Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Why Your Click-Through Rate Sucks and How to Fix It
7 - In this episode, Vira and Andriy dive deep into what really affects click-through rates—why yours might be underperforming, and most importantly, how to fix it.
Armed with real-life case studies, they introduce their easy-to-remember CLICK acronym for boosting your email click rates: Clarity of Message, List Segmentation, Incentive to Click, Creative Design, and Keep Testing.
Watch the full episode and explore all mentioned resources here!
You’ll Learn About…
- Why your current click-through rate might be underperforming
- Real-life case studies and what they reveal about successful (and unsuccessful) email strategies
- The dangers of using too many CTAs
- When plain text emails can actually outperform designed ones
- How segmenting your list can drive results
- Must-try tools to level up your email marketing experiments
- Why ongoing testing is essential to staying effective
Well, the podcast about emails. We're so happy to have you here. Guys, guys, it's a long overdue. Ever since we started recording this podcast once a month, I started missing you and I started like missing doing this more often. But anyways, we're here, we're here to deliver quality content to you. Andriy, say hi. What's new and exciting with you? Hey, you know,
Andriy:you said like of course it's a podcast about emails and not about Einstein.
Vira:Well, I, I still can't pronounce it. We've been doing this podcast for like three years.
Andriy:Me either. I. I don't know what the right pronunciat. I think it
Vira:depends where you are in the world. I think it's Einstein. If we're like trying to be German, but if you're listening to us from Germany, let us know how would you pronounce it? But anyways,
Andriy:I cannot pronounce Einstein. I cannot pronounce Egypt. It's hard. I don't know
Vira:why. But you just did, you just did, Andriy, congrats.
Andriy:I just did. But thank you. But some different scenarios, it's hard, hard to pronounce.
Vira:For me the most difficult one is like sheep and ship and all of this like e kind of situation in English because like for us as English second language people, sometimes I don't hear the difference. My friend's kids are making fun of me when I told them that I recently went to Stockholm and we went by sheep and they were like, you went by sheep? Not by sheep, you know, but I mean you guys, you don't have that struggle if you're in first, if it's your first language. But we do. But anyways, even with this broken English, we can still deliver a ton of value today. Andriy, introduce the topic. It's a big one.
Andriy:Yeah. Today is all things about click rate. We want to talk the entire podcast, we want to dedicate talking about how you can improve the click rate because open race, it's vanity metric. But click rate, this is what the most important metric for email marketing right now. This is inbox providers, this is they paying attention to Mostly to the click rate. And that's why we decided it was Vira to record this podcast and share our knowledge about how to optimize it, how to improve it. Yep,
Vira:yep, exactly. And we came up with this clever acronym. If it's clever or not, you decide. But I'm obsessed with it. Like, me and ChatGPT worked really hard on it. So. So remember the acronym. Click C L I C K. Click. C is for clarity of message. L is for list segmentation, I is for incentive to click. C is for creative design, and K is for keep testing. What do you think of this acronym, Andriy?
Andriy:I love all of them, but letter L make me laugh because it's like, oh, you need to add some adjectives. No, list, list. I had
Vira:to. I had to add something that starts with L. And we absolutely had to talk about the segmentation. But anyways, let's start. Andriy. The first one, I call it the clarity of the message. But you guys can call it whatever you want as long as you follow this principle. It's like, works for like 99% of the time. Core principle. At least for me when I'm working with email. One email should have like one main message and one cta. You have like, you can have like smaller, like, little topics, but it always has to have like one big focus. Why are you sending this email, what this email is going to be about? So for me, it's like almost like a rule of thumb. One email, one message, one cta. Andriy, do you agree or disagree with this one? So I would like
Andriy:to divide it in like, kind of in three categories, like the clarity of message or how many clicks or sorry, call to action to do in the, in the message. So first, as you said, do one call to action. Make it very clear, like, hey, almost click here. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the staples button. Like in staples, it's a like big, like office.
