E054: From Product Drops to Post-Purchase Plays - Email Marketing with 'Email Is Not Dead' Author, Karly Craig

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators E054 – From Product Drops to Post-Purchase Plays: Email Marketing with Carly Craig

Release Date: April 8, 2025

In episode E054 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker engage with Carly Craig, the author of "Email Is Not Dead". This episode delves into advanced email marketing strategies, customer retention techniques, effective product drops, and innovative loyalty programs. Drawing from Carly’s extensive experience in e-commerce and agency management, the conversation offers actionable insights for marketers aiming to enhance their retention efforts and drive sustained growth.

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Carly Craig's Journey and Email Is Not Dead [00:00 – 02:53]

Carly Craig introduces her professional background, highlighting her transition from owning a specialized email agency to taking on the role of Chief Marketing Officer at No Days Wasted. She shares the evolution of her book, "Email Is Not Dead", initially published in 2022 and later updated in 2025 to incorporate fresh insights gained from her recent experiences.

"I sold my agency about two years ago... I spent six months after owning an agency for five years researching and writing [Email Is Not Dead]." [01:46]

Carly emphasizes the importance of keeping marketing strategies current, leading her to update her book to reflect the latest trends and data-driven practices in email marketing.

Email Marketing Foundations: Social Proof, Scarcity, Risk Reversal, and Discounting [05:24 – 07:30]

The discussion shifts to the foundational pillars of effective email marketing as outlined by Sarah Levinger, who contributed to Carly’s book. These pillars are essential for building automated email flows that convert prospects into loyal customers.

"Social proof, scarcity, risk reversal, and discounting... these are [fundamental] pillars." [06:14]

Carly explains how these elements serve as the backbone of successful email campaigns, ensuring that messages resonate with recipients and drive desired actions.

Implementing Email Strategies at Mini Katana [07:30 – 12:14]

Carly shares her hands-on experience managing email marketing at Mini Katana, a direct-to-consumer brand selling katanas online. She highlights the challenges and strategies involved in educating customers about product variations, such as full tang versus partial tang katanas, to cater to different customer needs like cosplay or actual use.

"We needed to show the value so that in some people's eyes, the $300 sword is actually very inexpensive." [09:12]

This segment underscores the critical role of education in email marketing, ensuring customers understand the value and differentiation of products offered.

Enhancing Welcome Flows for Better Customer Retention [12:14 – 20:00]

The conversation evolves to focus on the design and optimization of welcome email flows. Carly and the hosts discuss how a comprehensive welcome sequence can effectively introduce new subscribers to the brand, build trust, and guide them towards making their first purchase.

"For the brands that are not the nine figure brands, build those out. Maybe it's like three or four months of emails..." [17:17]

Connor shares Hexclad's approach, detailing a five-email welcome flow that incorporates brand introductions, social proof, and tailored product offers. Carly emphasizes the importance of maintaining consistent and engaging communication to keep new customers interested and informed.

Post-Purchase Strategies and Reactivation [14:53 – 31:35]

Post-purchase engagement is critical for maximizing customer lifetime value (LTV). Carly and the hosts explore various strategies to keep customers engaged after their initial purchase, encouraging repeat business and fostering long-term loyalty.

"If you can move that first month up, then it should trickle into every other month." [29:07]

Connor elaborates on Hexclad's post-purchase flows, which include cross-selling complementary products and providing educational content on product use and care. Carly adds that timely follow-ups, such as checking in with customers after a product has been delivered, can significantly boost reactivation rates.

Loyalty Programs: Value-Added vs. Discounting [44:00 – 48:56]

The discussion turns to loyalty programs, contrasting traditional discount-based approaches with value-added experiences. Hexclad opts for creating exclusive brand experiences for high-spending customers rather than offering points or discounts, aiming to enhance the overall customer experience and foster brand advocacy.

"Our approach is just like the loyalty program is only value added... we're trying to optimize customer really cool customer experience over everything else." [46:00]

Carly agrees, suggesting that loyalty programs should offer meaningful rewards such as branded merchandise, exclusive access to events, or unique content that aligns with the brand’s values and enhances customer satisfaction.

Product Drops: Building Hype and Community Engagement [53:30 – 73:35]

Product drops are a powerful tool for creating excitement and driving sales. Carly and the hosts discuss effective strategies for executing limited-edition releases that captivate audiences and encourage quick buy-ins.

"Building hype with consistent drops conditions the consumer to be excited for something that's coming." [68:13]

Connor shares Hexclad's experiences with limited edition launches, emphasizing the importance of targeted audience segments and pre-launch teasers to ensure successful sellouts. Carly cites examples from Montana Knife Co. and Portland Leather Goods, highlighting how consistent and visually appealing drops can build a loyal community that eagerly anticipates new releases.

Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts [73:35 – End]

The episode concludes with key takeaways on the importance of strategic email marketing, customer retention, and innovative loyalty programs. Carly shares her personal investment in coaching as a catalyst for her professional growth, encouraging marketers to seek mentorship to enhance their skills and business outcomes.

"The only reason that I'm in the place that I am now is because I spent the money that I was making and on coaching." [73:46]

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Notable Quotes

• Carly Craig on the Importance of Coaching:

  "The only reason that I'm in the place that I am now is because I spent the money that I was making and on coaching." [73:46]

• Connor on Robust Onboarding Flows:

  "We have a very robust sequence... these are probably the... I would say we don't do a ton of is scarcity." [15:14]

• Carly Craig on Building Welcome Flows:

  "Build a few months of emails because then you control... you're keeping them on this exact train." [17:17]

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Conclusion

Episode E054 of Marketing Operators provides a comprehensive exploration of advanced email marketing strategies, emphasizing the importance of foundational pillars like social proof and scarcity, optimizing welcome and post-purchase flows, and innovating loyalty programs to enhance customer retention. Carly Craig’s insights, backed by real-world examples from brands like Mini Katana and Hexclad, offer valuable lessons for marketers aiming to drive sustained growth through strategic email and SMS marketing efforts. Whether it’s through creating engaging product drops or designing exclusive loyalty experiences, this episode equips listeners with the knowledge to elevate their marketing operations effectively.

For those interested in deepening their understanding of these strategies, Carly Craig recommends leveraging coaching and mentorship to continuously refine and optimize marketing tactics.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Andrew]

All right, welcome to another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got a special guest here, the first author we've ever had on the show, Carly Craig, exited email, agency owner, retired Katana swords dealer from Mini Katana. And now Jack of all trades, E Com operator. And I've got the book here. Email is not dead. I was really excited to do this. For those not listening, I'm holding it up. Jimmy Fallon. You know, dude, I've read the book. I got the notes. We're gonna. We're gonna talk through it.

