Episode 20: Supercharge Your Email Marketing Part Two

Today’s episode is part 2 to our email marketing series. Mike explains the email flow he uses for his Colorit.com contests. This episode will focus on the promotional material that is sent out over the course of the month.

We discuss why we have the flow structured the way we do and Grant does some brainstorming to think outside the box. We toss ideas around and we talk about how successful Mike has been with this campaign.

Our conversation today includes:

• The benefits of using Klaviyo.
• How facebook is helping us build an email list.
• The actual email schedule we use with new sign-ups.
• General ideas to draw in new customers.

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. If you missed part 1 you can listen to it here. To take a look at the landing page we designed for the Colorit contest click here. We have had wild success with this marketing approach and are still trying to find the edge of the limits to it.

Join us next time for part 3 of this series How to Supercharge Your Email.

Resources Mentioned During Today’s Episode:

Klaviyo

Typeform

If you have any questions or anything you’d like us to discuss on the podcast please go to ecomcrew.com and fill out the contact form. Also we would really appreciate if you would leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks  for listening!

Full Audio Transcript

Intro:    Welcome to the EcomCrew podcast with your hosts, Mike Jackness and Grant Yuan.  Here you will learn the lessons, tips, and tricks that these ecommerce pros have learned over their years running and growing their very own seven-figure ecommerce businesses.  Each week, we dig into the ins and out of ecommerce, the truth about affiliate marketing, how to build your own brand and sell on Amazon, and how we’ve stumbled and then quickly rose to success.  The world of ecommerce is changing rapidly, and here you’ll find the trusted resources you need to take your business to the next level.  All right, enough of the fluff.  Let’s get over to your hosts, Mike Jackness and Grant Yuan.

Mike:   Hi, this is Mike.

Grant:  And this is Grant.

Mike:   And welcome to this week’s edition of the EcomCrew podcast.  This week we’re going into part two of I guess basically how to supercharge your email marketing with Klaviyo or just any other thing that you do, but really the point is no time like the present to get started doing email marketing and we’re really peeling the onion back and talking specifically email by email what we’ve been doing with ColorIt to gain the success that we have.  Just as a recap, in the last 30 days we’ve sent out 102,200 emails with a 33.9% open rate and $16,200 in revenue off of ColorIt.  And again, remember this is a site that had zero people on its email list just three and a half months ago and now we have 19,800.

So this last week, we went over the contest flow and how we were, email by email, doing contests.  This week I want to talk about four free drawing promotion that we do on Facebook, which is basically to run and ad to Lead Pages.  If you ever used Lead Pages, Leadpages.net.  We send people to a Lead Pages page that we have on a domain that’s obviously on ColorIt.com.  I’ll give you guys the URL real quick and we’ll also link to it in the show notes so you have it but it’s offer.ColorIt.com/Facebook-4-free-drawings.  And basically, all this page is is about our offer.  We shoe people exactly the four drawings that we’re going to be giving away.  It’s “download now and give us your email address” and we get them into a Klaviyo flow.

And this page is converting at 87%, which is obviously insanely high and we’re paying somewhere between 20 and 30 cents per lead.  Not per click, but per lead.  And I say between 20 and 30 because it varies depending on the week, and we also are constantly kind of massaging our audience and sending this out to lots of different people and our goal is to get as many people into this flow as possible.  So if you ever – I’m sorry, go ahead Grant.

Grant:  Now, when you’re saying you’re paying per lead, is that your acquisition cost per email?

Mike:   Yeah, that’s what is costs for us to get each email on our email list.

Grant:  Got it.

Mike:   So our per-click is something like 17 cents per click, and because we’re converting at something like 87%, the cost per lead to get that email address is about 20 to 30 cents, which is pretty cheap.