Vira:Oh, like the no button. The no button. The no button or whatever. No, never mind. Because we have this in Canada. Yeah, it looks like,
Andriy:it looks like the no button, but it's like staples, like creating button to, I don't know, to order. Anyway, so it's extremely clear. You open the email and like I said, click here and you know where to click. So this is kind of one bucket, second bucket, another end of the extreme where you're receiving some kind of email from apparel brand and they have, let's say a female apparel brand and they have a lot of different, like, images, a lot of call to actions. Because like, you know, for you to check like dresses, like shirts, like some other stuff and there's a bunch of call to action. And the third and by the way, the first one and second one, I, I believe they work. I believe they one of the best. The third one, I think this is the biggest mistake and I would recommend not to do it where you're kind of between we including multiple actions. But also it's not kind of clear what we are doing here. I know, I know what you
Vira:mean. Yeah, yeah. In the first
Andriy:email it's kind of lace, very clear one thing. In the second email is kind of catalog for you to scroll to browse to see all the options and what interests you. You click. The third one is like in between. And I think that's what, what doesn't work. Right.
Vira:And I actually have an example for you guys who are watching us on YouTube or who are listening to us on podcasts. We are reviewing this email that is called, it's from the brand called Jenny's. Super fun times. First of all, the email looks super fun. There's a lot that is happening on this email. But under the body text they have this like the weight is over copy. Apparently they are launching the new flavor of the product. But they have like three different, different looking CTA buttons. Order for nationwide shipping, find a scoop shop, get prints on demand. Like a lot is happening. Then you're scrolling down, they have an additional CTA shop the collection. Then they have the additional CTA shop all sizes. And all this CTAs they look kind of messy. And I think what happens here, it's almost like counterintuitive. You would think that if you give more options to people to click on, they would pick the one they like the most and they click on it and they go to the website. In reality it's almost like the other way around. It's like Costco that has like two products and you're ending up buying like one of two mustards or like Walmart that has like 10 variations of mustard or like 15 and you end up not getting anything. So the simpler the better. In this case case for me, like the goal of this specific email is like very hard to understand. So like for me this setup doesn't work. But maybe it's just me. I would almost like, I would almost ab test it and or like why waste a B test, right?
Andriy:No, it's the structure of this email is like they trying to put so many different ideas here and it's again it's all about clarity. Because I was focusing on a call to actions about clarity. What is this email all about? They putting so many different ideas. Maybe you have multiple call to actions like in my example of catalog, but it's one idea and it's like clear. Okay, so I'm browsing the images. There's no text. I'm browsing the like how you said lookbooks like, you know, like I'm browsing like how it looks and I'm clicking. So this is one idea.
Vira:Going back to your catalog comment. I'm looking at this email by Peptide Science that was shared by our colleagues on the. In the Slack channel that is called tlc. So the idea is very simple. They kind of provide like the list of products that they, that they sell. And it's kind of like that has that catalogy feeling. But all of their products look identical. The only difference is like. I disagree,
Andriy:Vira. I know, I don't know.
Vira:They look identical.
Andriy:No. Okay, tell me,
Vira:tell me more. Because if I
Andriy:open, I don't know, like for us it looks identical. We work with this kind of brand. Remember like back in the days, maybe like six, seven years ago, like Bioscience or something. Right,
Vira:right, right. I remember exactly who you're talking about. Yeah, it's very sciency. Maybe for this group of people it would work. For me it doesn't 100%. It's
Andriy:like, it's like for LA ladies or guys who loves clothing. Like, like browsing the catalog with, with images of the clothes. The same thing here for them. Like I, I receive. I'm that weirdo who received the emails from Home Depot or Lowe's and looking on the beams like bowls, like tools, stuff like that. And it's like I'm still. Maybe
Vira:it takes a special person to understand the vibe of this email. But for me they all. The only difference is like the name in Home Depot catalog. You like see this like different tools and they all look different. They have different functions here it's like literally just the. Maybe I would do something to the image, you know, to the image itself. But
Andriy:I think by now, by now is overkill. I don't think you do need buy now under each. We don't understand. Would you
Vira:do like buy, I don't know, buy. Fragment by AOD9604 no, no. In this case,
Andriy:in this case I would just remove the just like list and just, just list them and maybe do it. I mean maybe do it not four in the line, but maybe three in a line. So it's just Easier to read. It would be cleaner.