[Connor]

Are you a posted. Are you a post it note in Book Guy?

[Andrew]

Dude, I'm not a book guy. I was. I. This is. This is the first book I've read in quite a while. But, Carly, having you on the show, I was like, I. I gotta. I gotta read up. So, Carly, why don't you give us, like, a very quick background, the elevator pitch on what you've been up to the last couple years and maybe tell us a little bit about the book, the history of it.

[Carly Craig]

Yeah, so if I just give you maybe the last three years. I sold my agency about two years ago, but the year prior to that, before I sold it, I processed myself out, My team ran it without me, and I was the COO at Mini Katana for a year. So I have had lots of experience in my entire adult career. But the last few years have been the most impactful. I mean, you guys know Isaac. And Isaac used to call me ten times a day. So the amount of knowledge that I was just gaining was incredible. But last year, I actually took the entire year off. And I didn't do anything E Commerce for related. I just went on a whole bunch of trips. And then I just made my foray back in this year as I published my new book. And then I started working as the CMO at no Days Wasted.

[Andrew]

Amazing. Yeah. So. And the book was Originally published in 2022, and now there's an updated version in 2025.

[Carly Craig]

Yes. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So what's the history of that?

[Carly Craig]

So I wrote the first book as one does for Legion, and I realized that I was selling my agency just about the time that I was finishing it. So we actually did not end up pushing it. We didn't associate it with the agency, because what. All I was learning was like, this key man issue. And, you know, I didn't want to get stuck with the agency. I didn't want to have to sell the rights to my book. So it just kind of sat there. I mean, it. I actually did end up selling around 700 copies of it for it. Not getting promoted. But the version of it that was out there was not my best work at the time. It absolutely was my best work. I spent six months after owning an agency for five years researching and writing it. But then in my time with Mini Katana, in my time just being on the brand side, meeting all of these other people that were sharing their strategies with me, I realized that it was incredibly outdated and only included maybe like a fraction of what I now know. So I wanted to update that and make sure that people knew that I was smart.

[Andrew]

Yeah. All right. I love it. Well, perfect. I want to get into the details. Like I said, I am maybe 80% of the way through the book. I've got a bunch of notes and questions for, for the both of you guys. Before we get into our episode, we want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich panel after Cell and North. You haven't heard. Motion has launched Expert Agents, one of the coolest AI solutions I have seen thus far. It is a way to analyze your ads and complete creative research tasks using AI enabled workflows. Expert Agents right now are created and owned by different Experts in the D2C space like Dara Denny and Barry Hot. You can think of them almost like apps in an app store. Whether you're an agency, a solo consultant, or a talented brand operator, you can reach out and explore building your own expert agent with Motion for brands. If you simply want to speed up workflows and find hard to discover creative insights automatically, you should get Expert Agents working for you in your Motion Dashboard. You can check it [e-mail] expert agents to learn more.

[Connor]

So cool.

[Andrew]

So the book for. For those listening and for those who haven't read the book yet, the book's formatted in or it's structured by. We talk about automated flows, campaigns, we get into analytics, things like that. It kind of breaks down. Carly. I think I'm getting it right like holistically. The book's called Email is Not Dead, but it touches on sms. Would you say it's like retention generally?

[Carly Craig]

I thought about going the retention route but there was so much missing from that that I decided to just keep the title on email.

[Andrew]

Totally awesome. Yeah, I think it's. I think it covers a bit more than email, but definitely has a. Has a focus on it, which is awesome. So where I wanted to start actually for to tee up a little bit more. There's also a lot of contributors. Can you maybe talk about that process a little bit? Because I've got a couple points I want to hit in quotes. A lot of them come from people who contributed to the book. So maybe you could talk briefly about like that process.

[Carly Craig]

Yeah, that was an accident. And I had asked one person their opinion on something and we did a little zoom call. I recorded it and then I realized, oh, wait, I actually should just continue asking more people about their experience email marketing, because I can do all of the research in the world on the questions that I know to ask, but there are probably a million things that other people have already experienced that have actually seen the data that, that can share, things that they've learned over the years. So there are quite a few agency owners in there, which is totally fine. Right. Because I have nothing to sell on the back end. And then there are a number of brand owners. There are some SaaS folks in there. I really kind of went across the entire breadth of my Twitter network to pull in all of these experts.

[Andrew]

Yeah, totally. It felt like a, like a premium Twitter feed. Almost lots of familiar faces, which is like more, more much longer than 180 characters. All right, cool. The first one I want to talk about, Sarah Levinger talks about four key pillars in automated flows. And I think it's like a good jumping off point for just talking to customers generally. She says social proof, scarcity, risk reversal, and discounting, which my experience reading the book was like, I haven't thought about the basics, like the foundational level of email and SMS in a long time. So it was a cool refresher. Those four points are not like, incredibly novel. I think we've heard them before. But like me having been an e. Comm for 10 years now, and I'm dealing with much other issues, it's nice to kind of come back to that. And, and one of my takeaways was like, we really focus on social proof and we really focus on risk reversal. We, we, we miss that scare cdp and then we discount a lot, but we don't love doing that. So I thought it was. I, I thought that was interesting, at least for me to kind of reflect on. So I was curious, Carly, your experience with Mini Katana, like, did you guys take that? So, and what did that look like from a, from an email or just speaking to customer or prospect perspective?

[Carly Craig]

Sure. I think actually the biggest thing with Mini Katana was that, I mean, we were seeing some reviews of people not stoked with the product, but it was only because of an education issue. So we had two, mainly two types of katanas. There was the full tang and the Partial tang. Are you guys familiar?

[Andrew]

Our listeners probably aren't. So maybe. Are you a knife?

[Connor]

Well, this is a knife concept too. Full tang. Partial tang, yes.

[Carly Craig]

So the full tang katanas have the blade that runs all the way through the handle. So if you are, you know, playing real life fruit ninja, the sword isn't breaking off when it from the handle whenever you hit it on something. And then we have the partial tang, which was meant to be more of like decoration or cosplay that wasn't actually sharp. So we have sharp full tang that you can actually, you know, fight through with. And then we have one that's meant for decoration. And that is maybe one of the biggest points is that, you know, some people would buy this, the decorative piece, because it was much less expensive, not realizing actually that what they wanted was the more expensive one. And then we also needed to show them the, the value of that because in some people's eyes, the $300 sword is actually very inexpensive. Because Mini Katana was maybe the first D2C brand that I can think of that was selling katanas online. I mean, they could order from China perhaps and then take their chances, but I don't, I. People weren't used to having this product in the market. So for me it was more about education and making sure that they knew why they could trust us.

