Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Google Merchant Center Updates: Big Changes for eCommerce Brands
4 - Google just dropped major Google Merchant Center updates—are you ready?
In this episode, we break down what these changes mean for eCommerce brands, especially when it comes to email marketing, audience segmentation, and growing your owned channels.
Joining us is Tanya Chandik, an eCommerce Strategist who’s seen firsthand how platforms evolve.
Tune in to learn how to turn these updates into a competitive edge and avoid costly mistakes.
Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein the podcast by flowium. We are your hosts, Vera and Andre Andrey. Say hi. And today we are joined by a very special guest from our team as well. Today we will be diving into the latest and greatest updates of Google Merchant center and what it means for all of us in e commerce world. And joining us today is our amazing strategist from Flowium, Tanya. And aside from being a top notch marketer and an awesome colleague, she also now holds a very important title, the owner of the cutest pet in Flowium. Yes, we literally did have this little contest last week and her amazing friendship won that title. So say hi, Tanya. We're so happy to have you today on this on this podcast of ours. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I
Tanya:almost want to pull one of them onto the screen. Let's do
Andriy:this. Oh my goodness. Which one is it? Lola. I was voting for you, Lola. My vote is
Tanya:with you with her yoga poses. She's
Andriy:the sweetest. Okay guys, if you're still listening to us but not watching our us on YouTube, well, you've gotta stop to do whatever you do and just like go and watch us on YouTube because then you're gonna have a little sneak peek of Tanya's pets. Okay. Awesome. In the last few days like we start seeing the questions from customers about this new merchant like merch. Google Merchant center update. To be honest, I know so little about this. I read the blog post you wrote. Thank you very much for that. Sorry, my voice today is I'm a little bit sick. But I would like to learn. I want to take this time to learn from you. I want to know about all the pros and cons, what's the benefit of it? But let's start first from what is Google Merchant Center? Tanya? Yeah, so Google Merchant center is just a
Tanya:platform that essentially powers your how your Products show up across Google's organic and paid services. So thinking search, shopping, maps, et cetera. So it's where brands can manage their product, their product data, promotions and store details to improve visibility on Google. So for example, when you go to search for sunglasses on Google and then you see at the top of the search results a bunch of, you know, product photos with links to websites, that is, that is derived from, you know, Google's ecosystem essentially. And. Yeah,
Andriy:but isn't it, I'm just curious. I mean we'll be talking about email marketing and Merchant center is a new release. But I always thought that top feature is sponsored that you have to pay money to be there on top. Isn't it true? Yeah. So you can run paid
Tanya:search ads to, you know, boost your product listings. I would have to look a bit more into that to. But there's paid and organic. Okay, so
Andriy:they have organic. I thought they just have only the paid one. Okay, yeah. So Tanya, let's talk a bit more about this update, specifically email update that they just launched. What is this thing that everyone talks about? Give us the gist and how will it affect us as email marketers? Oh, okay. So Google
Tanya:is now allowing brands to essentially use their marketing emails as fuel for organic search visibility. So if you're opted in, which you will be by default, Google can take key promo messaging from your emails, for example, like discounts or shipping offers, and display them directly into search and shopping results. So it's essentially turning your email into a free ad. That's the nutshell.
Andriy:But that's a really cool concept because correct me if I'm wrong, for me as a customer to see this advertisement, I don't even have to necessarily be on your list. Right. I don't even have to be subscribed. Okay, that's cool. So basically we can use that email both for our internal email marketing purposes but also as an external promotion which to us this wasn't obviously available before. That's cool. But you know what, I know it's a little bit too technical and we're still new to all of this, but does your email needs to be like properly format to display? Because I know some brands use one image email. They like have a. I don't think they will display that. Like they need to display the product. I actually I did some, I did some search on that. Like I did some like digging and yes Andrew, you are correct. Like image only emails is not it for this like new update. So there are like certain things that you have to have. You have to have like patterns, headers that are preferably plain text. You do have to absolutely use the alt text. I know it's like a good thing for us to, to use even like before this was introduced, but now it's even more important. But what is also crucial moving forward and I'm sure Tanya will talk about it later as well. Like for example, if it's like a sales email or promotional email, you have to have in text all of the details of your like promotion. The, the, the, the start of the promotion, the end of the promotion, like what emails are or like what products are in sale. So you like have to explicitly say it in words for Google Merchant center to pull it. Am I right Tanya? Or how, how. Absolutely. So best practices
Tanya:would essentially include clear promo details. So dis, discount amount, terms, conditions and end date. That's extremely important. We have to use subject lines with context. So avoiding vague language like something special here versus get 20% off including key text outside of images so Google can read it. So Vera, you just kind of touched on that and then adding expiration dates and like I mentioned earlier, so essentially being really clear on the nose. And, and then to avoid any promos being placed out of context, let's say in the future.