Vira:Agree. I'm still not a fan of this email if you ask me. But nothing personal. Peptop science. But like contact me. I can hook you up with an amazing email email marketing agency that can like figure this out for you. But anyways the copy does mean does matter. Actually the copy of the CTA button and I was very skeptical when we started running this test for one of our clients who are in the hair transplant business. But we've done numerous tests where we were testing different copy of the CTA messaging like free consultation versus something more personal like request my info. And for this client the click through rates are a constant struggle because they're in their emails are so like informational to the point that sometimes the customer doesn't even have the reason to go to the website because that's not the goal of the email. Right. But we still want to have like a good durability. So we started experimenting with like free consultation vs request my info or like get a consultation now vs learn more about my hair. And in one of this recent test we've done we witnessed like 40 or 119% click rate lift for the message with request my info on. So unlike that generic one free consultation request my info performed better. And we've done like a lot of tests like this and it did work for this client. So my point here is that even little things like CTA messaging or what you put on that little button, they do matter. And that was like a very surprising for me to learn. Cool. Oh actually since we started talking about this client, one little thing that we also tried to like in order to like improve their click through rates. Teeny tiny change that we did but you wouldn't believe the results that we get with 100% probability. We found out that adding in text links in addition to the CTAs actually help with click through rates. We were able to improve our Click rates from 1 point from 0.09. Again it's a very educational email to like almost 1.5. So the click rate lift percentage was something like over 1000% and with 100% probability. So it just like became our standard practice for this specific client because they're so like education heavy. Adding the in text links, not just the CTAs, the CTA buttons which was super interesting to learn. Nice, nice. Do you want to present the second one?
Andriy:You're, you're like it's, it's. I love how you kind of share your projects like a little bit like, like showing how great you are, how great strategists you are. You see, that's like the
Vira:only projects I have access to. It's not like I'm trying to brag, but it's like the only projects I had access to in such a like last minute set. Because I was literally planning this podcast before we went on this episode. So Andriy, present the number two, your favorite one.
Andriy:I'm joking. You should brag about it. You are amazing. I should, right? I
Vira:should. Yes. Thank you so much. Andriy. Let's go to the next one because you're making me blush.
Andriy:Yes. Segmentation or segmentation. It's very important. I always like to bring an example of a brand. Back in the days it was RSVLTS Brand, they are selling branded, sorry, licensed T shirts shirts. So basically they have like Warner Brothers license. They have like Walt Disney, Pixar and so forth. So they sell shirts with like Mickey Mouse and Bluey and all the Office series and so forth. And we did multiple split tests for segmentation. So first series of emails we were sending generic campaign to the entire list or entire engaged list. And that moment it was like I believe 100,000 subscribers or so forth. But we exclude everybody who either checked that category of that product. Let's say they interested in specific series. Let's say the Office or. Yeah, or let's say I don't know, Mickey Mouse. We segment those people and we for segmentation we use. They viewed the product, they viewed the collection. They at least checked out at once. And we. We put or not and. But. Or condition. So. And it was 10000 subscribers. And when we constantly were sending to those people, we realized that that list was 10 times smaller because 10,000 versus $100,000 subscribers. 100,000 subscribers. But it produce I believe 4x of the revenue. Yeah, which is. Yeah, that's it. I believe the 100,000 brought was bringing around like 10,000 and then 10,000 was bringing around like $40,000.
Vira:That's crazy. It amazes me every time, every time we do that and we do that with like a lot of our clients. The similar strategies that we are testing. Actually there is this cool strategy that Eric, our strategist shout out to Eric just shared with me. So you know how you mentioned like most brands are just like blasting either the entire list or like 30 days engaged segment or something and they base their segmentation on how people engage with emails. Well, Eric, such a bright guy, love working with him. Instead of like chasing those like engaged people, he actually narrowed the sand to the actual past buyers. So he had the campaign for the Engagers or whatever. But also he created the campaign exclusively for people who have purchased in the past, regardless of their recent opens, even if they're unengaged. But you want to like pitch this like product launch of this like new product to them. They were included in them in the send and what he did to those people, to that like previous purchasers segment, he sent very plain text plaintext email, like a simple one. And then to the Engage 30 days audience he said the usual HTML version and I was like so shocked. He shared the screenshot with me. This like it doesn't even sound real. Those like engaged customers list which was like over 100,000 subscribers. It only generated $500. Then
Andriy:by the way, we are sharing this like we do screen share if you want to watch it on YouTube VRs, like screen sharing this case study and going over it. So that
Vira:was like crazy to me to think because the beautifully designed HTML version that was sent to engaged customers generated $500. Now guess how much money generated a teeny tiny 25,000 recipients campaign?