[Connor]

Well, and Carly, how much of that was you. You all having to figure out? Because like, if you're launching a katana brand, which is the coolest thing in the world, I think Isaac is the coolest person ever for doing that. Selling swords on the Internet is the most badass e commerce business in the universe. I remember going to the mall, going to look sharp when I was like 14 and like buying like throwing like stars and. And they had these swords in there. And so I make that connection. I think it's so cool. But you guys had to figure out like, are people actually trying to play real life Fruit ninja or do people want this as a decoration? So you quickly found out that your customer base was more of the real life Fruit Ninja than it was the. We're going to put this on my wall in the living room and it's going to be like a cool decorative piece.

[Carly Craig]

Well, it depends. I mean, the Fruit Ninja was more of mine thing because I'm not actually a sword person. The only thing I ever did with it was the fruit Ninja stuff.

[Connor]

Yeah, that's what I would do with it.

[Carly Craig]

I wouldn't say necessarily that more people wanted the sharp sword. It was just that they needed to know the difference. Yeah, because I, I, there were a lot of anime fans. Of course, like most of the swords were related to a certain anime and people were using them for cosplay or literally for decoration. So it was both uses. They just needed to know why they were buying, what they were buying and it wasn't initially clear.

[Connor]

And you were leaning on. I would imagine that for you guys, email is probably a very like maybe one of the higher last touch point channels before conversion. I mean you're buying a pretty expensive product. Like I assume people would like opt in, get a bunch of emails from you, be in the funnel for a while and like, so as that was that your approach is like, let's get them to opt in. Let's start sending a bunch of interesting content. And part like one of those content pillars is the education around. Hey, if you want to go and slice a watermelon in half, like you need the full tang.

[Carly Craig]

Well, really I think that it was more people had an affinity for a certain show. So I think more of the drop base model actually helped with that because we could draw, you know, we could have a ton of swords from maybe like Demon Slayer, but if they loved. I'm trying to remember the names Chainsaw man or something like that. You know, they're waiting for that specific sword to come out or they're writing us, requesting like, we really want this one, we really want this one. And so, I mean, I, I believe we'll talk about this a little bit later, but Mini Katana. What we figured out at the end of like my tenure there with Isaac was that the drop model was actually really important, especially because we had this huge breadth of what people wanted and maybe in small quantities so we could do limited runs of things that are. We knew that there was a subset of our customer base that was only going to buy this one thing. They're waiting for this one thing, which was a really, I guess, interesting aspect of that business in terms of the list growth that was different. I mean, Isaac is so brilliant. He's always thinking 10 steps ahead, not just even selling the sword. So we had this very gimmicky like wheel that was on the site for people to.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I, yeah, I remember it was awesome.

[Carly Craig]

And, and we know looking at the cohort analysis that are those people even buying like they are, they just want to win the prize or they want to use. At one point we had an actual like fruit ninja thing where they could win their prize by like cutting open a fruit. But he had other plans also for that list and for the business in the long term. So we, we did things maybe a little bit differently. Isaac is so such a smart guy. I have so many nice things to say about him.

[Isaac]

We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich Panel at the start of Q4. Q1 is usually when we're absolutely drowning customer support tickets from Black Friday and holiday season, but right now we have none. So was it risky switching our tech stack right before peak season? Sure, but I couldn't be happier with the decision. Since switching to Rich panel, we've gone from overwhelmed to having an empty inbox, which is place we want to be. Here are three of my favorite things with Rich panel so far. Number one, if you know me, you know I love saving costs. So we save costs on the actual software by 50% right away. Much better deal. We also, I love it, the features. We have better features, better support. I see our team going back and forth with Rich Panel. Even the CEO Amit is in there all the time. Uh, given our team support building out new features for us, immediate impact. The analytics are great as the, you know, the automations are amazing. The AI social media moderator as well, you name it. There's just been so many features that have we've been able to add on to either reduce our tickets or increase our efficiency, which is the name of the game. Second thing is we've actually had 1.26 million in revenue generated from our CX team in the last four months, literally turning six from a cost center to a profit center. And third is getting early access to all their new features that are being released like updated analytics, dashboard, a bunch of AI stuff, AI Social Media Manager, you name it. It's been super helpful for us. You probably have a backlog of meta ad comments if you're like one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love the AI Social Media Manager. You're able to set everything up, automate it. It's able to learn from your best agents, your best replies. People think it's, it's a human, it's amazing and it's allowing us just to get back to everybody, offer better customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better. So I love it. If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to Rich to save money, save time and keep your customer service team happy, I highly recommend it. We switched at a really important time and they came through for Us. So if you want to slash your customer support expenses by at least 30% overnight while reducing tickets, go to richpanel.comdemo to book a call and learn more. That's richpanel.comdemo.

[Andrew]

So, Connor, I'm actually, I'm curious to hear how you guys approach it at hexclad. This, this idea of we're, we're in the flow section of the book. So if you've got a prospect or if you've got a custom, you want to provide social proof, scarcity, risk reversal, discounting. Is that more or less how you guys think about it or what are some of like the key strategies that you're implementing from a, from a flow perspective?

[Connor]

Yeah, I mean we have like a very robust onboarding flow. I mean we have, call it five to six, not six, I think it's five emails now that are in our welcome flow. At any point, if you buy, you get funneled out of that. But yeah, I mean I would say a lot of the pillars that are here are, are in that welcome flow. You know, it's, it's very like, hey, intro to the brand. Like, here's who we are. Who's what? Here's what we are. Here's our core value prop. You know, we're explaining a lot of it's informational. I think that's, that's like, for us is really important. Like we are selling a 212 inch pan, we're selling a 700 set. It's like we need to give like a really compelling product story on why we're doing that. So that's where we open up. It's like, you know, welcome to hexclad. Here's the hybrid technology, here's what this means. Then we go into like founder, like note from the founder type stuff. So like making it a little personal. And then yes, then we're going into social proof. We are going into lots of reviews, we're sending people to our Cooking with hexclad community in that flow. So a lot of social proof in there. We eventually get into like offers on the bundles, which is not necessarily discounting, but it also is. We're saying, hey, totally 12 piece set and you're gonna save a bunch compared to what you would if you bought these all individually. So you should just buy this set now and then. Risk reversal. Yeah, I mean, lifetime warranty is like the best risk reversal value prop you can put out there. And those are, you know, it was fun to like actually like read this and then actually like Map out the actual content we have. And I was like, oh yeah, we are doing like every. I don't necessarily think of it this way all the time, but like, absolutely. These are probably the. I would, the one I would say we don't do a ton of is scarcity. We do that more with our product drop strategy, which is not like an automated strategy for us. So that's one that would maybe be interesting to go back and think through. Like how can we, you know, intro some more scarcity? But yeah, absolutely. Within the five emails, I think you'd see these four pillars at least, or these three pillars at least show up a lot of different places.