So again, our goal is just to get people on our list because we know from the previous episode that we are going to just email the living crap out of them.  Even though we’re giving them something for free, the idea’s really to do that whole value bomb, and the value proposition, if you follow the digital marketer guys or someone like Ezra Firestone, that’s all they talk about these days.  And so I was like, “Okay, well if they’re doing it maybe I can do it too,” and it’s worked out really well for us.  And basically, our value proposition is, “Here.  Okay, well we know they have an interest in coloring books.  Otherwise they wouldn’t bother downloading these drawings and they certainly wouldn’t convert at 87% if they weren’t interested.”  So we get people on our list and we’re going to email them and I’m going to go through step by step what we’re doing on the four free drawings email flow here.  And obviously, you can sign up yourself at the URL I gave you (and again, we’ll put that in the show notes) but I’m going to go quickly through what we’re doing here to get this high of a conversion and open rate and et cetera.

So, if you remember from the last week’s episode, I said the really important thing here is to get a high open rate, to engage your list, get them trained at opening up your emails.  So the first email that we send out as soon as they sign up for this list is About Your Complimentary Sample Drawings.  And we say, “This might be the craziest thing ColorIt has ever done.  Starting tomorrow,” and that’s the key.  “Tomorrow we’ll be sending you one complimentary drawing each week for an entire month.  Before the fun begins, we wanted to answer a couple of frequently asked questions,” and we get into a few FAQs here.  I don’t need to read all those.  But the real key here is that we want the open rate (and we know the open rate is going to) be super high on this first email.  The subject line is Thanks for Requesting Our Sample Drawings.  Open rate: 63.2%.

Grant:  Now, when you’re getting the emails done – because I know a lot of people out there generally have a lot of trouble writing copy – are you actually writing the copy, or are you taking it out and getting a content writer to do the copy for you?

Mike:   So, company-wide, it’s a combination between me and we have a full-time like marketing lady that is on our staff here who is an English major.  It’s pretty awesome having her.  So one of two things are happening: either I write the email and she proofreads it, or she writes the email and then (ha-ha) I proofread her email.  I mean I usually catch things like, “I wanted just a different message,” more than anything.  So yeah, I mean these particular emails I did write, but she’s written or has been writing the bulk of all of our emails.  I mean my MO is to figure out how to do things myself first and then delegate it afterwards once I understand it, and I’ve been delegating I’d say 85% to 90% of email now to her.

Grant:  Mm-hmm.  And for those people that are trying to wonder, “Hey if I can’t write copy, where do I exactly go?” there’s a lot of people out there that actually will hire themselves out to write email copy and it’s almost a dime a dozen.  You can find them on Freelancer or Upwork or any one of those sites.  You can even find them on Fiverr.  I don’t know if I trust having somebody write email copy for $5 but you’d be surprised.  There’s a lot of people that just do this for a living.

Mike:   Yeah, for sure, and that’s a really good tip.  I guess I’m lucky, obviously, in that regard that I have someone here on staff.  Actually, I know I am.  She was a heck of a good find, and like I said, she’s an English major and just really passionate about what she’s doing and does a great job.

So yeah, so that first email just basically – I don’t want to call it a cheat because I mean we don’t do anything unethical but I think that people expect when it says “Thanks for requesting our sample drawings,” that they’re going to have a sample drawing in there right there and then but we use that as an excuse, like I said, to get that 63% open rate and to know that the next email’s going to also be a high open rate and a high click-through rate, which is going to get things out of the promo box and into their main inbox.  And it trains people to be looking out for our emails, and we say in that first email that you’re going to be getting something tomorrow and we say to whitelist our email and add support@colorit.com to your whitelist if people actually even do that these days.

So after we send that out – in the last three days, we’ve gotten four orders just off of that email, just the intro email.  So that just goes to show you that even just doing that is worthwhile.  So the next email goes out 18 hours later.  We actually changed it from one day to 18 hours just because some people were getting antsy and being like, “Where the heck’s my email?  Where’s my free drawings?” and I was sick of answering stuff in support.  So I changed it to 18 hours.  So like T plus 18 hours from when they get that first email, they get another email that says – let me pull it up here – “Your first sample drawing has arrived just as promised.  Here is your first sample drawing from ColorIt.  To get started, click the Download button below.  The file is delivered as a PDF, which most Macs or Windows computers can easily open.  Once your drawing is downloaded, all you have to do is print and enjoy.  If you have any trouble, you can reply to this email and we’ll be happy to help.”  And then we say “This drawing’s from our most popular book titled Calming Doodles.  Blah, blah, blah.”  You don’t need all this on this podcast.

