← DTC Podcast
DTC Podcast
Ep 472: What Email and Retention Strategies to Focus on in 2025 with Pilothouse's Jordan Gordon
00:27:33
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
Jordan Gordon
We're going to talk about reaching really far back in your audience, finding ways to do it safely and pushing people into conversion funnel support into abandonment. But abandonment on steroids?
- [00:11]
Eric Dick
How does one put their abandonment flow on steroids?
- [00:15]
Jordan Gordon
Businesses have customers. Not buyers, customers. They're a person and you build a relationship with them over time. What I see a lot of out there is people approach their whole business as if it's all about acquiring customers. There is a life cycle that you want to drive people down, and the first step towards driving that people down is.
- [00:43]
Unknown
If you haven't yet used Motion, the creative analytics platform used by top e, Comm and DTC brands like Fiore, True Classic, the Farmer's Dog, hexclad, and hundreds more to ship winning ads. Here's why you should try it out. Everyone knows that the right creative is the number one lever for success with paid ads. The that's how you make money. But consistently shipping new winning creative you're gonna need your media buyers and your creative teams on the same page Right now you're probably spending hours tiring away going back and forth between Google sheets and your ad platforms and tools, and then spending even more time plugging it all into different decks for the rest of your team. In a perfect world, you could have an elegant way to combine visual assets and performance data so media buyers can save time and creative teams can get the details they need to make great ads all in one place. And that's where Motion comes in. In you can build powerful visual reports using data from your ad accounts. You can monitor your performance metrics and see your visual assets in the same platform. No need to go back and forth across multiple apps. You'll finally have media buyers and creative teams working together to create and scale your next big winner. If you're ready to learn how the best DTC and E commerce brands use Motion to ship winning meta, TikTok and YouTube ads, book a demo today or start a free trial@motionapp.com DTC Even better, motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. Get 50% off your first month when you use the link motionapp.comdtc on signup.
- [02:13]
Eric Dick
It's all killer, no filler. It is 2025. We are living in the future and I'm here with Jordan Gordon, the host of the TWA Burp, the world's best email and retention marketing podcast, which you can find on anywhere you listen to podcasts, so make sure you go download that. But we're checking in with Jordan today In the world of email and ret you got to talk about today, Jordan?
- [02:36]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah, I mean, I thought I'd just continue the discussion about what we're doing for 2025 and the kind of adventure that people might be on if they follow the world's best email retention podcast through the year. But you know, before that, let me just wish the happiest of New Year's to, to the entire audience. I actually went and had my first kind of reel away from my laptop vacation in three years. It's basically that's when I started working at Pilot House. Um, it's been busy building the team, but we kind of finally got our team to where I was able to sneak away for a couple weeks. We went to the beach. So I, it was very refreshing for me and I hope everybody out there also had some time to unwind, get away from the machine and refresh.
- [03:17]
Eric Dick
I had three weeks. This is the first time I've, I've ever. Because I ended up getting sick for the last week, which kind of, which really sucked. But the first two weeks were fantastic. Three weeks away from, from work was, was an. A wild experiment.
- [03:30]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah, for sure. So on the pod, I'll look at. Let me just jump in some things that are coming up. We just this morning I spoke to someone at Black Crow and then yesterday spoke to someone at Glock Apps for coming on the world's best known retention podcast to discuss kind of the tech stack. So there's some things in motion to bring some, some guests on and maybe you'll send, maybe you guys will syndicate those episodes on, on dtc. I'm not sure it will be email specific. We just got on and talked about social commerce. I just recorded it with, with Jocelyn Kell, who's a POD lead here. So there's some guests coming up. I didn't push for a lot of guests in the middle of Christmas. No one wants to do anything like that. So, so a lot of that work is coming out now. So that's coming up. I hope everybody subscribes to the world's best email retention podcast to get in on those interesting content.
- [04:18]
Eric Dick
Now just, just pause right now. Just go do that now. If you're not subscribed, get, get on it. It's, it's going to be, it's a masterclass in email and retention.