[Carly Craig]

I'd love to add something on the welcome flow. It's a little, little bit off topic, but for the, the brands that are not the nine figure brands listening, whenever people are building out their welcome flows, especially those that have less resources, I often recommend to them to like really build those out. Maybe it's like three or four months of emails because then you control, you, you have guardrails on what they're experiencing from you. So it's not that they're coming in, they go through their five emails and then start getting just like whatever campaigns you have at that time. But it's like before they buy, you are keeping them on this exact train, you know, trying the different angles, seeing what's working. And I guess that can inform other parts of what you're doing in your marketing as well to see what actually speaks to them and where they convert. But I would put in things like flash sale at a certain point. Like you guys are probably familiar with the fact that what is it like 95+% of your list is going to buy within the first like day and then it's like 3% buy in the next three days and then maybe 1% buy by day 30 and then the, the 1% of stragglers buy after day 30. So I also keep that in mind as I'm building out that welcome flow as well.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that was, that was one of my takeaways. I have a bunch of notes that I'm going to go through with my team, but there were two examples in the book. One brand that had 15 emails in their welcome flow and then another with 30. I'm closer to Connor and Hexcloud with like we're probably at 5 or 6, but we're probably leaving a lot on the table. Like we just have a lot of important things to say that are probably that are not getting captured in flows. I'd like to just ensure that when someone signs up they're getting, I don't know, we could probably get to 10 or 12 emails pretty easily of like things we want them to know, whether that's like introduction to our different categories. The founder story. We have Marquez, we have product education, we have some sort of promo flash sale, save with kit, something like that. So that was kind of the mindset that I was in as well. That could probably extend that further. And then the other thing that I liked that was brought up were these like pattern breakers. So like it also not being too monotonous. And Connor, I think you hit on that a little bit. The note from the founder, does that feel, is that like a plain text email or does it look and feel different than, than the rest of the welcome series?

[Connor]

It's, it's, it's designed, it's, it's not plain text but it definitely looks different. I mean it like we wrote it like you know, it has lettery feel to it. So it's very different than like a product focused email that you'd be getting or even like a review style testimonial. It's like very long form and it feels very different.

[Andrew]

Yeah, because I think that's a big one. Carla, you bring up a flash sale, a note from a founder, I'm talking about Marquez. I could see there being like a really strong Gordon email. As people are building these things out, I think they could think about just like keeping it fresh. I think that was like one of the main points of the chapter.

[Connor]

So are you saying, Carly, that you'll actually take your welcome flow and extend it like three months out, four months out and just like have a huge drip on this, on this welcome flow over a longer period of time?

[Carly Craig]

Yes. And if they buy, which is obviously what you're trying to get them to do, they fall out and they go into all of the rest of your flows or they go into your normal campaigns. But it's to me, I think of it as having guardrails on their experience and it's not up to fate of whatever you've decided to send out that month.

[Connor]

I love that that's actually, you know, we've been something we've been thinking about. We've done a nice job and I might be jumping the gun here, but we've done a nice job of building out our post purchase cross sell flows and just like this overall approach of like we need to build as much awareness with people that came and bought our cookware, bought all of our Other sets. And, and now we're thinking about how do we do this before someone purchases. Like we need to, we need to have this pre purchase as well. So one of the ideas we had was like, hey, should we, should we have like a radio button that's basically saying, you know, you can choose which category you're the most interested in when you've bought. Which I thought was okay, that's interesting, but like pretty complex. Now we have like, for like parallel welcome flows. I don't really like that, but I actually think a simple way to do it would just be, hey, just go add them onto the back of our welcome flow. Because if someone hasn't bought after those five emails, which are gonna be more cookware focused, let's get them into knives, let's get them into mills, let's get them into aprons, let's get them into specialty cookware. And at some point, hopefully they'll see something they want. So maybe that is just, I'm thinking through this, like that could be like a much simpler way to introduce these non cookware categories pre purchase.

[Andrew]

What was that, Connor? I'm curious. The you were talking about sorting people into different categories, is that the, the mills and cookware and aprons you guys are thinking of potentially building out different flows for?

[Connor]

Yeah, so that's how we do it post purchase. Like where someone buys, we have a general cross sell flow that's like very. Call it like upper funnel for our categories. And then we have product specific flows and those product specific flows are utilizing product page and like collection page pixels. So it's like, all right, you've bought, you get pumped in the general cross sell flow. And now you visited a knives page. Now you're going into the knives specific, you know, sequence. So that was the initial thought was like, how do we take something like. And you could do the same thing pre purchase as well. If we just wanted to like duplicate those and say someone opted in and viewed this product page or this collection of product pages, we could, we could do that too. I just don't want it to be too siloed too early. So that's kind of what we're working through right now.

[Andrew]

Carly, have you worked with any brands who have like multiple categories in that way?

[Carly Craig]

Oh, I mean a ton. Back in the agency days we worked with like 500 plus brands. But on the, on the brand side, I've sold katanas and now dhm. So this time around we actually do have, we do have three categories. So the dhm, we have an electrolyte drink mix and then sleep. So I'm doing that. I'm asking that question beforehand. I'm just changing our pop after so I can. I actually am going to do the multiple welcome flows though.

[Connor]

Oh you are? Okay.

[Carly Craig]

I want to speak directly to the product that they're interested in.

[Andrew]

We do that as well.

[Carly Craig]

It's particularly important with us because DHM is not something that the average person just knows what that is. And so I don't think a lot of what we're doing is saying, you know, hey, we're better than the other brands that sell this. It's actually discovery. So it's more of that education piece, especially for that specific product. So that was the main reason that I wanted to split them out.

[Andrew]

But what does DHM stand for?

[Carly Craig]

I wrote down how to say it on my whiteboard. It's Dehydromyrestin. I can show you a pocket of it. It's. It's a supplement that you take when you are celebrating. I would love to use other words but around that and it helps you feel a lot better the next day.

[Andrew]

Oh, got it, Got it. Okay. No days wasted. Great brand name.

[Carly Craig]

Yeah.

[Connor]

That is awesome.

[Andrew]

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Okay, here's. This is on topic, not in the agenda here, but one of the things with multiple categories that we struggle with is we have rings, we have wallets, we have luggage, we filter people into different welcome series, we have different post purchase series for those. Where we struggle is when we want to offer discounts from behavioral emails like an abandoned cart or checkout abandonment or something like that where it feels incredibly redundant to build out those automations three different times. So end up unifying all of those and we essentially have to offer the same promo across all the different categories. Connor, do either of you guys deal with that or have an answer? Is the answer really just, hey, either don't do a promo and have standard abandonment flows or it's worth just going through the effort of duplicating everything out.