But the point is that it’s a very simple email.  We highlight a couple of things in the email about the particular book that we’re doing this from, and then there’s a button to download the drawing and in that download, that PDF download, it’s two pages.  Page one is like an overview of the book with a coupon code and page two is the actual drawing itself so it’s pretty simple.  So the stats on that email are 54% open rate.  We’ve had a couple orders placed on that, 0.1% spam, 0.4% unsubscribe, which I’m actually surprised that there’s even any unsubscribes on that first free drawing delivery, but again, two emails, really high open rates.  We’ve generated at least a couple of orders off of those first couple emails.

So the next email that we send out, this is where Klaviyo gets really powerful.  We title this ourselves our first drawing check-in.  So the subject is Didn’t Get Your First Free Drawing?  And the open rate on this is 28%.  And this email is filtered out to only go out to people who did not click on the first email.  So this is something that I don’t believe that MailChimp or Aweber can do at all.  Again props to Klaviyo.  So if people didn’t click the Download button in the first email, we send them the next day a follow-up.  You know, “You didn’t get your free drawing?”  So it’s keeping people engaged, which is really important.  So, Grant, before I kind of go further down this email, do you have any questions or thoughts on just the first three emails we’re sending out here?

Grant:  No, not too much.  I am wondering for the people that get them, you mentioned some people had complained like, “Where’s my free drawing?”  Did you ever get any emails from people saying, “Hey, why don’t you send these all at once?  Why are you sending all four emails?”  Again, being a little bit of a devil’s advocate because as business owners, we probably don’t really care about the freeloader all that much.  I mean this is really a tool for us, but do you actually get any kind of replies in that regard?

Mike:   It’s actually funny that you mention that.  First of all, to start with, this was all four drawings being delivered at once.  That was how we did it to begin with and after talking to people in my mastermind and to my friend that I mentioned in that last podcast, we decided to split it up over four different emails in over a month and that’s all because, like I was saying, we’re training people to interact with our brand and we want to draw it out (no pun intended) to a month to get people interacting with us for a much longer period of time.  And we haven’t actually gotten any complaints about it taking a month to get the free drawings so that’s not something someone’s complained about.  What we have gotten complaints of is, “I can’t figure out how to open these.”  Some people have complained that we’re spamming them and, “Thanks for nothing.”  One lady, like I mean it was hilarious.  I have to go find the support email that came in.  I was in the middle of like writing this like nasty reply that I luckily got smart and didn’t sent.  Sometimes I’ve been known to send some of these like off the cuff emails.  I just get pissed but it’s like no, not me.  No, no, no, no.

Grant:  You never…

Mike:   So yeah, I was just like, “All right, it’s not worth it.”  But yeah, we do get people complaining that they can’t open it.  I mean our audience is old.  You know, people don’t necessarily know how to open a PDF or they’re like, “I don’t have a printer,” or, “Can you mail me these?”  You know, just crazy stuff.  I don’t know.  There’s definitely a lot of stuff that comes into support, but overall the promotion’s been profitable and it’s raising awareness of our brand, which is really important and it gives us an excuse to get in front of people and obviously the vast majority of these people don’t convert.  But we don’t need the vast majority of people to convert to make it profitable.  So there is definitely some headache but I think it’s worth it overall, to answer your question.

Grant:  Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that a lot of people, especially on the business side, really need to wrap their head around.  And I’m going to take a little bit from the non-digital world, which is in the franchise world, and I know a lot of restaurant owners and having operated two franchises that are in the food service business, you have a lot of guys that just don’t really think super long-term and somebody comes back and they say, “Hey, I’ve got a piece of hair in my food,” or something like that or “I didn’t like it.”  And that happens pretty regularly at any kind of restaurant.  You know, some guy just gets something they don’t like or they get something that didn’t really sit well with them.  They want something new.  Now, I just say, “Not even worth my time dealing with this guy.  I’m just going to give him another one.”  Or just say, “I’m very sorry that you had a bad experience.  That’s not what we’re about.  Let me get you another one, make you happy.”