- [04:27]
Jordan Gordon
Absolutely. But getting into kind of the 2025 adventure, like I just went and got in front of my staff and we just did a three year kind of champ meeting where we just showed, hey, this is where we were three years ago, this is where we are now. You know, when I showed up, I'm like, look at these emails we were making before. Look at the emails we're making now. You know, look at some of the results of the other agencies. I pulled up like three agencies the most, three recent audits I did and it was like Gmail click through rate point 13% just garbage and showed our results. Sorry to pump, sorry to pump our business. But anyway, that's the talk I just did. And, and then we went into, well, what are we doing now? Right? Where are we going? And, and it is an adventure that I suggest our audience follows us on too, because it's the right path. And let me just start that discussion, me and you Eric, by talking about the business cycle, where we were and where we are. So we were a few years ago, the broader economy was in growth at any cost mode. Just there was free money all over the place. If you were kind of launching a zero revenue app that helped you network with other dog owners, you got $100 million, right? That was growth at any cost. And then you step into, you do a consolidation and then you step into growth at a reasonable cost. So we did have, you know, we've seen examples of consolidation within the market. Elon Musk lays off 80% of Twitter, you know what I mean? Like certainly we see examples of consolidation and after consolidation, move into growth at a reasonable cost as people start to put their feet back in. We're certainly seeing that. We're seeing, you know, a lot of people who come, they need the service, but they need it at a good cost. And so our options are one, do exactly what you're doing for less money and just cut corners and offer a bad service, or two, get smart and match what you're doing to the business cycle. So the way that you would match, to match the needs of the business cycle here for us and for you out there, it would be to be more productive by getting more revenue with less messages. So there's my little intro. Any, any thoughts on what I just laid down on you there, Eric?
- [06:54]
Eric Dick
I'm just excited to see how we're going to do it. I think, I think it's on every business's top objective to get more efficient in 2025, because you gotta.
- [07:01]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah, for sure. So look, that's obviously in email retention, it's automations, right? Every time you make a campaign, you basically, you send it and you toss it up and it's garbage and you put it in the bin. And you're done. Yep.
- [07:16]
Eric Dick
An angel loses its wings every time you send a campaign, so you spend them wisely.
- [07:25]
Jordan Gordon
So here's, here's the things that we're going to talk about, you know, on the pod. We're going to talk about reaching really far back in your audience, finding ways to do it safely and pushing people into conversion funnel support into abandonment. But abandonment on steroids, right? You want, if you want to remove campaigns, every campaign is, is every pain you send is one message per user to your audience. That's what it is, right? So if you're going to remove one message per user from your audience, you need to replace that with something automated. And you got to get creative because people are going to get these automated emails more than once. Right. So you got to really think through, you know, how do we deal with, with us just cycling through this over and over again anyway, that's like a little kind of, it's a highlight of what we're doing. Cut the work down by you know, say a third and then you can, you can offer some value to clients without, yeah, without cutting corners.
- [08:28]
Eric Dick
What did, what do you mean by putting like, this is a phrase I just wrote down here, your abandonment on steroids. How does one put their abandonment flow on steroids?
- [08:36]
Jordan Gordon
So when we think about campaigns and flows, campaigns and automations, campaigns are generally static and very broad. You're trying to generate intent. You don't know where someone is in their awareness or buying cycle. You start really broad, right? And you start with kind of a very, you know, the simplest kind of brand message you can. Now look, once someone's, when someone's in your funnel and they're showing intent, they don't need that anymore, right? If someone like. And look, the default build for automations is quite simple. It's like, you know, once you're, once your browse abandoned and lower, it's like, here's the product you looked at, here's your cart. Notice it's not some, you know, hero shot of the guys drinking espresso outside of the brick walled cafe. You lead with where they are in the funnel, right. And that's actually one of the reasons these messages have a higher revenue per email sent is obviously you're showing someone something they want. Part of it is also they're in a more engaged, there's two parts. They're in a more engaged place in the lifecycle is one part and two, you're showing them something they want. And you at home can know this by testing to someone who's been in your funnel in the last 14 days. Showing them a hero shot versus showing them a recommendation. The recommendation will win because it's showing them something they want. The question being what is funnel support on steroids or whatever the statement was that I made there. One part is really, really filling it full of dynamic content, shoppable category pages, sending people shoppable category pages. That's one half which is relevance and the other half is simply frequency. Like flood the inbox of people who've shown intent. Look, it's tricky when you sit down with a spreadsheet or a piece of paper, whatever you're doing and you think how do I replace these campaigns with automations? Which is basically your task if you're doing this, we have a way that we do it. I'm sure you can figure something out at home. You've really got to think about, okay, well we're sending all these messages and when you're sending campaigns, you know, hey, I sent a campaign two days ago, right? When the automations are doing it, they're just shooting stuff out. So you really have to design it so that everything overlaps cleanly. And also, you know, you, someone can move to, someone can move down your funnel and then maybe be on a duration based funnel at the same time and making sure that the message makes sense. So it does take real intent to do. But once it's done, you're making half as many campaigns and you're just saving time and then you can focus the time on growing your business. That answer your question?