[Carly Craig]

I mean because flows just sit there and run after you build them. I mean especially in your guys's case with the amount of revenue that you do. I think it's worth it to just build them out. Yeah, there are probably depending on how you build it might be things that you can do to have blocks that only show with totally whatever it is that you're. You're separating them out based on. But I would just build it out.

[Connor]

Yeah, we're not, we're not doing any like we actually don't get to aside from some like SMS sales stuff that we're doing with Postscript. Like we're actually not very transactional or sorry, discount oriented in our flows. So we're like really trying to hit them on social proof to make them convince, make them convinced that this is the right decision. You know, we're giving them some buy now, pay later options. If again if though if they, if it's a set they abandoned is baked into the pricing. So we have felt that we haven't needed to do that. So we don't have them built out separately right now. What we, what we've done to, to like avoid having to do a lot of that is we've built out these like really nice blocks for lack of a better term where we're placing these blocks in the footer of tons of emails, both lifecycle and campaign. So it's like if you're really deep in the hex mills funnel and now all of a sudden you're getting everything Hex mills, pre purchase, whenever, wherever you are in the cycle, you're still going to get these really compelling blocks are like knives, boards, totally Hex mills. So like we're, we're just making sure that these secondary pushes are really prevalent in a lot of places. Like I don't want anyone to ever get into our email lifecycle marketing and, and be like after four months, oh, I didn't know you had knives. Like if that's the case, we have totally failed at retention and just lifecycle marketing in general. So like we have these blocks that are like big punchy bowl, they're using a sexy product shot and yeah, that's, that's kind of how we're hedging against not having like, you know, different abandonments for all these different product categories. Right now.

[Andrew]

If you're running an E comm brand, you know the game of maximizing AOV and that's exactly what After Sell does. Over 35,000 E commerce brands, including all of us at marketing operators trust After Sell to power their upsells and increase their AOV by 30% on average. Their upselling suite works from checkout all the way to the thank you page. Here's a few things that help After Sales stand out. One, you've got one click post purchase upsells which we talked about on episode 40 with Shane and 33 with Zack stuck. It's a great way to drive revenue without adding friction or expecting the customer to re enter payment. Two is you get checkout upsells which we use heavily at Ridge and they have the ability to monetize your thank you page with their free Rocked thanks Formerly known as network offers some real numbers from after sale users up to 35% increase in conversions and over a 16 average conversion rate. If you're not optimizing your upsells with after sale, you're leaving easy money on the table. Book your free demo today and get after sale for 60 days free. Go to aftercell.com operators to claim the offer. Awesome. Cool. So I want to talk post purchase a little bit more. We were getting into it. Sarah Levinger had another good one. I think she crushed some of the contributions. So shout out Sarah. She she talks about like some of the key strategies for post purchase. She's got celebrate and reassure. She's got build trust with the here's what to expect. She's got surprise and delight with the post delivery email and then a long term nurture where you build community. Also just super, super sound advice in my opinion. One thing that I thought and I'd love to get your guys's perspective on is like the reactivation strategy. I don't know if the the data is in the book but like I hear it from everybody, someone, a customer is most likely to repurchase basically immediately after their first purchase. It is within that first like 14, 30 days is when at least for us we see by far the largest like reactivation rate. So I'm curious Connor, maybe I'll start with you and then Carly, I'd love to hear any experience from either Mini Katana or some of the agency clients. Like what does that LTV strategy look like immediately after purchase and then how do you balance that with building trust, you know, surprise and delight, et cetera, et cetera.

[Connor]

Well first off, 100 like if you go look at our cohorts by like every single cohort does not matter the month. The largest amount of growth is in month one. So the, the very next month and then you start to see some interesting things like you know the month one from the October cohort generally has the largest growth because they are getting acquired in October. Then BSM happens in November and then number two is the month one for the November cohort. So across the board it's absolutely uniform. And like we are starting to play around like we know because of that that for us to really move the needle on ltv, if we can move that first month up then it just like should trickle into every other month. So we're starting to like play around with how we can set some targets around that where it's like, hey, last year our month to you know, average revenue per, per whatever per member of the cohort was like 10 bucks. We set a goal on trying to make that 15 bucks. And if we can achieve that, it's going to like move the needle a lot. But absolutely. So because of that like our general cross sell flow is happening within that first, that first month and again, same thing. It's a very robust sequence. I think it's like three to four emails of pretty much every product category that we have.

[Carly Craig]

So.

[Connor]

And then we also have like we're building out a better use and care flow. So we're also, we're trying to simultaneously say, hey, you just bought this 12 piece set. Here's exactly how you get the most value out of it. That that's coming right away. Like I forget exactly the trigger, but it's like product was shipped or something and then I, I forget the trigger. Exactly. It's like within 14 to 30 days then they're getting this general cross sell flow that is building awareness of all these other product categories. And that's like the, that's the first wave is, is that those two sequences.

[Andrew]

Do you do any sort of discount to get them into the other categories? Like do you offer a discount, an additional discount on the knife considering they just purchased.

[Connor]

We're not, not right now. I mean again though, we're pushing those sets, right? So we're like right, right, right. Here's the seven piece set. In the seven piece, that's our best seller by a long shot. It's like, hey, here's the seven piece set and it has that baked in like multiple hundreds of dollars off from the MSRP of all of those. So if we, if that was not the case, we would absolutely be doing more discounting. Like we would definitely be saying, hey, an email three, let's give them some sort of offer here. But we've. Yeah. Just because of how our, the nature of our product category, it's, it's allowed us to like not have to do anything on, on top of.

[Andrew]

For us.

[Connor]

What I'm trying to do is think through how can we make like I'm trying to build a wet caraway does a really nice job of this where if you like click over their info bubble, it tells you why their MSRP price is their MSRP price and it just explains, it's like this is what the cost is of all the individual products. So we're trying to do more of that actually. So we don't feel like we're always on discount. A little. A little bit of a tangent.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Carly, do you. Do you have like, what's your take on the best way to craft a post purchase flow?