And the guy that gets in trouble, I think, is generally the owner that goes, “Well, maybe this guy’s trying to screw me.  Maybe he put a hair in there or maybe he actually is just wanting a free piece of food.”  So in the short run, he says, “Well, ha-ha.  I win because I didn’t give this guy that free food,” and he goes, “Okay.”  You know, this guy gets pissed off and says, “Hey I really didn’t like it.  Why can’t I get another one?”  Owner says, “Tough luck.  You know, you paid for it.  Like it’s not my fault you didn’t like it.”  So the problem is you start thinking about what we just talked about, which is average lifetime value.  And one guy that keeps coming back to the restaurant, he might come back once a week.  He might come back once every two weeks or whatnot but over a year, that’s guy’s going to be making 50 trips at an average of, who knows?  Maybe $15 per trip.  That’s a decent amount per year.  And we’re talking maybe even to like $1,000 lifetime value.  If you get like kind of a regular, then it could be even higher.

And over that time, like how many free replacement meals are you giving?  And the answer is really not that many.  I mean there are, but you have a much greater chance of just pissing somebody off and so taking this back into email marketing and how that applied, I think a lot of people are going to say something to the effect of, “Well I do this giveaway and now there’s all these people that freeloading off of me and they’re complaining.  God, this is such a negative experience.  I hate it.”  And I think really the proper mindset is to have the, “Yeah, there’s going to be those guys,” and there’s always going to be those guys, but the reality is that you can mine the gold out of that and I think that what you’re doing can really show that with the promos.  And I do think one thing that it really does require, though, is that it needs to be marketed in the right way and with the right kind of product to the right audience because you can definitely shoot yourself in the foot just trying to do a free giveaway.  And I think we’ve known that from some of our prior businesses.

Mike:   Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  That could be another whole podcast episode.  We’ve had some really funny stories about that.  But any rate, yeah, so at this point kind of going back over the flow here, we’ve sent them an entry email, we’ve sent them their first drawing, we’ve followed up if they didn’t open it.  So at this point, what we do was we alternate.  So we’re emailing them twice a week and so the first email of the week is their actual drawing and then the second email of the week is something to do with our brand.

And in fact, this next email, which is on day four here is specifically that.  It’s like about the ColorIt brand and we title it Find Out Why I Love Coloring.  32% open rate and the email basically just talks about why we use Erica, my cousin, who’s my partner with this, as the face of this brand for everything and it just basically talks about – you know, it says here, “Coloring is something I’ve enjoyed ever since I was a young girl.  Now that I have my own children, it’s become a bonding activity that keeps us close.  As an adult, I can appreciate the simplicity in coloring, and the fact that I don’t necessarily have to be artistic to enjoy an activity that helps me relax.  This is exactly what led me to enlist my husband, cousin, and his wife, to cofound ColorIt.”  And that goes on, but we have a “Click a button to read the full story” so that take them to our About Us page.  So we basically just have an email that is really just driving people to an About Us page.

And the reason we do that, I mean first off, we put a lot of effort into our About Us page.  It tells I think a pretty cool story about our family and how ColorIt came to be, and we have  like a ColorIt family tree up there and we have like a map of like where all of our customers have recently come from.  And it’s just basically a trust-building exercise.  We’re trying to get people familiar with our brand and kind of make them feel like they have a personal touch with us and that’s what this email’s all about.  And again, with a 32% open rate and we’ve been getting orders off of this email as well, which is wonderful.

And like I said, we just go on this alternating back and forth send them their second drawing.  Now we do a second drawing follow up.  The second drawing is getting even more orders than the first one just because now we’ve sent them two drawings.  The second drawing open rate is still at 45%, which is really high, and then the follow up is at 23% if they didn’t click on it.  And then we do another, like I said “about ColorIt” type of thing.  It’s a ColorIt product offerings email, which is the same type of email that we use in the contest, which just basically talks about, “Hey, we sell coloring books, we sell pencils, we sell journals, we sell sketchbooks.  Here’s just kind of about your brand.”  And that email has a 27% open rate and again, more orders, which is really important.