Andriy:60,000. How did
Vira:you know, Andriy? But like isn't it crazy? I just, just love this approach because sometimes we do, these people do get overlooked because we are like so used to blasting the Engage segment and thinking of our list in terms of whether or not someone is opening and clicking your emails almost to the point that we are losing the view of these people who actually might be interested in repurchasing or purchasing. So that was a great little case study. Shout out to
Andriy:Eric and the team right now. I just want to clarify something. The second second email we send to you, our typical engaged, whatever the engaged means. But the first one we send to people who purchase at least once in their lifetime, right? To people who
Vira:purchase at least once in their life lifetime. Also I think he included like a ton of different like VIPs so people who have like average order value that is like two times the average order value. So I think primarily focusing on VIPs but also previous buyers, like he was focusing on people regardless of their engagement with an email.
Andriy:So yeah, if we focus like again, depends what the goal of this campaign is. If we focusing on the open rate, I would say that, I mean this test failed because Engage, it shows that it has higher open rate by what? Like, like what, 50? Almost by 20%. Right? But open rate, you know, it's such a weird metric nowadays, but click through. Rate, it's so inflated.
Vira:But yeah, the change in the click through rate from like 0.07 to like over 2% and like placed order. It's
Andriy:unbelievable. Pretty
Vira:impressive. And actually since we started talking about like all of this like engagement strategy and stuff like that, recently I've started for like a lot of my clients using this tool called Orita. We briefly talked about them on our previous podcast. But basically Orita is this tool that kind of like we actually. Sorry for
Andriy:interrupting you. We just. I mean I'm not sure when we will be releasing this podcast episode, but on our YouTube channel we have Orita demo I recorded with a co-founder DB and we went through the Orita demoing the tool and how it works. Oh, that's cool.
Vira:That's cool. Did you guys demo the engagement levels as well? The, the, the engagement like segments, the levels of engagement? Because that's like one of the, that's just like one of the tools that they have and I love it. And basically what, what Orita does, I'm not sure if you're Andriy, are familiar if you worked with them, but what they do, they kind of like collect information about your customer and their engagement. Not just like with your email, but it's more like a holistic approach. They analyze how they engage with your brand as a whole and then based on that information, they create different like levels of engagement that are including not just your email engagement, but the website loyalty program, stuff like that. And we've seen big success with it. And they have this like five engagement levels. The highly engaged segment. These are your like, like fans, people who are like loving you, opening your emails, going to your website. I don't know, they have probably your name tattooed on their butts. I don't know. They love you. And these are the guys who want to receive all of your emails. So as a
Andriy:standard practice hair restoration tattoo.
Vira:Oh gosh, it sounds disgusting. But anyways, these are the guys who pretty much like, unless it's a part of the strategy, we do tend to send all of our emails to them unless they're like there's some other logic that they have to be excluded. Moderately engaged. They like like us, they engage with us emails. But we do include them in like bigger promotions or like product launches, stuff like that. Slightly engaged. So these are the people who are like curious about what you're doing, but they are not like committed committed to you. So it's like good having some kind of like educational sequences and including them in like the biggest, the biggest promotions. And then rarely engaged, not engaged. They are like on and off. So we don't recommend messaging them often. It's more like a minimal engagement but there is a potential. So you still want to talk to those like rarely engaged sometimes and not engage. These are just like people who are ghosting you. So we are basically using this structure. It doesn't mean that we don't use the other segments. No, we do use other segments a lot. It's just Orita has been super, super helpful to like me and my clients in understanding like how engaged their subscribers are as a whole. Not just with email, but like in general with a brand. It was like super cool. So they use a lot
Andriy:of data points. So they use data points from your help desk, from your website, analytics from your loyalty program, from sms, from like all the data points. And this is how they define engagement, like different engagement level. Okay.