Andriy:Okay, cool. And like for brands, why, why should they like be excited about it at all? Like what's the, what's the whole deal with it? Like, what are the other benefits of this, of this new update for us as brands? Yeah, absolutely.
Tanya:So this update essentially blurs the line between email and SEO. So by sending key promotions, launches to Google, you're essentially turning your email content into a tool for organic acquisition. So now email is not just about retention, it's about acquisition, which is absolutely huge. And yeah, I would say that that is the biggest driver. So we're essentially supercharging your SEO by using marketing content that otherwise would have just been limited to your email list.
Andriy:Yeah, that's, that's really cool. So I see, I see there's a bunch of like benefits. But are there in cons for this? Like why, let's say why should all our clients not use this? Like should we just turn it off by default for all our clients or there are some cons to this. Yeah, so I, I, before getting
Tanya:into the pros and the cons, I think it's really important to go, I guess myths and facts. So essentially with this update, if you will be opted in automatically by default and you can opt out, but essentially Google is not going to see every email that you send out. So you can be a bit more strategic in terms of which emails that you're sending. So in terms of things being taken out of context, you can make that strategic decision because the email needs to be sent manually to to Google. So if the email is not sent to Google and the homepage doesn't display the promotion for example, then Google has no way to find out or use that promo. So if you're doing an email exclusive promo and you don't want that visible to Google, if you're not sending to Google, it won't see anything. Even if Google can pull promo details from emails, it's also safer to publish the promo on your the promo visibly on your website to improve that consistency. So just going over quick pros and cons. So pros free organic exposure beyond your list increase reach without ad spend A new SEO lever using email content to rank in Google and this is especially powerful for promos, sale events and product launches. Guys, let's already start thinking Black Friday. And then some of the consultants would be Google might show old promos if you don't include clear end dates. Messaging can be pulled out of context especially if you're using heavy image heavy emails, loss of visual branding. So text content will get prioritized for example and then you have to manage, you know, your content hygiene. So accurate links, updated promos, you don't want people clicking through to a broken link. So yeah, just on that note to reiterate kind of like the points that we've already touched on on so dues including clear promo details, amount terms, end date, using text outside of images link to crawlable pages. So public pages you can't link to something behind let's say a paywall using subject lines with context don't would be relying on image based content. So really heavy image based emails skipping on expiration details and like I mentioned using gated or login only links. But yeah, to sum up, definitely there are the pros and the cons. But when you leverage strategic thinking in terms of what emails do get sent to Google and what emails don't, then the pros way outweigh the cons. So you just need to be a little bit more cognizant of those important details. So.
Andriy:Sorry, correct me if I'm wrong Tanya. Like I read it and again I haven't like played with it yet. All of this and that I'm going to share is like purely like research based. So I read that there are like two ways of doing that. So you can either send an email manually to like a certain email address or you can allow it to pull like automatically. Is that correct? Or you can only do it manually. Yes. So you need to,
Tanya:you need to send to marketing email to googlemail.com. oh wait, no. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Yeah. Obviously we can link I guess the proper email in the description, but yeah, so Google can't just see all of your emails and pull automatically. I mean potentially you can have it pull automatically if you send Google through a flow, for example, they will get all of those emails in the flow. The emails that you want Google to see to be sent to marketing email to Google. Okay, so
Andriy:okay, yeah, that makes sense because a lot of brands that we work with and Tanya, I'm sure you have like similar strategies as well. It may be a bit challenging in terms of like privacy or like strategic concerns because we do have some brands who have very like cool strategies for VIP only. So or like email exclusive promise or something. So I would see how that might become an issue if we are not like thinking strategically about it. So I would still want to keep some promotions for like email only because essentially we do want to own that contact. Right? We do want to provide the exclusive value through emails. But I like how you can actually pick what exactly you're sending to that Google thingy. So I see it like theoretically keep flow separate, let's say talk about campaigns. So you send a campaign on regular basis and when you want to include certain campaign in the, in a Google Merchant center, you just add that segment to your next campaign, like to include that email and I mean hopefully it will be included. Do people need to create some account on Google because I'm not familiar with this at all. Or they just send it to that email and that's it. Or do they need to create something on Google site?