Keeping on with the alternating email, we send them now our third free drawing.  Third free drawing has got a 44% open rate.  Still incredibly strong, and the check-in email has a 23% email.  Again, those are people that did not open up that drawing.  And then we don’t have an alternating email in here yet.  We need to fill out this sequence a little bit more.  This is just something that we’ve been testing.  We just are now getting people getting to the end of this flow for the first time as of last week, so we didn’t really know like how profitable it was going to be and if we should continue putting effort into it, but the answer at this point is a resounding yes.  So this email flow’s going to go from whatever it is, I think it’s like 13 emails, to probably 20 or even 30 and we’re going to put more information about our book in there and we’re even considering stretching this out to 10 drawings to split test if we email them over 10 weeks instead of four weeks if that has an even bigger impact.  So time will tell on that, but just real quick on the stats: the third drawing, I think I mentioned it got a 44% open rate, lots of orders.  And then the fourth drawing, an equal number of orders as the third.  It has a 38.8% open rate.

So at the end of this flow, now it’s basically down to, “All right, we’ve been emailing them for a month.  We’ve sent them I think it’s eight to ten emails at this point, or up to eight to ten emails depending on if they open up the email and we did a follow up or not.”  So my thought process now is – and know all those sales have been at full price up to this point.  So they’re at the end of this.  We’re at 29 of this flow and they haven’t purchased yet.  What so you do?  Well, in my mind, we send them a free gift card.  You know, it’s like if they haven’t purchased yet, let’s try to get them to purchase.  And we don’t really have enough data yet, because again, people are just getting to this point.  We have only a 17% open rate.  It’s because like it’s really new.  Like you have to let emails sit around for at least a week until you can see the full open rate because sometimes it takes time for people to open things, they’re on vacation or whatever it might be.

So at this point, we send them a gift card.  We’re trying a gift card method versus a discount for right now.  We’re going to switch to a discount and split test it, but right now the subject is Enjoy This $5 Gift Card from ColorIt, and I’ll just read you the email here real quick.  It just says, “At ColorIt, we love awesome surprises.  First we gave you four complimentary drawing just to check us out.  Well now we have another surprise for you: a free $5 gift card.  For the next three days, if you head over to ColorIt by clicking on the button below, we will automatically apply your $5 gift card at checkout.  If you happen to have any issues claiming your gift card, just reply to this email and we’ll be happy to help.”  And there’s a button that says Claim My $5 Gift Card Now.  And that’s the email.  You know, I guess time will tell how this works and we’ll split test doing a gift card versus doing a discount, but so far it’s working fairly well, but the open rate is the lowest of the series, which I don’t like seeing a 17% open rate.  So we still need to split test subject lines on this email and the contents of the email and see if we can get that up and running but overall, this provide value first and sell them later proposition’s been working really quite well.

Grant:  Now one thing that I would personally be curious about – I do like the gift card idea and I think gift cards are far better than coupons because there’s an immediacy to it, which is a gift card actually has value.  Coupon are more of an idea or is seen as just like getting some kind of savings, but a gift card is something that if you don’t use you’re wasting it.  So one thing that I would almost be curious about is if you did a survey almost at the very end, and a lot of people don’t like surveys but say, “Hey, we’ll give you a $5 if you do a survey for us.  All you’ve got to do is answer a few questions and you get a gift card.”  And I think that would almost be – what would be the right word?  Self-filtering where if they don’t even want to do a survey, then they’re never going to buy from you to begin with, but if they do a survey, you can say, “Hey, why haven’t you bought from us yet?” and you can say, “Is it the pricing?  Is it the quality?  Are you just not ready to buy?” or something like that.  And depending on whatever the answer, maybe you could do something.  And I know that’s going to be beyond the capabilities of a lot of different products, but I do think that would be an interesting way of trying to almost capture what’s going on for that particular customer or potential customer.