[Carly Craig]

So Ryan McKenzie actually had a really great recommendation that I am implementing now with no days wasted. And that's the. After it's been delivered to them for maybe 10 days or something like that, just sending them a. Like a very short, plain text email. Hey, have you tried blank yet? How is it? My thought as you guys were talking about this, I'm like strategizing the background was that if we just. If that was going to our customer success team and then we had a couple of different little blurbs that we could send back to them is that if they do like it, to encourage the second purchase, perhaps it's like, okay, here's a code and it'll add an extra like a travel pack on the next purchase that you make. So you guys are actually giving me ideas as you're talking. But specifically at. At Mini Katana. It. It was more difficult for us at first because we had. We were thinking about the swords, right? And for the most part, people buy one sword. There are a few people who, you know, have 10 in their living room, but that's generally not the case. So there was a really. Isaac had a really smart idea about selling them other products. And so we did start to venture out into a few different things. And actually I had. This just clicked right now. One of the things we're talking about was candy back in those days. So I mean, like, he. He went really hard with, okay, we're gonna sell them something else. That is so funny. But he also had kind of the little smaller, like truly Mini Katanas, right? Because a lot of the customer base was younger. They couldn't even buy the larger katanas in the first place. They'd be messaging us like, please tell my mom to buy me buttons. It was sometimes the issue of them not even be able to buy for the first time. So that's really interesting.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. The reason I ask is because we are. We give a customer exclusive offer immediately post purchase. We do 40% off. So it's like our biggest. It's 40% off $100 plus, which has been incredibly effective in driving up repurchase rate like, like on a. Not only activating new orders, but we're driving up a of. We're driving significantly more revenue. Our cohort data has just been like, up and to the right for the last year or so. It's also benefited from the new products we've launched. But I don't love from a brand perspective, I don't love offering that discount immediately after purchase. So we try to tee it up as like a thank you. Like how do you, how do you give a discount to a customer in as elevated of a way as possible? So it's not like, ooh, big markdown pricing, 40% off. It is thank you. We've also spent a lot of time for getting shoppers signed in and then having more of like a account experience. So it's like, hey, sign in, you get your lifetime Warranty. We have 99 day risk free trial. If you need to return it, this will be easier. And by activating your account you'll get 40% off. Here's the code so you can get the, the promo either way. But we try to like wrap it up in the experience of being a Ridge customer, which I feel pretty good about. But it's like a difficult line to walk I think.

[Carly Craig]

So Connor, you guys have the, the account backend as well. Can you guys tell me a little bit about how that helps? I've never, I've never dealt with the totally friend before.

[Andrew]

So one of my thesises for increasing lifetime value. So like also when I say lifetime value it's. It's the delta between the lifetime value and the initial order value. Right. Some people like group those together. But what I really want to do is if we get a hundred dollars from a customer on their initial order, I really care from a retention perspective about the incremental dollars that we're driving after the fact. Ridge historically has been a very low LTV business. People also only buy one wallet and ours are guaranteed for life. So there's not a lot of reason to buy too many. So we've been thinking about this problem of how do we drive, how do we drive additional purchases over time. And really step one, I think a lot of people jump to like, oh, a loyalty program. We're going to offer points, we're going to offer incentive, we're going to offer bigger discounts, etc. Really step number one is just how do you make the experience of being a Ridge customer better? And I think having a slightly more personalized catered experience on the site is a great way to do that. So we started exploring. I mean we don't do anything super special. We were using status accounts for a while. They closed down last year. We're using Revo now who we're super happy with and that is you get signed in. It's pretty seamless. In doing that, you create an account, you get easier access to warranty information, to the risk free trial. It's integrated with, it's integrated with package tracking and return. So like all of that is just much easier. And my thinking is, hey, if we can get more people into that experience, I, I think they become more likely to repeat purchase. Now what we found is people who create accounts are. Have a significantly higher ltv. I don't have the number off the top of my head. That's a little bit of a wonky number because anybody engaging with your brand after the fact is going to have a higher ltv. But I feel good about the people who are going through this experience are repurchasing at a really high rate. And at the very least, and we kind of talked about this on the last episode, Connor. I just feel better about that experience. It's like, okay, worst case scenario, it doesn't make an impact. But we've provided a better customer experience, easier access to returns if you need it, easier access to warranty when you need it. So that's kind of where we've landed.

[Connor]

And we just used it for the sweepstakes, Carly. Because we were like, we needed a, we needed a way to power the a. The actual accounting but then be the awareness from. One of the things I hate about as a consumer is when I like opt in for something and it's a gamified experience and then they don't confirm with me like, like, I, I think I know what I received but like there's no way for me to go and like opt in or like sign in and be like, no, it's right here. It's itemized. I can confirm I have this. So that's, that's why we ended up rolling out the account experience with Revo. We kind of just like rode bridges, tailwinds because they were kind of building a lot of this for ridges sweepstakes. And then we ran ours and it was really, really cool for that. We know we're going to use it more in the future. Like we, we have plans to roll out a loyalty program at some point and that will probably be a really big component of it, but we're not using it for much outside of the sweeps right now.

[Andrew]

I'll give you one other. Like I mentioned this on the last episode too. We rolled out this loyalty experience which is just like a page that has some like light personalization. It also gives you access to the most pertinent information, no points. There's no incentives you do get. If we have any sort of like customer offer running, you can see it there. So you just get access to the stuff we want you to have access to. One of the things we do there that I think is really cool, similar to the sweepstakes and entry tracking is we say in our post purchase, you know, we want to, we're designing products for life. That's like the mission for the company. This is day one. You just purchased your wallet or your carry on or your wedding band and we want to be there at day 999 or whatever. Right. Like that's a lot of our framing. And when you log into this loyalty experience, if you're a customer, you can see, oh hey, it is day 457 for me. Or it is day 89 and that's a dynamic day that adjusts from when your first purchase was. And I just think that's really cool.

[Connor]

That is cool. Carly, I want to, I want to ask you a question here. This is, I want you to beat this up if you think this is not the approach. But so we don't do, like I said, we don't do a lot of discounting post purchase. However, the caveat is that part of our welcome offer is the second order offer where like you opt in and then based on how much you spend on your first order, you are getting an offer on your second order. And we're iterating on that. We found that that has a, as you probably would expect, like a much better reorder rate and much better lifetime revenue than only incentivizing the first order. So what we do is you opt in, you buy whatever, depending on how much you spend, you get an offer on your next order. 14 days after the first purchase is when we swing you into that general cross sell flow. You haven't gotten, you haven't gotten your, your offer yet because it has to be with it outside the return window. So we're saying 14 days after we're going to send you in this three email sequence. I think it goes for the course of like, I don't know, 10 to 14 days. And then almost right when that ends, that's when you get your, your next offer. So we're like, you buy, we're educating you on our product categories and then on day 30, depending on how much you spent on your first order, then you go into that 75 or that like up to 75 off order. So our thought is like come in by, we're Gonna educate you a bunch by the time you've hopefully had time to wrap your head around like everything else we have. Here's the second order offer. I'm sure it could be optimized. So far it seems like that is, it is driving a better reorder rate. But I was curious your thoughts on like, do you think that timing makes sense?