Tanya:Yeah, so the setting up a Google Merchant center, depending on what your setup is, could be a bit more of a technical conversation. But essentially yes, you need to set up your domain. You need to set up all of your, you know, all of your website and all of that to point to Google Merchant Center. It's fairly simple. Especially with Shopify, there are areas in the back end that you can just plug and play, which is really nice. I remember the days where you actually had to pull the tags and go into the code of your website. But for example, on Shopify it's done pretty intuitively. But yes, you do need to set it up. You can't just send to marketing email to google gmail.com. You probably miss those days. I know you like to play with a
Andriy:cold. Yeah, you know what with those things I don't
Tanya:miss it because it was very stressful.
Andriy:But you can even now upload just like the list, the CSV list with all of your products and products details to this like Google merchant account or whatever. Like I was trying to learn how it works. So yeah it's pretty, pretty straightforward. The good thing about. Sorry just to on that
Tanya:note, I mean the good thing with Shopify, not to turn this into a whole Shopify discussion with data feeds they can pull in your products dynamically. But yeah, that's a whole other technical conversation so it kind of saves you some time there. Which is why Andre point I do not miss the old days of stressing with the code and data feeds not populating and all of that fun stuff.
Andriy:I'm just curious about like analytics. Do you know anything? Let's say we send the email, send the campaign from Klaviyo. It will got populated in Google. Let's say they get 50,000 revenue in Klaviyo. It should be kind of Klaviyo Google Attribution. But how the attribution will work and how people will see the analytics of their campaign.
Tanya:You know that is a great question that I will probably need to dig a bit deeper in with Google Analytics specifically. I know in Merchant center the analytics are slightly basic but I was playing with this feature with my own e commerce site over the weekend and sent out some launch emails with promos and I did see a 48.8% increase in clicks over the past seven days. If that was attributed to my email, hard to say. But I will, I will definitely do part two for that question so I can dig into that a bit further to see if Google Analytics tracks that attribution. What is, what is your
Andriy:E commerce storage? Tell everybody you just got us curious.
Tanya:Okay, it's, it's interesting. So I essentially sell a software that creates custom made garments instantly. So this is mainly for the sewing community and my target audience specifically are those who make costumes for artistic athletics. So dance, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating. So Essentially what the user does is they can put in their, their measurements of their client and then out pops a custom sewing pattern that's made to measure so they can create custom made garments in seconds when previously. This process takes at least five hours, a ton of math and a lot of fit issues. So it's essentially a software geared to the sewing community. The link is the name is My slope. So M I, S, L, O, P, E. And yeah, it's very niche. It's very niche, but it solves a very, also a very niche problem. But yeah, that is, that's biz. Thank you for sharing. Awesome. So
Andriy:guys and girls who are listening, go to my slob. My slope. Okay. Yeah, my slope dot com. No, can you spell it again? Because I misspelled M M Y or. M I
Tanya:M I, M I S O. Oh my gosh. M I, S, L, O P, E. Listen, it's not going to make sense unless you are. If you, unless you sew, you sew in design. No, but you can, you
Andriy:can follow Tanya's email strategy and like see how, how she's doing. So you can spy on her. Oh yeah,
Tanya:absolutely. My welcome flow is pretty fire. Do you work with
Andriy:this, the stirrup brand? Like we just got the brand who is like actually on the dancing? No, gymnastic clothing brand. We just got the new project. Oh no. You should be part of that team or at least an advisor.
Tanya:Well, yeah, I'm definitely. Check that out. I'm going to send some slacks after we hop off the call. Excellent. Cool. Tanya, what were you doing with your
Andriy:emails differently this weekend when you were playing with them compared to what you were doing before? Considering all of this new Google Merchant center updates.
Tanya:Yeah, absolutely. So first thing I did was I added the Gmail email. The Gmail email, the Google Merchant email into my list. But word of caution, you do need to ensure that if you don't want it going through your flows, you have to make sure you put some filters and exclusions. Also in terms of exclusions, Google, the Google Email can only open email. So if you have any, let's say parameters for your send, that will exclude those who haven't clicked and you want to send to Google, you have to be cognizant of that. But essentially, yeah, I had all of the terms and conditions of the launch and the promo that I was running written in text and it was the perfect opportunity because I was doing a launch and a promo at the same time. So essentially I just plugged in, plugged in the email and wait to See what happens. We did make some sales so it was a. It was a great launch. These keep us supposed to. You probably
Andriy:will be testing more because from all our kind of clients and experiments you're probably the first one we are doing this on. So I would be interested in that higher click through rate. A higher click through rates to the keeping because of the merchant center or you just did the great email and it was campaign with a higher click through rate in general. So the click through rate pretty much
Tanya:was the same. That wouldn't have impacted it but what would have impacted the success of my launch weekend essentially is just more traffic clicking through to the website. So essentially I just acquired more leads during my last weekend. Yeah analytics remains KPIs remained pretty standard par for the course but greater lead acquisition. But listen E commerce is all about numbers so with more traffic comes more opportunity for conversion comes more profit so.