- [11:26]
Eric Dick
Yes, fully.
- [11:28]
Jordan Gordon
Another thing, another theme to discuss in 2025 is the retention, the customer retention part of email. We just discussed email. That was that discussion. How can we like jam stuff into people's inboxes and be efficient with our time? But this other theme that I want I've been discussing is like basically businesses have customers, not buyers. Customers. What's the root word? Custom. They make it a custom of purchasing from you. Right. They're a person and you build a relationship with them over time. And what I see a lot of out there is people approach their whole business as if it's all about acquiring customers. Right? And so of course there is a life cycle, right, that people, that you want to drive people down. And the first step towards driving that people down is conceptualizing it, realizing I've got customers and having a whole different part of your marketing strategy about speaking to customers. And then technically it's bringing that strategy out of klaviyo or whatever you're using and Stuffing it into ads, which you can do with integrations and customer email lists, email addresses, society's unique identifier. So that's another thing that we're kind of working on right now and I'm planning on talking about more.
- [12:48]
Eric Dick
I like your customer versus buyer. Because buyers, they've just bought something. Customer to me says also like custom, they bought something. It's not that they've just bought a thing or they've spent money, they've bought a product. And so everything you're talking about when it comes to segmenting your list and making sure people are in these support, these funnel support things, it's based on the custom purchases or the, the custom things that they were going to mer turn into mer for you. And so it just, just, it's a better way to think about it so you're not trying to, you know, cast the same net for everyone.
- [13:23]
Jordan Gordon
This, this was the specific discussion that was happening kind of in the back. We were talking about someone who'd come to us and we were analyzing their business from another agency. That agency was approaching selling multiple products as multiple channels to approach new people with, on Facebook, on Instagram. Right. And it's like, well, wait a second. No, no, your first funnel, get them in on your number one product. Focus that whole thing on getting them in on your number one product. Don't triple how many, how many. I mean this isn't advice for everybody at home, of course. Different people have different businesses and do different things different ways. But you could triple the amount of top of funnel campaigns and the amount of work you're doing, the amount of testing on features and benefits angles, right? Or you could just do it on what's obviously gonna sell, right? And then approach them with email and with ads. But two targeted lists of customers who've made their first purchase and then you just, if you, if you had three lines, you've just cut the number, cut the amount of work at the top of the funnel by three and you're just focusing on one line. And look, this is very nebulous what I'm saying. It's like super high level. But if you're pushing three lines at the top of the funnel and you could be pushing one line and then working on pushing people through a life cycle. I guarantee you that's what big brands are doing and that's the kind of simplification you could do. And works well with the automations that we're discussing too because then you just automate that life cycle and it's just running and then you just spend your time kind of just tweaking it. And then once that's set up, then you just say, when the coast is clear, I spend more on that product and push more down. When the coast is not clear, I spend less on that product, push less down. And it's like a what you have like a one lever business.
- [15:16]
Eric Dick
I like it. And you mentioned earlier just about this, you know, being more efficient is so important for the time. It saves you, but it really just also saves their attention because customers have only. It is a bit of a zero sum game. They're only going to open so many emails from you. So make those emails relevant and apply to them in a custom fashion.
- [15:34]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah, sure. And we did like I recently discussed this in the pod when I did the only site abandoned email you'll ever need. And we're going to do the only browser band and email you'll ever need in a bit like these shoppable category pages are all just dynamic products. Just what I'm seeing is more for a company that has a full enough catalog, if you're a single SKU company, obviously it's not gonna be dynamic. You're gonna, you're gonna have to hard code this. It's a little more tricky if you're single sku. You really gotta do storytelling each message rather than being dynamic. The message is gonna talk through a specific use case and bring the person into that world. That's how you do it if you're single sku. But aside from that, the whole thing's dynamic. Right? And that means every time they get it, it's new. And it also means it's stuff that they want. Right? So it's in my mind, it's easier because what is worse, oh my God. Than sitting back and going, I have to come up with 12 angles for the month. And you're like stretching like, oh, what are we going to say? Right? You know, I mean, do you think someone's at Amazon and they're like, you know, got their spreadsheet and they're doing all their angles and they're gonna like send out these campaigns from Amazon? That's not how real businesses do it.