Vira:So as I said, Orita is amazing and we do use them quite a lot. But it doesn't mean that we don't use any other segments because that's, I mean that's what we're hired for. Right? And we have this interesting case study. We have this client who kind of has like two big groups of groups of products on their website. They sell vapes like the smoking devices and they also sell edibles like gummies. And what was interesting to us, we wanted to find out whether or not this audience's like cross, whether or not it makes sense to like upsell this products to like different groups. So we've started including this like different groups of customers enter our campaign. So on top of like Orita segments and everything, we started including segments like person has purchased devices at least once over all time and has purchased gamis zero time and vice versa. And we had like gazillion of this like little different variations of the customers which to our surprise we found out and we've done extensive like research, like not just one campaign. I'm just sharing this screenshot with you guys. But turned out that these two audiences, they don't cross almost never. So for example, when we've like included this segment of people who have purchased devices at least once over all time and has purchased gummies zero times, we saw that while they're like engaging clicking, the placed order rates are like zero. And we also did like a similar thing with accessories. So people who are purchasing gummies, they don't buy like accessories, they don't buy like different organizers and stuff like that. And we like presented it to the client and he kind of like knew that, but it almost made them think to divide it into like two different brands, we will still be or like mini brand under the big brand. Because the more we learn about the audience, the more we understand that yeah, these are the two, two different people and they build, they barely cross each other. But that's like the segments for you, right? And I really do like that like a few years ago. Sorry, go ahead Andriy. No,
Andriy:no, but I love how insightful this information is. It's like yeah, we do email marketing but how insightful is this for the brand to see such a dramatic difference? And I bet the brand probably spending money on ads, a lot of money on ads and they try to catch all those types of two types of clients. But now they understand and they can evaluate oh, what is ROI on like smoking people or vaping people versus like gummy chewing people.
Vira:And yeah, and I mean we just like learned this. Gummy chewing people. Yeah, we, we just learned this information like literally last week we completed this test. So what it made us at this point all we did, we just like separated them into two different like at least welcome journeys. That's what we are working on right now. Because we used to have like one size fit all kind of welcome sequence. We just got this client so we're like revamping their strategy but now it's going to be like different journeys for different products which kind of like we should do it anyways. It's just like made us understand just like how much different these people are. So yeah, segments for the win. Okay. Incentive to click. Unless you have something to add to the segmentation. Andriy,
Andriy:I just want to say that I'm currently working consulting one company. Again there's no partnership we have. I just want to mention them, they pretty new on the market called Nexie AI but it's kind of esperant. But their goal, what they're building and that's why they're talking with us to see how to do it. So basically instead of sending let's say 5 campaigns per month or 10 campaigns per month, they will do 5, 10 emails campaigns per day to different segments. You kind of help them help their tool to define those segments. But those five or 10 emails per day, smaller chunks of people will receive. Receive. You know, like maybe instead of thousand people, only 50 will receive today, another 50 tomorrow. That's cool. And all those 10 or five emails are totally different. They are personalized for, for that specific group and segment with different images and with different copy. And of course humans cannot produce thousand of campaigns for one brand in the months. I mean physically it's possible but it would be extremely expensive. That's why they developing the like AI and right now they have a kind of working in beta working product and they are testing how it will work. So will it have beautiful emails like we design like Flowium design team design? Hell no. But, but for those people who doesn't let's say that science brand that you just showed us, I think for them it would be perfect.
Vira:It's more about the content and not the. The way it looks. It's just like what that email is about. No, the content sounds super fun.
Andriy:You have the opening the image and it's like rain on the city, like a rainy city and say hey Vira, living in rainy London on the first floor in your apartment, recording cards, get the gummies. You know, stuff like that. No, the concept is super
Vira:cool and we do have this client who we send like 6 variation of the email because. Because of the like the legal requirements and we send to like different states, different variations of the email. So I would love to have something like this Andriy. So sign, sign me up once, once they want more users. But anyways, let's go to the next part of our acronym. I Incentive to click. I just needed something for I. Okay you guys, we could, we could even like skip this part or combine it with something else. But then I started thinking like incentive. Having like a clear incentive and strong CTA that tells people what to do and what they will receive in exchange is actually pretty important. I found a few really cool examples here and. And when I think of the value that you're bringing to the customers or incentive to click, there is some obvious ones like some practical incentives like discount codes and promotions and learning information. There's value driven incentives when you're educating your customers. But there's also emotional curiosity incentives. Andriy, let's review them. I have one really cool example I'm excited to share with you guys. But what do you think of this like teaser kind of emails like this.
