Friday Q&As

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Q&A’s WITH IBRAHIM

Question from Michael (co-founder): Creating email campaigns. What type of content, how often, cadence, etc.

Answer: This was actually a question from the last week, and since we’re talking about emails anyway and having just wrapped up with the flows, I figured it’d be a good idea to give y’all a quick framework on this. I’ll dive into this extensively in the future.

Okay, so one thing I do recommend Founders is, to have a campaign calendar. Most brands have a calendar for social media as well for the email/SMS campaigns, but I recommend having one for the email and SMS campaigns at the very least, and today, we’ll talk specifically about email campaigns.

Why? Because, otherwise, you’re going to be sending newsletters/campaigns at random cadence, when it’s convenient for you, especially if you’re a solo Founder. In this process, you skip looking at the previous performance metrics such as what kind of emails have performed well, why it has performed well, when were those email campaigns sent, etc.

In fact, to make it easier, Klaviyo now has a calendar view within its software, but I use Notion for this purpose as it lets me brainstorm ideas, strategies, and tag others as well.

Note: if you’re unsure about the difference between email flows and email campaigns, to put it simply—email flows are entirely automated, meaning, when you signed up for our newsletter, you might have received a welcome email, and that was an automated email. Where in, today’s email is a campaign—meaning, it is meant to be sent as a one time email.

Alright, so this would be a good framework to begin with for most brands, but you can obviously get a lot more creative and don’t need to stick with one specific framework. At the end of the day, the game is to figure out what works the best for your brand because every brand’s needs are different, your consumers are different, your products are different, and the way you’d like to position your brand is different. So as you keep growing, you can get a lot more strategic about it.

Email Campaign Framework

1. Monthly Newsletter

• Purpose: To update subscribers about blog posts, exciting news related to your brand, what your brand is working on, etc.

• Cadence: Once or twice a month should be fine, but I know brands that send weekly as well that perform well

• Content: Highlights of the month including media mentions, behind-the-scenes content, and customer stories

2. Promotional Campaigns

• Purpose: To drive sales with specific promotions or discounts

• Cadence: Typically 2-4 times a month depending on your promotional calendar, but one rule of thumb I follow is, for every 3 value based campaigns, I send one promotional campaign, but these two aren’t exclusive—meaning, an email can contain both—value as well as promotions

• Content: Limited-time offers, seasonal sales, exclusive deals for subscribers, etc.

3. New Product Launches

• Purpose: To announce new products and drive initial sales

• Cadence: As needed, whenever new products are launched

• Content: Product features, availability details, and compelling reasons to buy. Not to mention, you don’t surprise your subscribers by sending these emails after you’ve launched. You need to talk about it way prior launching, and get them excited. You’ve gotta build the hype!!

4. Re-engagement Campaigns

• Purpose: To re-engage subscribers who haven’t interacted with your emails or made a purchase recentl

• Cadence: Every 3-6 months

• Content: Special offers, updates on what’s new since they last visited, and an easy path back to engagement

• Note: In my case, I like setting up an email flow for this (win-back flow), and also send these re-engagement campaigns to special cohort of subscribers

5. Seasonal Campaigns

• Purpose: To capitalize on seasonal shopping periods

• Cadence: Aligned with relevant seasons or holidays (e.g., Christmas, Summer, Black Friday Cyber Monday, etc.)

• Content: Themed promotions, seasonal products, and timely offers

6. Event Invitations

• Purpose: To invite subscribers to webinars, live streams, offline/online events, etc., which is great for community building. True Classic is a great example of this!

• Cadence: As events are scheduled

• Content: Event details, what to expect, and incentives for attendance (e.g., exclusive content, discounts for participants, etc.)

7. Customer Appreciation

• Purpose: To thank loyal customers and create a positive brand relationship

• Cadence: Annually or semi-annually

• Content: Exclusive offers, loyalty rewards, personal thank-you messages from the team, etc.

Best Practices

• Segmentation: Tailor campaigns to specific segments based on customer behavior, purchase history, and engagement levels

• Spam box: I’ve consulted a few brands where I’ve helped them get their emails out of the spam box. This typically takes 1-2 months, so if your emails have started hitting the spam box, don’t panic—there’s always a way to get out of it

  • If you send all the emails to every single subscriber of yours, it’s inevitably going to hurt your domain’s reputation, after which, your emails could start hitting the spam box

  • The best way to start is to begin by sending email campaigns to the most engaged email subscribers, and keep encouraging them to respond to your emails, which sends a great signal to the email service providers (ESPs) such as Gmail, etc.

  • Send more TEXT based emails vs design heavy emails

  • In your welcome email flows, the very first email should ask the customers at least one of these 3 things, but if all 3 are done, that would obviously be great:

    • Move the email to the primary inbox manually

    • Mark the email as important

    • Reply to the email

  • If none of these things are working, then you try something interesting—a tool that warms up your email domain and while there are a few of those in the market, I recommend Lemwarm (it’s a part of lemlist, which is actually an outreach tool for B2B)

• Analytics: Use Klaviyo’s (or other ESPs) analytics tools to track the performance of each campaign and adjust strategies based on what works best for your audience

Question from Cristian via Email: Hi! Excellent content. It's amazing. Do you know any platform like wonderment that works with Woocommerce? It sounds great! Thanks.

Response: Thank you, and appreciate that!

So I did work a bit on WooCommerce long back, but unsure about any such tool for WooCommerce. In fact, Peel Away was on WooCommerce when I first joined as the CMO a couple of years back, but the first thing I did was—move to Shopify, and that has made our lives a lot easier ever since. Definitely recommend considering it, especially if you’re having a hard time with WooCommerce.

Feedback from Glenn:

Received a lot of emails with positive feedbacks. It helps me to keep writing, and come up with better value and content every day.

To Glenn, Farheen, and all the others—thank you!

I have other questions I’ve received as well, and if I’ve not answered your question, not to worry, I’m going to try and cover them in the future Q&As and weekly Ibrahim’s Nuggets’ column if necessary.

Have a great weekend ahead!

Thank you.