- [16:54]
Eric Dick
Well, you want to learn how real businesses do it, you gotta listen to a burp. Kind of join Jordan every week, week in, week out. I'm excited for some of these other upcoming episodes. I wanted to ask. I know we're a klaviyo shop through and through. You mentioned Black Crow. Are there any other I'd be interested to know how we're using Black Crow and if there's any other tools in the marketing ecosystem that you're useful on the retention side.
- [17:15]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah. So I just talked to a gentleman at Black Crow. Want to have him on the pod. And let me tell you what, I'll just tell you guys what I want to talk to me about. And I probably their team has been on the DTC podcast before.
- [17:30]
Eric Dick
Yeah. Bunch. Yeah. Came to our events.
- [17:32]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah.
- [17:32]
Eric Dick
We go way back with Black Crow.
- [17:34]
Jordan Gordon
But probably didn't talk about what I want to talk about, which is how you use Black Crow to pump conversion. Funnel support, basically. Funnel support on steroids. Like I just discussed with you. Have you discussed that on the pod or is it kind of their other tools?
- [17:52]
Eric Dick
I guess, yeah, we mainly focused on the Facebook, the meta side of the aisle.
- [17:57]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah. So rewind 20 minutes. And what we were talking about was how do we be more productive? We're going to reach back a long way and we're going to push people into funnel support on steroids. Okay. One way you can get more. What you want is more inboxing or more inbox placement from funnel support. One way is to schedule more automated messages. Just. And what do you do? People just get more in their inbox. Another wing is to have more people qualify for funnel support. Right. Rather than stuffing more in the same inboxes, have more inboxes that you can stuff it into. So what they do, and we have lots of people who use this. And what I can say, I mean, I've called them to have them on because I know it works, right, Is they have some technology. We're going to discuss it on the pod. I don't exactly understand how it works. It's some kind of cookie system. I'm actually curious. That's why I want to have them on. But basically it elongates how long someone is cookied for funnel support. I don't even know what a cookie is anymore. Like, I studied 25 years ago. I don't know what a cookie is now, but they're cookied for longer, so they match for longer. And people who weren't properly cookied because something failed in the session, you know, because. Because it was lossy. They have technology that beefs up the registering of the cooking. So, you know, in my experience, say, 25% more people, you know, get cookied. Well, whoa, 25% more people getting cookied is huge. And I'll tell you why. If we think back to. It was probably the world's best email and retention podcast episode Two or three. I went through the hierarchy of revenue, where revenue comes from with email retention. Number one is inboxing. If you're not in the inbox, that's it. Number two is welcome. Well, that makes sense. Welcome is actually a function of acquisitions. So you pump acquisitions, you pump welcome. And after that's funnel support. So your abandoned funnel should be what if you look at your emails, the second largest, you know, single source of revenue. So if you increase that by 25%, it is. Makes a. It's a massive difference for your business. So, I mean, I guess I'm pumping Black Crow a little bit here right now. Hey, hey, Black Crow guys, please come on the podcast. Look forward to having you just talk to you today. But that's where it makes a difference, right?
- [20:41]
Eric Dick
Yeah. Filling more data, top of funnel. Nice. Well, I really look forward to that one. Are there any other, any other tools that we. I know you mentioned Glock at. We use that every day on the DTC podcast as well as we are trying to ensure that we are inboxing. It's a cool little tool for anyone interested in determining. Yeah. How many inboxes they're actually hitting.
- [21:02]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah. So I just spoke to yesterday in the morning, I spoke to someone From Glock Apps, Zero Bounce. Like, it's a tool we use. And so hopefully 2025, I introduce you to basically the account managers. Right. From the tools that we use. So you'll know it's like, it's not a paid placement. I'm just bringing on people from tools that we use. And we don't take any money for that, by the way. Everybody in the audience. I'm just going to bring you the people.
- [21:29]
Eric Dick
Not saying we won't there, Jo Jordan, let's just. The DTC Pump podcast functions pretty well with an advertising game. So I love your, I love your altruism, but we're not above taking, taking some ad dollars.