[Carly Craig]

Well, I guess you have to wait until after the return period or else every day.

[Connor]

Right.

[Carly Craig]

So are you actually reminding them or you're explaining it further other than just like some small text in the pop up about this second order?

[Connor]

Oh, it's pretty prevalent in our welcome flow too.

[Carly Craig]

Okay. I mean that's awesome. Montana Knife Co. Kind of talks about this as well with their, their drop that they do weekly. But it's kind of, it's training your customer to be excited for something that's coming. So rather than it being an afterthought, it's like oh I, I'm going to get this discount in this many days and setting them up to come back whenever it gets to them. It's not just like oh surprise, like here's 5% off. They're waiting for it at that point, which I love.

[Connor]

Right. Right. All right, good. You're making me feel better about the, the timing of it. I was like, I've been, I'm like, when should we time these two things together? So North Beam just released this new attribution model called Clicks and Views Enhanced and I am really excited about it. I think it is really, really game changing for brands measuring the performance of view heavy channels like TikTok. So I want to explain first, what is the difference between this new model of attribution and northbeam's other models of attribution? North Theme's other models of attribution are probabilistic and they're probabilistic because they're doing machine learning to make their best guess about where purchases, where revenue is coming from. What's different about this Clicks and Enhanced Views is that because they're working directly with the platform, it's now deterministic. They're actually able to connect a real impression to a real purchase. Which just means that ultimately this data is, is real data. It's not modeled data that has really serious implications. What it means is that now instead of only getting a 24 hour look on view based attribution, you now get just as long of windows that you're getting on clickspace. So now if you go into, if you go to Clicks and Views, you'll notice that no matter how long you extend the Clickbase window in North Beam, that view based always stays at one day. When you now go into the clicks and enhance views, you'll notice that whatever time window you're selecting is for views and clicks. So now in TikTok you can actually measure a conversion 30, 60, 90 days from that impression. Which again is really important for brands that have a lot of top of funnel happening through videos and really important for brands that have longer consideration periods or that conversion often is not going to happen within that first 24 hours of seeing that video. I was just looking at this last night. I was simply selecting the same period of time and clicking back and forth between the 90 day click one day view and the new enhanced clicks and views window that has 90 day click 90 day view. And the amount of of attribution in ROAS increase and revenue increase that I saw was, was really, really insightful and I can't emphasize enough how important this is for channels that don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google Ad and are a lot more video view heavy like TikTok. So right now the clicks and views enhanced only covers TikTok and it's still in beta. But this attribution model is rolling out to other platforms very soon. If you want to check out the incredible results of the TikTok beta and just more information on it in general, check out North Beam's landing page at NorthBeam IO forward slash clicks and dash views enhanced.

[Carly Craig]

I wanted to ask you guys before we pass on to something else about the loyalty program. So Andrew, who was your previous retention director at Hexclad, was talking to me about the loyalty program that you guys are going to roll out and how he didn't believe in the, you know, give us your birthday and get a certain number of points or like do this thing, do this thing, get points. And your guys's outlook on it was more we are going to focus on the people who have spent a certain amount of money, the people who are true VIPs and then make them like micro influencers for the brand. So I think you guys are sending them maybe like branded aprons and things like that, which I think is amazing. I actually had not considered that idea until writing the book because there were some other large brands that have the same thought. So I would love to hear anything else you guys have to say on loyalty.

[Connor]

Yeah, so you know, Sean, Sean Frank. Actually I screenshotted this and sent this to our team when we were, when we were doing a lot of scheming on this program last year, he was, it was basically telling a story of how he showed up to a department store, he bought something, he got a discount because he was a member of the loyalty program. But he had no clue. He had no idea he was in this program, had no idea he had any discounts. And our, our general like the, the like baseline of our program is you're not getting a discount by being in our loyalty program. It's not like if you spend $3,000, you get 20 off your every order from there on out for the next year. Like a, that's just like a super devalued approach to the brand and B, this person already spent three grand with us. We don't need to give them better discounts to get them to spend more like they want us. They like our products already. So our approach is just like the loyalty program is only value added. There's no discounting. It's only just like, it's really like cool brand experience period. So let's, you know, like if you're in the highest tier, maybe you get like. We're thinking about branding the different tiers. So like what Andrew was talking about is hey, if you're in the highest tier, let's have like a, a black apron club, if that's what it's called. Let's have like a custom apron where if you spend three grand, bang, you get sent a black apron club apron. Or maybe you get like a gold plated hex mill or maybe you get access to these digital cooking classes that, that no one else has access to or maybe like a gift card to another brand. Like just like fun stuff like that. That's just like, like really cool brand experience is basically what we want to do with the program and just not have any sort of hey, you have 5, 000 points. Thus you get to, you know, redeem like that's equals $500. Like I just, maybe that works and there's a time and a place for that. But for us we're trying to make loyalty just like a, we're trying to optimize customer like really cool customer experience over everything else when we do it, we'll see when we do it. But that's, that's like our overall approach and we just don't want to discount at all in our loyalty program.

[Carly Craig]

The gift card is really interesting, especially if you partnered with some sort of food brand.

[Andrew]

Right?

[Carly Craig]

Is that what you guys were thinking?

[Connor]

Yeah. So the initial yes Exactly. Like there's this, there's you know, a bunch of brands out there that basically sell these products that are like, you get the ingredients and you get a class, like a digital class. So we were thinking it could be cool to say hey, part of our whatever tier is like you get one of these courses and then on the back end that brand would then be motivated to promote us to their audiences because we're, we have them as part of. So it's, it's kind of like a loyalty. Like how can we bring people from their ecosystem into ours by like giving their experience to our VIP customers and then they're trying to bring net new people into ours. So yeah, it's just like very. There's all sorts of, you know, as you can imagine, super complimentary things like that. You could even do like a gift basket of sorts, which I think would be cool. Like here's a gift basket of like a really high end olive oil and like spices from Spice Walla who already partner with and like a knife sharpener. Like there's all sorts of like just fun things like that that you can do in a loyalty program.

[Carly Craig]

Cool.

[Andrew]

Well, I've spent a lot on Hexclad, Connor, so you just let me know when this is in place. So I start getting my black apron and my olive oil. These are all good I ideas back.

[Connor]

For you for sure. But, but Connor, I want to know like I wrote it down big and bold in my. Because I've heard you a few times mention that you launched your loyal loyalty program and I like I wanted to pick your brain. So I'm curious, you know, basically redirecting Carly's question to you, like how are you thinking about your loyalty program and making sure it's a value ad?