Mike:   Yeah, it’s actually very funny that you mention surveys.  As part of our post-sale follow up sequence, which we’ll talk about in part three of this podcast the final part next week, the email that we’re adding right now to finalize that sequence is a survey and it actually just is surveying, trying out SurveyMonkey and Typeform and ended up settling on Typeform because they basically have a free version that does everything that we need.  So we’re going to be using Typeform to do several different surveys.  First off, we’re going to be surveying actual customers that purchase from us.  I love Grant’s idea to survey people that get to the end of the four free drawing flow ask them how come they haven’t bought yet basically?  And how did you like our artwork?  Or what would make your decision of buying whatever?  And if they still don’t buy after that, we can just send them the darn gift card, but I love throwing the survey into that flow and it’s something we’ll definitely do.

But Typeform, I’d highly recommend it.  Again, they have a free version that’ll probably work for 99.9% of people that are listening to this podcast and you can build pretty complex surveys.  And the first one that we actually built as a test here, we’re going to be using Typeform to run a survey of Pick Our Next Title, which I’m really excited about.  We’re going to basically email our entire list of 20,000 people and ask them to help pick our next book title.  And a lot of the titles that are on this list, we’re probably going to develop anyway, but we’re going to put whatever one wins to the front of the line and we’re going to run a month-long contest.  Well, we’re going to have 15 different topics to pick from and then we’ll narrow it down to five and do a second and final like voting thing and then we’ll give away X number of books to people that picked the winning title and the first 30 that come off the press probably or something like that to do to a whole viral marketing campaign, social media campaign about Help Pick Our Next Title, You Get to Choose kind of thing.  So surveys definitely can be quite powerful and I definitely agree, Grant, that that would be a great thing to put in this flow.

Grant:  Yeah.  One of the things that, again, is about the ColorIt brand for me when I think about it, I just think, “Well, for $16 you can get an item that you’re looking at.”  And this is the hard part again, like the last episode we talked about not being able to be in my customer’s shoes, and for me, it’s really hard for me to try to jump in that because if I find a product that’s $16, I mean let’s face it, I’m just going to open the wallet and give my $20 like, “Take my money,” and like, “I want it.  I want it now.  Like let’s not dick around.”  So it’s really hard for me to think about somebody that’s looking at a product going, “Well, I really like it but for $20 I don’t really want to buy.”  And obviously the money is going to be a concern of course because that is always a concern and some people might just way, “Well, it’s not in my budget,” and obviously a lot of people have a budget that they’ve got to stick with.

On the other hand, it is $16.  I mean it’s within striking range of anybody that’s in reasonable financial situations and just anybody within striking distance of $16.  So, to me, it’s really interesting because there is almost like that magic button.  It’s got that infomercial type of, “If we just push the right buttons, we can get that sale,” which is simply not available for me for CuttingBoard with an average order of a $100 cutting board.  I simply can’t say, “Hey, you’ve been buying these $12 cutting boards and now let’s go for the $100.”  You know, it just doesn’t work.  You’ve got to get somebody up to the right buying temperature and then you’ve got to execute and for me, that buying temperature just doesn’t exist.  I mean it’s like stratospherically hot, well, or cold.  You can figure it out.  But that’s something that, to me, is really neat about ColorIt, which is it’s an ultimate psychology machine and people obviously like it.  Now the question is why don’t they just freaking buy it at that point?

Mike:   Yeah.  And it’s interesting, Grant.  You mentioned I think we’re just so jaded and I think this is another opportunity just to feel lucky and blessed in life where we both would – we see something we like for $16, we’re going to buy it and not even give it a second thought but I think even our average customer’s really not in that bucket.  I mean we get the craziest emails, I mean like every day, about “Can I put this on layaway?  I can’t afford it until I get my next paycheck?”  We’ve gotten someone that asked us if they could split it across two different credit cards because they only had so much credit left on their credit card.  I mean I was like for $16 seriously?  Like you have $8 credit limit left on each credit card?  I mean maybe you probably shouldn’t be buying a coloring book.