Andriy:So I'm a big fan of teaser emails. I believe they tend to have higher click rate and I even recorded the video on YouTube what two years ago called the teaser email design and showing like bunch of different teaser like how company did teasers. There's right and wrong way to do it, the right way to do it. Like you need kind of to show people what what you're talking about. But it's still hard to understand is it like fully true or not so that they are kind of incentivized to click And I mean the purpose of this Eye to get the incentive, you know. So I'm a big fan of those emotional emails.
Vira:No, I mean for me they're huge. I always click because like that's the curiosity part of me. I really love this email from. I think it was Manchester United. The team Manchester United, they have their merch store and I found it in love emails or what was the name of that. Yeah, emaillove.com and we had actually a founder of emaillove.com Andrew King I think is his last name on podcast. And they just like recently on that website they posted this amazing example from Manchester United store where they customize the T shirt. Manchester United T shirt that they sell with your last name. I think it's super cool. Yes. And they actually. I googled it. They used the personalized for this like personalized jersey reveal. They use the Scene.io. So it's very similar to. Gosh, what was the name? We had Maverick that were personalizing some videos, but it was a bit of a different. There was this also other tool that was personalizing some hero images. But basically the copy of that email is your name, your number, your old Trafford moment. I think Trafford is the stadium. This is so
Andriy:cool. I would probably click so many times on it.
Vira:If you guys are like watching it right now. It's not just that they like created this hero image. They actually also have this entire. It's linked to like your personalized page and we will show it in the video and when you click on it, there is this entire video that I'm showing right now. This video of like your short hanging over the stadium with your name and your number. I think it's amazing. It's pretty cool. And yeah, and that's just like a. It's a very British thing to do. But I think it's super cool. I don't necessarily know the mechanic behind it. I'm pretty sure it should be a flow, not the campaign for something like this to work. But I don't know, maybe there's something that I don't. I don't understand yet.
Andriy:We have our partner get Maverick. They do something similar. Not to this extent. They kind of the founders, they record the videos and founders, when you click on it, they tell it like, hi, Andriy. Hi Vira. And kind of talking to you. Like they personalize their voice. But this one, it's much cooler in terms of, you know, like if you're a big fan of that company and they have your name there. It's. I, I think it's very powerful. You don't even have to
Vira:be a big fan. Like we have this client like that is doing the hair restoration services and they just introduced this tool, the AI tool that helps you picture. How would you look with hair, Andriy? I have hair. I have full hair of hair, Full head of hair. But I still use that tool because it's so fun and so like you're just like get curious about these things. Yeah, they just introduced it and they have like limited number of credits. So I won't tell you guys the name of the tool yet, but I looked really good with hair if you ask me. Do you have a
Andriy:picture? Can we include it in the podcast? We can't because
Vira:they have limited amount of credits. And we will use them for good use. We'll put them to good reason. So you used it
Andriy:already? No, because I was testing
Vira:it because I'm a strategist on that project, so I had to know how it works. But
Andriy:didn't you save that picture? Oh,
Vira:no, no. It's just like shows you the like. Yeah, but it was super cool and like every time something like this comes to my inbox, like I use it every freaking time. Okay, cool. So yeah, there are like different ways to kind of make people want to click.
Andriy:One more example that like I don't have it to show. But remember that Mr. Beast email where you have to click thousand times to win something on the email. So basically any amp emails and one of our partners, Zaymo, we testing a bunch of different emails with them. But any amp email have typically have higher click rates.
Vira:Yes, yes. Anything that is like gamified or has that like interactive aspect to it. Let's go to the next Andriy. Let's go to the next kind of point. And we kind of covered it. C is creative design. So we in a way covered it in our other topics. But there are some just like good rules to follow. Like the core idea here is your email should be scannable in five seconds and clickable in one. That's something that I learned from our designers and I don't even think people spend five seconds on scanning the email to be be to be fair, I think it's less. I think it's like two to three seconds. But it should be super scannable and you should be able to find that like CTA right away. While it should also like look beautiful. Although it's a controversial topic, we can talk about it, but it should be scannable and clickable. Do you agree, Andriy?