- [21:39]
Jordan Gordon
I'm not, I'm, I'm not, I'm not getting anything for it. Let's just put it that way. Okay. This is, this is purely because I want you to see we've chosen to use these tools and, and we've chosen for good reason. And we're going to bring the people on. But Zero Bounce, which is, which is when we talk about that really long look back. Let's say you want to look back three years. Like, here's a way to think about it. Within the, within. Within a year, everybody, two to one to two years, visitors, two to three years, buyers. So it's just getting tighter and tighter and tighter, which means a smaller audience. And what that means is a smaller volume of spam traps you hit. Because like, be careful, folks don't just reach back three years. Right? One does not simply reach back three years. Right. You have to really, you have to really, really think about it. And what you want to do is the further you go back, the less people you want to hit. Because absolutely, you're gonna hit spam traps. Zero bounce will help you clean out some of those spam traps. I have no idea how it works, but they, they have lists of known spam traps. Maybe they're, maybe they're testing. I don't, I don't know how they do it. We're gonna find out, we're gonna have them on the show. But that's kind of where that fits in is just really, really, really clean up that list. And this becomes more and more important the larger your list because you're just hitting more spam traps when you got a big list. Right. And also you are more heavily scrutinized by the inbox providers.
- [23:06]
Eric Dick
Here's a question. Will you send more SMSs on behalf of clients in 2025 than you did in 2024?
- [23:13]
Jordan Gordon
Yeah. Thank you. Very good question. I'm sorry I didn't bring that up earlier. So part of 2025 is absolutely more SMS and the key reason for that is. And again, this was just, I just met with my whole team and we talked about our 2025. It's getting harder to inbox. The three most recent audits I did was like a tenth of a percent click through rate because so much is getting thrown right into spam. And here was our research from 2024 when we looked at what was happening in big peaks like Black Friday, we saw certain segment groups, we do a 12 segment model. So we have the whole thing kind of laid out different kind of how many times they purchase when the last time they interacted. And we saw these groups, these unengaged groups just totally tanking in ways they hadn't before. Right. So if you're not splitting it up like that and you're just doing a big monolithic list that we've just discussed, what's happening is you think you're sending to all those people, but, but Gmail is like, you know, just putting 75% of them in, you know, not inboxing a bunch of them. You get really, really crazy click through rate when you go in and you look in, in your deliverability kind of dashboard and you look at your CTRs by ISP, you see, oh my Gmail, which is my most important is nothing. So what do you do in this environment when it's tightening up? Well, one, you get, you, you work smarter, you have good segmentation and two, you just, just expand and send more SMS and open up a sale with an sms, close the sale with an sms. Every single flow you build, kick off the flow. If it's five messages, kick it off with an sms. And that should just be part of everyone's standard playbook.
- [24:58]
Eric Dick
In 2025, was it like nearly 100% open rates? Because you know what I mean? Like, unless you're just dismissing it off the. Which off the hop, which I guess a lot of. And you're still seeing it even, you know, you know what I mean? You're still seeing 90% of the message even if you don't open it specifically.
- [25:13]
Jordan Gordon
I'm just telling you right now, look, in my phone I've got 156 unread text messages because when I see one of these things, I don't even open it, I don't even delete it. I just. Because I'm an email guy. But of course there are people who really carefully interact with their, with their text messages and ignore their email. And I know I've said this before, but there's just speak to both of those audiences, you know, don't exclude, don't walk away from one of those audiences. Right. And again, expand your email through your advertising by taking your lists from email and syncing them over into advertising. And you can just do this manually with downloaded lists. So you don't even need to have a custom integration. Right. And everything up by prospect and buyer and just speak to buyers differently than you speak to prospects. Right?
- [26:03]
Eric Dick
Amen. Build lookalikes all day long. Take your most valuable users. Build lookalikes. I don't even know if lookalikes are really a thing anymore on the meta ad side. I'm sure they are.
- [26:12]
Jordan Gordon
It's still a thing. Yeah, still.
- [26:13]
Eric Dick
Yeah.
- [26:15]
Jordan Gordon
I talk to these kids at the company, you know, and I say things that made sense five years ago and I think is that.
- [26:20]
Eric Dick
Yeah, still the same. Nice man. Well, let's leave it there for today. Go to Google and type in the world's best email and retention podcast. We'll have it linked in the show notes here, but otherwise, search it up. Give us that SEO juice. Go and subscribe. Leave a comment Leave us a rating on our new podcast. We're going to be launching some more podcasts in 2025, which is really exciting. We're finalizing some details on new entries to the DTC Podcast Network that we can't can't speak fully about yet, but can't yet. But we're. And we're always open to other ideas too. So if you have an idea for a podcast, you think something would be great, make sure you just send me an email at erictoconsumer. Co. Otherwise, we'll see you on the Internets. Thanks, Jordan.
- [27:08]
Unknown
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's All Killer no Filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.