Andriy:Well I'm curious since I mean mostly we use Klaviyo but Probably in other ESPs you can add the utms as well. So when you send that email and say Google decided to show it in their merchant center all links do they keep the same utms or they kind of kind of clear them up and there's no utms because if they use the same utms you are able to see the higher traffic.
Tanya:Oh that that's an interesting question because yeah that would. Be. That is something I would need to look into. But that is
Andriy:if you have you said you saw higher traffic to your site to see from what sources you've got maybe merchant center have their dedicated UTM or you can add a source in Google Analytics.
Tanya:Yeah so I didn't dive into Google Analytics. I just looked at the seven day average compared to the previous period basic. So I did see an increase there. So yeah, you'll have to stick around for a part two when I actually go dig deeper into Google Analytics. I haven't haven't gotten gotten my feet too wet this weekend. My Flowium clients come first so I'll I'll have to keep you posted on that when I dive deeper into the the numbers on the weekend. Have you talked to your Flowium
Andriy:clients about it yet? Have you introduced this concept to them? What is the sentiment?
Tanya:We talked briefly with one of my clients when the launch was initially rolled out. I do have a client call in about an hour so I will have to follow up on that question as well where we'll be discussing it in greater depth. But I gave them the overview last week and they seemed excited so yeah, this is definitely an exciting, an exciting update. It's essentially like getting a whole new team as part of your marketing department for free. So that is just, you know, no one, no one can say no to that. Right. What's your
Andriy:advice for all of us who are just going to present this concept to the clients? Like, why should they be excited about it?
Tanya:Yeah, absolutely. I would say that the main takeaway is that, you know, email not only is a channel for retention, it can now be a channel for acquisition, which is absolutely huge because acquisition is the name of the game. In addition to that, just to be really clear with how it works, so dispelling any myths, like I mentioned earlier, it's not that Google can read everything that's going on and we need to panic. It really is something that we can use strategically. So that is another fun tool that we put in our toolbox and discuss with our clients when we're building out our strategies for the quarter.
Andriy:Awesome. And I assume that this, this feature is available only for merchant brands, somebody who sell physical goods online because like at Flowium we also run some kind of promotions or like giveaways. It will probably not work for us. It's because we are like B2B. That's a good question because it
Tanya:also displays across maps. But so it could be used for a physical location with that, with that theory in mind. And listen, my product. Oh really it can be used for physical
Andriy:location. I mean listen from, from the
Tanya:literature it mentioned. Hold on, let me just pull up my maps. I have bunch
Andriy:of service businesses like local service businesses that I currently like consulting on the side and this is like game changer would be for them because they, I mean local businesses, they do have like some promos either it's like cleaning H vac system or so Interesting. I need to like research more about this. So I'm just looking at a notes here.
Tanya:Google Maps for local businesses promoting in store events or offers Google search results when users search for the brand or related offers. The Google Shopping tab and other Google services where merchant centered data is used. So essentially what I gather is if you could promote could be used but we might need to, you know, clarify those details a bit more to get the best answer. But yeah, and listen, I sell a digital product and I'm able to leverage this. It's a digital product but it still has a product page, product description, all of those good things. But did you
Andriy:try to use your keywords and search it and find it your kind of organic listing on the Google merchant center.
Tanya:Oh, good question. Like I mentioned, I haven't. I haven't gotten a chance to. Yeah, yeah, because into the KPIs and the results, I need to do a little Google audit as well. Haven't. Haven't done that in a while as well. But I will definitely keep you posted on that question. Perfect. Yeah. Let's continue conversation
Andriy:on Slack and we need to kind of dig deeper here and explore it. I think it's a great opportunity for all our clients. Thank you so much, Dania. It was fun learning it from one of the first explorers of this topic. Thank you so much, Daniel. Yeah, my
Tanya:pleasure. Thank you. Take care, you guys. Thank you. Bye.
Andriy:See ya.