I mean I had one person that did a pre-order that we specifically said on the pre-order page “If you order this today, we’re going to charge your credit card today and it’ll ship out on the 15^th of March,” which we actually delivered over a week early on that.  We wanted to under-promise and over-perform.  She emails in and said like, “I sincerely hope that like you didn’t charge my credit card for this today because like I don’t get paid for X amount of time and I don’t want to pay for something that I don’t have yet because I want to buy something else.”  And I was like, “Okay, well I’m sorry if you misunderstood.  It said it pretty clearly on the page but we’ll be happy to cancel your order.”  And we canceled and then she like emailed in back like in a huff like, “I didn’t tell you to cancel my order.  Like now I have to wait for the thing to like refund to my credit card before I can place the order again because I don’t have that much credit.”  I mean it’s crazy like how much of a shoestring budget people are on.

So like if you can imagine how difficult it is for some people to buy a $16 item, what you’re saying, Grant, about people having $100 to buy and even more expensive item is even tougher obviously.

Grant:  Yeah.  It definitely is and I will always say how fortunate we are to be in that situation and that, yeah, $16 sometimes like I said, it’s hard for me to jump into that customer’s shoes because $16, man, that’s pretty tough to, yeah, need to be able to do that.  And you would almost think – and I’m thinking out loud here but at the end of – I think you said you’re probably going to bring the whole thing out to I don’t know.  How long do you think you’ll take that email chain out to?

Mike:   I mean we’re going to keep on testing it.  I think basically, what we’ve decided to do is to keep adding emails to a chain until the open rate suffers and/or the unsubscribe rate skyrockets so we’ll just add one email at a time until we kind of hit that tipping point.

Grant:  Yeah.  You know me.  I love my out-of-the-box ideas but at some point, just charge them like $3 for a PDF download of the whole damn thing.  At the very end of the chain, just say, hey – maybe if they clicked on It’s Still Out of My Budget, say, “We get it.  Sometimes things are expensive and here’s our one-time great offer for you.  For like $3 you get to download it, print it all you want and do whatever you want with it.”  And I think in some ways you might worry about some guy taking the PDF and going crazy and whatever but you’re got your trademark, you’ve got your copyright and if they really wanted to do it, they could do it already or they could share it on the web or something ridiculous like that but it would be interesting to see what you get out of that.  Because at $3 there’s no reason not to buy it at that point and you can almost run it for a limited time just to see what people do.

Mike:   Mm-hmm.

Grant:  But I do think – my gut tells me you might get some people but I think a lot of people simply, at the end of the day, just don’t want to pay for it at the price that you have.

Mike:   Yeah, that’s definitely a part.  And we do offer all of our books for download already for $10.  So we could do like a 50% coupon for the download.  I mean it’s just $5 in our pocket.  There’s no out-of-pocket cost in the download.  That’s why I love them and it’s actually – I’ll mention one last thing here before we sign off for this episode that kind of is a foreshadowing of something that we’re going to be doing.  Perfect time to talk about it but we’re going to be doing a free-plus shipping offer.  So we actually just put together a package of our 10 favorite drawings from several of our different books and they’re printed on our actual paper, like our high quality artist paper and we’re going to be giving that away for free, plus the people just have to pay shipping and handling.

It’s almost like a late night infomercial but we’ll make money off just the shipping and handling, but the idea is we’re just trying to get people to prove that they will open up their wallets and pay and then we can segment them and market to them differently, number one.  And number two, like our feeling is that once they really see our paper and our printing process, which is really superior to anything else – I mean like I’m not just biased because it’s our product but it legitimately is the best paper and printing process on the market.  Like once they have that in their hands, maybe then they’ll want a full 50-page book that’s bound and got hardback covers and perforated and everything.  So that’s actually something else that will become a part of this flow as well, and it’ll be a standalone offer that we’re going to do as well.