Andriy:100%. And I received a bunch of marketing emails. I mean like because I subscribe, subscribe to a bunch of different brands and sometimes I have less than 1 second email to catch my attention again. I'm professional, I'm email marketer. So it's hard, harder to impress me versus maybe you're like just regular consumer. But still I only check that about default, you know, like I, I click archive, archive, archive all the email and where like where my attention stops, I'm like oh, what stopped my attention. Yeah. And in most cases, in most cases, sorry, in all cases it's a creative, some something creative. Really. I hate those emails where they have like menu style because it's like automatic. Waste
Vira:of your time. Right? But yeah, I kind of hear you Andriy, but I like agree to disagree because beautiful designs are important. How Simpson said the education is important but money are importanter or whatever. But, but anyways we've done this test. You guys, you're gonna have to look at a lot of hair transplant emails today. Sorry, just like guess what client I was working on today the most. But anyways about the language, like beautiful emails for this client. The before and afters are always huge for us because it's like literally what they sell. They sell the lifestyle, they sell the after and how you will look. But we are constantly battling this click rates kind of like challenge. And one test that we've done, and we've done it multiple times, like not hundreds of times but like a lot of times we've done it where we were testing our beautifully designed HTML emails or like visual emails that our designer Rafael spends like hours probably creating. They're super nice. But also we've sent like a plain text emails and guess What? With like 100% win probability and click through rate or click rate lift of 325% the plain text ones are winning. And we had the winning click rate was the change was from like 2.7% to 11.54%. Can you imagine this change? Yeah,
Andriy:but I hear you and I agree for this particular brand. But let's imagine, let's go back to that catalog style email for like brand apparel, female apparel brand which has like thousands of SKUs. If you send text based emails like they all think spam and even click like either unsubscribe or spam. So it's based on, on the brand.
Vira:Totally. It's not like one size fits all, but do test the A B test like when I reach out to my like colleagues to ask like for this podcast, like hey, what do you guys do to like improve the click threads Everyone was like segmentation and plain text emails. This is like a CTR improvement bible. The standard. If it works for your brand, just like you said Andriy, it wouldn't work for some like.
Andriy:But I think it's designers like breaking. Breaking the pattern. You know like maybe Tony Robbins like famous saying about like breaking the pattern. You know when you send like 10 branded emails, like send one, let's say tax based emails. The great example, sign up for Magic Spoon cereal brand. Yeah. So they do all the time. I think they have some kind of formula. Just sign it up and you'll see like for every maybe five to ten emails they have a tax bas email.
Vira:Yeah. Maybe it's a pattern interrupt thingy. I, I think you're right. And it's not like we're giving up all of the this like HTML or like this visual emails but it does really work really well sometimes. Do you follow that? Wipe.
Andriy:Not wiper. Sorry. The, the glass brand.
Vira:The glass brand.
Andriy:I forgot where they like cursing like, like having. It's like the, the. The weirdest design that. The probably the worst design.
Vira:I think you, I think you shared it in like a random channel or in some kind of like a good email channel or something because I think I remember it but I'm not sure.
Andriy:So they working hard to make their emails ugly.
Vira:Love that for them. Honestly
Andriy:it stops me and I'm checking out and also the either stretch New York jeans or stretching jeans, something like that. It's New York brand. It's also their emails are not beautiful. They use a lot of memes. It also stops me maybe because I'm receiving so many beautiful emails and again it's breaking the pattern.
Vira:Yeah. First world problems. I'm like too tired of beautiful designs. Give me something different. But yeah, I hear you. Creative design doesn't have to
Andriy:be beautiful design. Like how can you disrupt. Disrupt. How can you make. Break the pattern as well? Right?
Vira:Yeah. And it doesn't even have to be big things. Sometimes it's like little things like testing the CTA placement. I know it's, it's boring and we talked about it, but that for some of our clients we tested like different CTA placements and like copy for the CTA and static versus animated and stuff like that. Or another popular test that we were doing with a lot of our clients is like testing product image versus lifestyle image. And for certain brands showcasing the product in all of its glory. It does work. It's like so random. I would almost think it's like counterintuitive. But it does work. So you never know what would work for your brand. And just like you said, you said Andriy, you're right, it doesn't have to be like beautiful, it just has to work for your brand. Yeah. Okay, cool. What's the last K Andriy? What's the last part of this formula?
