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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
Tell someone at a dinner party that you do email marketing and you get the look. "Email? People still open those?" My guest this week, Laryssa Wirstiuk, gets it constantly. She runs an email and SMS agency called Joy Joya, she's been at this for about a decade, and she's very clear that email was never the problem.
Email is just the owned list. It's the one channel where people actually put their hand up and said yes, I want to hear from you. The problem is what we do with that permission once we've got it.
She proved the point with a study I still can't quite get my head around.
She signed up to 360 brands to see what would happen
Laryssa signed up to the welcome offer of around 360 ecommerce brands across all sorts of verticals. Popup, form, the lot. Then she wrote down what actually happened. Did the welcome email turn up? Did the offer match what was promised? Did it land in spam?
44% never sent the thing they promised.
Nearly half. You hand over your email, you're told a discount is on its way, and nothing arrives. Of the ones that did send, around 12% went straight to spam.
The welcome email is the only message a subscriber is ever genuinely waiting for. Every other email you send interrupts someone's day. The welcome one, they asked for. It's the single moment they're leaning in, and nearly half of brands fumble it.
Her fix isn't clever. Get a friend, or you yourself, to sign up to your own list and check it works. That's it.
A list of 20,000 that was really a list of 1,500
The other story that stuck with me was a client who came to Laryssa with about 20,000 subscribers and some of the worst open rates she'd seen, roughly 5%, sat firmly in spam. They cut the list down to around 1,500 genuinely engaged people. Deliverability recovered. So did the revenue.
That's a hard thing to hear when you've spent years building the number up. But dead weight doesn't just sit there quietly. When thousands of people never open and never click, Gmail reads that as a signal your email isn't worth delivering, and it starts routing you to spam for everyone, including the people who do want you.
| | It's better to speak to the people that want to hear from you than to try and win back people who just don't care.
Laryssa Wirstiuk |
Email is not a newsletter
We also got into the idea that email is a relationship, not a newsletter, and that the emails that pull the hardest often aren't the salesy ones. I've seen this in my own brands. We started podcasts for a few of our ecom businesses, and whenever a new episode goes out we send an email about it. No offer, no product push, just here's the episode and here's why you might find it useful.
Those podcast emails are our highest-grossing revenue emails. They outsell the offer emails.
The catch, and Laryssa was quick to make this point, is that they only work because they're part of a mix. If that was the only email we ever sent, it wouldn't land the same way. You still have to sell. You just don't have to only sell.
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