Nick Disabato – Ecommerce Email Mastery

Ecommerce Email Mastery: Increase your profits with evidence-driven email.

Is your store not getting 20%+ more revenue out of its email?

Emails bring back your old customers. Emails salvage lost transactions. Emails promote your credibility. Emails strengthen your moat against competitors.

Emails are the primary touchpoint with your most engaged customers and the primary way you get less-involved customers to resume a relationship with you.

We all know email is powerful.

But there’s a catch, of course: email is a time-consuming pain to create. Very few stores have an email department. Everyone wears too many hats. Moreover, it’s unclear whether the emails you do create will generate a meaningful ROI for your store.

This is doubly problematic for store owners in particular, where time is always at a premium. There are dozens of other things to worry about at any point.

Why bother with email when your hair is literally on fire, and your warehouse looks like this?

You can’t afford to waste time on email.

But you do need to spend time on email.

As a result, you need to make sure that the time you spend on email yields maximal value for your store – and does so sustainably and automatically.

“35% of your revenue should come from broadcasted & automated emails.”

– Ecommerce expert Ezra Firestone

Doing email right boosts CLTV

As display ads get increasingly expensive and competitive, it becomes more and more imperative for you to recapture the customers you previously sold to.

The ROI of email isn’t decreasing anytime soon – but the ROI of advertising is. According to Mary Meeker’s influential Internet Trends Report, CLTV is currently the most important metric in a store’s ad spend, and the cost of ads is rising faster than its reach.

In short, you need to be strategic & intentional about how you communicate with your customers. That’s why our mini-course, Ecommerce Email Mastery, will teach you all the things you need to do when building evergreen, well-optimized emails that keep people coming back again & again. And then you’ll finally be able to sleep easy when it comes to your store’s email.

Done right, email makes money. According to Shopify consultancy Ethercycle, “our clients typically see additional 10-20% revenue growth from email automation.” Draft has seen similar numbers.

If you want 20% more revenue for comparatively minimal work, Ecommerce Email Mastery is the best investment you can make right now.

“Your store will never reach its full potential without email. Email is hard. Ecommerce Email Mastery makes it simple.”

– Dylan Kelley, Wavebreak

Make email work for you

So, what are the best ways for store owners like you to make email work? Through a 3-step process:

1. Strategize. Email doesn’t work when you chain a set of defensive tactics together, or rip off whatever your competitors are working. It works best when you understand the high-level strategies that the world’s best stores are putting into play.
2. Delegate. Smart business owners know that they can’t do absolutely everything, and really smart business owners operate with an investment mindset that recognizes the ROI of various initiatives. Stores focus heavily on email because it’s almost always a high-net-ROI venture. Dedicated email copywriters and productized email services can do the work for you – with outsize value for your store.
3. Optimize. Given infinite store owners at infinite typewriters, one of you is going to write an email that simply fails to meet your store’s needs. That’s where optimization comes in. How do you improve your emails so they perform maximally for you and your customers?

All of that sounds great, of course, but it operates at too high of a level to really act on. What specific tactics should your store execute when it comes to email? And how do you find out what’s most likely to work?

Where stores use email

Right now, there are 4 places where you gather a new email address:

1. Placed orders. This is the most obvious one. An online store has customers. Those customers should be subscribed to your store’s mailing list by default when they place an order.
2. Recovering cart abandonments. If a prospective customer gets as far as entering their email address, but fails to check out, you should email them shortly after, to encourage them to complete their order.
3. Out-of-stock notifications. If a given variant of a product is out of stock, and the restock window is more than a few weeks, a store should provide the opportunity to sign up for a notification for when something is restocked.
4. Carrot enticements. You know the kind: “Sign up for our list and get a 15% discount on your first order.” These usually appear as header banners or popovers for first-time or logged-out customers.

How this started

Draft has seen numerous deep-dive usability studies of online stores. Baymard Institute publishes some of the best. These sorts of studies are important because they help you understand what kind of marketing plays are in vogue – and how many stores are doing the wrong thing.

We were curious if any similar ones existed specifically for email. Klaviyo has a few – here’s a good example. In spite of excellent studies like these, we haven’t yet found any wide study of lifecycle emails across many stores.

Until now.

What you’ll get

We’re placing real orders at real stores. We’re abandoning carts in incognito tabs to see what stores do to salvage the transaction. We’re signing up for out-of-stock notifications, and taking note of how each one behaves & communicates.

We want you to get maximum value from the time you spend launching new emails. With Ecommerce Email Mastery, you’ll end up with the following:

• 30 deep dives into a store’s lifecycle emails for cart abandonments, placed orders, and in-stock notifications, comprising over ten hours of video.
• A tactical summary, covering the best practices that we tend to see in email – as well as what percentage of our analyzed stores got it right or wrong in practice.
• A strategic guide for exactly what to do with email in your store: how to start, how to adopt the right voice & tone, how to delegate, and what to optimize and when.
• A signup code for 10% off any plan on Klaviyo, if you don’t already have an email provider, or are considering switching to one that provides the sort of full-blown automation that your store needs.

Final list of stores

Our stores are all B2C, and run the gamut across verticals and AOV:

• Allbirds
• Away Travel
• Beardbrand
• B&H Photo & Video
• Charlotte’s Web
• Chubbies
• Colourpop
• Cotopaxi
• Design Within Reach
• Glossier
• Harry’s
• Jeni’s Ice Cream
• JetPens
• Kaufmann Mercantile
• Kettle & Fire

• Kiehl’s
• Marine Layer
• Nice Laundry
• Outdoor Voices
• Outlier
• Quip
• Rothy’s
• Snow Peak
• Sportique
• Tanner Goods
• Tattly
• Taylor Stitch
• Tortuga Backpacks
• The White Company
• Yeti