Grant:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  That seems like that would be pretty interesting.  And the tester in me even wants to like, like I said, go out of the box and even say, hey – if like maybe you just send like a piece of paper, you just got like a stack of 1,000 of these pieces of paper and just send it out First Class or whatever.  Actually maybe you just send them a postcard that’s just got everything on it and the postcard is the actual drawing itself or whatnot and if they put the postcard on their Facebook and tag you, then you send them another postcard and now, instead of Klaviyo, you’ve got your postcard structure or whatnot.

Mike:   I love that actually.  I’m going to steal that idea, too.

Grant:  Oh.  Great.

Mike:   That’s the great thing about doing these podcasts.  We come up with ideas on the fly.

Grant:  Well, yeah, the other last out-of-the-box idea (and I actually thought about this when you were mentioning another topic), which was there’s a huge thing at least in Seattle, I don’t know if it’s in San Diego, but where people go and they drink and they paint at the same time.  And you talked about unleashing your creativity.  I mean that’s really the way to go because it really loosens you up.  You get the wine in you, and I’m not really much of an artist at all squares, circles, whatnot, and they’ve got somebody at the front that just puts everybody in front of a canvas.  You’ve got your pallets and whatnot and they just walk you through a very basic type of – you know, you’re not doing a Pablo Picasso or anything but they walk you through the Starry Night or like an apple on a table things that a five-year-old can do but they actually give you enough technique and they actually take you through the strokes to make sure that you can get it done right.  That said, if you want to go off the rails, that’s totally fine.  I’ve done three of them and we actually did one together when you were here.  That’s right.

Mike:   Yeah, I was actually going to say the four of us went and did that one night.

Grant:  Yeah.  For everyone that’s listening in, Mike has these great videos on Facebook of these – it’s almost like a speed run where they have a – is she a professional, Mike, or is she –?

Mike:   Yeah.  No, she’s a professional artist.

Grant:  Okay.  So you can watch these videos and she professionally draws or paints in or colors in the coloring books and it is really eye-opening because for me, coloring books are still one of those – well Mike’s got a great business.  I’m not downplaying it at all, but if you give me a coloring book, I mean you’re just going to get something ugly at the end of the day.

Mike:   Yeah.

Grant:  It’s just not going to be pretty.  It’s just going to be – you know, I have not evolved since I was a five-year-old.  But this lady (it’s a lady, I’m assuming, but), she makes it looks wonderful.  I mean it’s shading, she like draws whiskers where there’s not anything and it looks wonderful.  And to me, as almost an upsell would be, in addition to the digital downloads or anything like that, everybody that buys from you gets a free members-only account into, “Hey, want to draw some really awesome stuff?  We have some video tutorials for you over here.  And go beyond your creativity,” or something like that and –

Mike:   That’s another one of these “funny you should mention that” things.  We’re working on that right now.

Grant:  That’s funny.

Mike:   We’ve been actually working on it for the last month.  We had someone that we hired that didn’t do a great job and we’re finding another person now but we’re going to actually do a couple things with that.  We’re going to turn them into webinars so we can use it for that type of marketing and, again, value prop upfront but then also, obviously the vast majority of our audience won’t even know that we’re using that stuff for a webinar and anybody that does purchase will get access to these webinars for free on how to color your books, yeah.  So it’s definitely something we’re working on.

Grant:  Mm-hmm.  So for anybody watching, this is not scripted.  This is just how me and Mike do business.

Mike:   Yeah.  Cool.  All right, well we’ve unfortunately hit our limit for this episode, so hopefully you guys found part two of how to supercharge email to be helpful and next week we’re going to come back with the third and final part.  We have some other interesting flows we’ve been doing, a post-purchase flow, and then we also have some campaigns and stuff that we’ve been running, and then we’ll also talk about the future of what we’re looking at doing and Grant just stole my thunder on the webinar stuff.  But until next week, everyone, have a great week and again, if you don’t mind leaving us a review on iTunes we’d really appreciate it.  It helps gets exposure for our podcast and Grant and I are doing full time ecommerce and this podcast is kind of a side gig for us and the more comments we get and the more reviews and the more exposure we get, it keeps us motivated to doing this because it does take up a lot of our day each week.  So definitely appreciate you guys listening in and until next week, have a good one, everybody.

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