
Jeremy Weisz 27:50
That’s huge. That’s huge for them.
Joshua Chin 27:52
Exactly. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 27:54
We talked about lists utilization offers anything else to add here from a list utilization standpoint.
Joshua Chin 28:00
So less utilization is one of the metrics that we use to basically measure the goals, kind of that interim goals between now and achieving, say $1 million in email revenue. There are multiple milestones in between that we need to kind of keep track off in order for us to know that we’re moving the right in the right direction, and less utilization helps us do exactly that. So yeah, and we kept kind of a, we we set goals around this metric. As to lists group soda, we know that we’re not just growing the list without growing impact. We are growing the list while growing its impact on the overall bottom line of the business. So that was super, super impactful.
Jeremy Weisz 28:54
So they they have a pretty big email list.
Joshua Chin 28:58
They started out having a pretty small email list. Initially, we were sending less than a million emails per month, way lesser than a million emails per month. Today, this is an eight figure brand. They sent way more than 2.2 million emails per month. Today, we spent Yeah, we spent a lot more. But basically, the number of emails that they have in your subscriber list is approximately, I would say about 10 times less than that, because every single year, we send about 10 emails, per per every email that we have in the list approximately. So that’s what we losing.
Jeremy Weisz 29:43
So yeah, some of the results.
Joshua Chin 29:46
And yeah, so this is what we’ve seen actually in over the course of two years, pre 2018, late 2017. They were at 5% or slightly Less than 5% in total email revenue in 2019, we brought that up early 2019, we brought up to 12%, essentially doubling more than doubling that. And in 2020, started 2020, we brought up to 20 plus percent. Today, we’re actually sitting at 27%. So, in essence, email alone generated over seven figures for the brand, actually, across the year, in just a single year, well over seven, seven figures in revenue. That’s huge. Wow. That’s amazing. And, and it means a lot, because the revenue that we get from email means a lot more in terms of profits, and the impact that they have on your business and what they can use that that money for is massive, they can reinvest it in growth in other channels that they may not have explored before. And, yeah, they have massive, massive plans for 2021. And I’m super excited to be a part of that their journey as well.
Jeremy Weisz 31:07
Yeah, plus, it sets the groundwork for any new people that come into the list, they have a measurable trackable system that has been built out. Right, so Exactly. Um, so we talked a lot about this. open rates translate to what?
Joshua Chin 31:28
Well, open rates is, that’s the first step, right. So optimizing open rates, and really creating that kind of opening up that top of funnel essentially, for emails allowed us to basically increase in engagement rates, click rates, and ultimately more conversions. Because the more people see your emails, the more likely you’re going to have more clicks than otherwise. So over the course of two years, we quadruple well over quadruple, actually, five x in the results that we’ve seen with emails, and they have grown way more as well. So that percentage actually counts for a lot more in revenue. With flow revenue would triple and same with campaigns revenue. Today, were actually way higher than that. And it’s, it’s it’s just been a great, great journey.
Jeremy Weisz 32:18
So as we talk about this, and walk through all the steps that you did to increase revenue and what you did, this talks a little bit about you. Do you want to just talk about at a glance, what we’re looking at?
Joshua Chin 32:38
Yeah, sure. So basically, we at Chronos Agency we’ve worked with, well over actually 300 clients today, and that’s insane. That’s insane to think about, we’ve only been around for about over three years now. And since day one, we have been wholly focused on email marketing for e-commerce, brands, direct consumer brands. We are one of Klaviyo’s top partners, also listed as one of the top b2b companies and Clutch, which is a b2b agency directory. On average, our clients see an increase in ROI of 20, anywhere from 20 to 30%. There has been cases, for example, this year, an eight figure, beauty brand actually generated 60% of their total revenue, with emails with our efforts directly. So that that is a incredible for their for their business. The average client ROI is actually 35. x. This is slightly outdated for those of you who are seeing this on the screen right now. So we actually crushed that since then. And yeah, at a glance, we partner with amazing high growth direct to consumer brands, taking things to the next level. We’ve worked with some really incredible brands from different industries. And that’s a Yeah, that’s about it. We have a team of about 80 plus people to date right now. Just working on obsessing over email marketing, and working with clients crushing their ROI. So if anyone’s interested in finding out more, all you got to do is click on either the link if it’s available here, or go to Chrono.Agency/application, fill out an application form to book a demo with us and we’ll go through your goals and your journey and how we can help you get to the next level.
Jeremy Weisz 34:45
Thanks everyone for listening, check out Chronos.Agency, Chronos.Agency/application and check out more episodes of the podcast as well. And, Josh, thanks for having me.
Joshua Chin 34:56
Thank you for being on
Outro 35:02
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