Andriy:It's. Now you're talking. It's like the thing we do all the time. All the time.
Vira:Yep. We kind of discussed it through this entire presentation. But just like don't stop, don't stop testing. Don't stop believing. Not just design stuff, like different aspects of your emails. Recently we've done this test which is kind of like basic test but we were testing what would happen if we just send email not on Thursday but on Saturday for this specific group of customers. And we've sent send identical email to the same segments same time like 7pm because it's their like smart send time or whatever. And then Saturday outperformed and we did it again and again and again and with 99 probability the Saturday emails are winning. So guess when we're sending majority of our emails now on Thursday. No, I'm joking. On Saturday you guys. So, so it does, I mean this like little twin weeks just by changing the time we were able to improve click through rates from like 0.7% to like 1.53%. And this is one of those clients that are like struggling with click through rates. I'm just like sharing the examples of people who are, we're like working hard on like improving these numbers and it does work. Yeah,
Andriy:you know what, like how do you call the person who see the future or see. Yeah,
Vira:Oracle. Oracle. No, none of the future.
Andriy:Who can read things. So for everybody who's listening like here's small exercise and I can tell I can give you your metrics right now. So if you go to your statistics for the last, let's say 30 days or 90 days and you check click rate for your flows and compare it to your click rates in campaigns, campaigns would be 5 maybe to 10 times smaller.
Vira:Yep. Your click rates
Andriy:would be terrible. However, what do you do on every every week you are sending campaigns and you set it and forget it your flows so you spend more time, more resources, more money, more of your team's time, more creative brain for campaigns and you just blasting people and they are less engaged. So your homework to continue testing because you need to focus on campaigns on your click rate. You need to test everything that we just spoke about and what we are just finished with about testing not only Creatives, but also when are you sending. Like all of these
Vira:little aspects and the reason and kind of like with our projects we do have obviously the flows, a B test, split test, but for campaigns. What I love about like testing the campaigns, it gives you like quick results with flows. Sometimes you have to wait for like a month, you know, to gather the information, enough information for it to be statistically significant. So what we started doing, we're just like test the theory on our campaigns and then like replicate it into the flows. It's been working really well. But actually there are tools that can help you make this like entire testing process automated. Andriy, maybe like you introduced this one because I think you know more about it than Maverick Ab testing tool for subject lines. Oh yeah. So tell us more about it. Yeah, so we,
Andriy:we use them for some of our brands and we would love to use for more of our clients. Basically you are now this is a true set it and forget it. So instead of writing subject lines and split testing, you are writing your raw version of the subject line and you inserting the Get Maverick code inside of subject line and preview test. And now each email you send, the systems Klaviyo sends it pulls different variation from Get Maverick and it analyze which one is performing better, which one worse and the one which performing not so well, they are dropping and split testing with another one. And sometimes we log into our clients accounts and it's like version 27 and you're like whoa, it would take me forever probably to test 27 subject line in the welcome flow on the third email or fifth email in abandonment card, you know. Right, right.
Vira:No, it's such a cool tool because it's like a lot of manual and repetitive work when you start doing it it on your own. So yeah, Maverick, they're cool. I wanna, I wanna play more with them.
Andriy:So yeah, I saw that you become like very active or on LinkedIn and if you're not following Vira yet, I strongly, strongly recommend for you to find her on LinkedIn and follow she share a lot of insightful information about email marketing. Thank you Andriy. Thank you for
Vira:promoting my LinkedIn. And I actually want to write a post because I was like only posting this like professional information but I started noticing that people are more like sharing their personal life and stuff. And I want to share the five sales lessons that I learned from visiting Morocco from their like carpet sellers because there are some things that we can start doing more in our marketing as well because those guys are so skillful, helpful. So maybe I'll start doing more of those posts as well. Who knows?
Andriy:Nice. Nice. So follow here on LinkedIn, please. Yeah,
Vira:Vira Sadlak. Like the only Vira Sadlak in the world. Easy for you to find. Thank you so much. That was fun, Andriy. Thank you guys. I hope you learned something new. And please comment with your ideas. What worked for you? What didn't work? Please share your knowledge. We're all in this together.
Andriy:Okay, see you next month. Thank you.