[Andrew]

Yeah. So no, I like what you said about value add and ours would be value add in a much lighter touch way. Right. Like for me it, the, the, the sign. So I'm big on signed in shopping. I think that gets more popular over time. We're signing in more people, we're getting them logged into accounts. We know who they are, we know who they bought. Once we have all that information, just how do we provide a, a better experience? And that's largely what we're doing now. So I think we're at like V1 and I'd really, I, I think we could improve like multiples from here, but just basic blocking and tackling of the order tracking. I really want to build out a better warranty portal. Like we generous warranty and we are really great to our customers. And our products are designed in a way that they are modular and parts can be replaced and like. So we've invested in from a product and design perspective. Now how do we invest in that from a, from a customer perspective and like how do we make that even better? Right now it's like you easy access to our customer service and we will send you the replacement parts you need, things like that. But how can we elevate that even further? I think would be really, really cool. For instance, we have our, our never lost in forever fit program on our wedding bands which is the average guy changes ring sizes twice in his life just because you're, you're gaining or losing weight or you know, some people lose them. So you need replacements and we offer 2x replacements and I, I think we were the first wedding band brand to do that. The experience of like the never lost forever fit protection should be like 10x better. And that requires you to be signed in us to know you're a ring customer. So we can make that really great. That's really like thinking about. And I think if we have more experiences like that, people just become that much more likely to become advocates of the brand or to repurchase from us. The other piece that I would say is we're launching so many new products. We've got like 120 go to market items. We're launching hundreds of new SKUs this year. We have different LTV offers so we're willing to give promos or exclusive access to certain products on certain products to certain customers. And we just need kind of a home base to do that. So if you're a customer, I want you to be able to log in and have access to all of those things. The new products, the, the exclusive offers that you get based on your customer status and easy access to our warranties or tracking or returns or whatever else. That's really like where my vision for it and that'll take a year to build out. So a little bit different than how you guys are describing it, but something I'm, I'm super excited about. I think like Lululemon has like a fantastic customer portal that we, we're, we will take some inspo from. There's like a Nike football brand that's also really strong. You get to like choose your favorite team and they'll give you updates around that. So there's, there's some examples out there. I don't think there's that many, but that's kind of the, the future. We're building towards so very white gloves, very white glove. And then you can also imagine how it's white glove but it's self service at the same time. It's just like an elevated self service experience. But you could also imagine how that becomes like, like more one to one interactions with our team. Like all of a sudden we have more people signed in. We know what they want, we know what they're looking for. If that becomes a one to one reaction in, you know, with our team, then we kind of have that information readily available and the whole thing just becomes a little bit better. I think in a way it could be a rising tide that lifts all boats. Do you guys want to talk about Drops? I think I'd love to hear both of your guys's perspectives. There's a great section in the book. Let me pull it up since I got this sticky note in it there's Francis Wynn, senior director of e commerce for 100 thieves who crushed Drops for so long. He talks about, he's got some great examples. He says their playbook was first looks, call to actions storytelling. And then the one I really liked that we're totally going to implement is he says, a post purchase flow to create like a Gotham moment which I don't think about at all. And we're trying to get into drops and, and having a more unique post purchase experience was like a big one that I took away from, from some of the strategies in the book. Connor, let me kick it to you. What's I know you guys have been developing the playbook around new product launches and drops. So like what is that looking like as of late?

[Connor]

Yeah, so in the context of retention, I mean most products we're not building acquisition funnels around, it's like we are continuing to optimize our category breadcrumbs on site. And that's kind of our like, hey, if, if people wanted this on the first order, they're going to find it by doing that. So for us, most of the time it's very own media driven. I wouldn't say it's super. I mean we're just kind of blocking and tackling on the basic stuff. You know, we have a launch strategy which will consist of anywhere from two to four email and SMS campaigns throughout the initial month that it goes live. Then we'll have a sustained strategy where we will pepper it in for the next, you know, two to three months and we'll kind of position it with certain recipes or just like, you know, all these different ways that you can write About a new product, right. If it's a, a new size stock pot, like there's not, there's like infinite ways to like position that with a recipe. So that's part of the sustained strategy we will update. If it's a very prominent product, we'll go and update our general cross sell flow with creative. It's like hey, if we have this new Dutch oven I think we think is really going to crush like let's go put that in the Dutch oven section of our cross sell flow. We will create these like campaign blocks which I already mentioned. Like we will do that for categories but also for new products. It's like hey, now we're in month two and we have an email campaign that's about, you know, some recipe but in the middle of it we have a block that's like check out our brand new, you know, insert product name Sustain. Sustain strategy. And then the other big ones, upsells. Like we have a lot of products coming out recently and in the future that are just really nice fits with existing products. So like the steamer basket is a great example. I mean that's such an amazing upsell on our 12 piece set, on our six piece pot set. So just making sure that, you know, that's outside of the, the own media channels of course, but just making sure that all these super complementary or complimentary products are just really positioned well within existing funnels that we know hundreds and thousands of people are going to go through on any given month.

[Andrew]

And then do you guys do so. Yeah, yeah, I love those. And you know you're launching new products and you're like deeply integrating them across the cross sell flows and things. Do you guys do anything that's like truly limited edition? I'm thinking maybe some of the influencer stuff possibly.

[Connor]

Yeah. We've only done one. Our Benny Blanco launch.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Was a limited edition drop and I'd say mixed results on that one. We definitely haven't developed that muscle as well as we would like to. The other one was the sweepstake or not the sweepstakes, the super bowl. That was another one where we made, we made Custom Area 51 test kitchen products and that was really interesting. Some good insights on like which we had four custom products and there was some, a lot of awesome insights and like very actual next steps based on which products move better than others. So, so it's something that we, there's a very clear roadmap for it with one of our product categories. I'll leave it at that. And we need to build that muscle more. Because I think for us, especially in this category I'm talking about where we just don't have. That's not what we're known for. I think it's going to be a really, really, really necessary way to tap into new audiences that we are not ever going to reach with a cookware ad or even an ad of this product from our brand. So it's something we're gonna keep developing and, and probably hit up, you know, folks like you and, and Mike from Simple Modern who do all sorts of like, you know, licensed, you know, co branded products.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So we, we had an interesting. We, we've been trying to get into more. We have a, we've done seasonal products for a while. Right. So like Alaska Twilight came out in January. We still have it but it's gonna sell through by April, May and then it will be gone forever. So that's not really quite a drop. This year will be the first year where we do like true drops. We've got like a thousand units. We did our first one a couple weeks ago with Dessert Warrior, which is like the lore behind. It's one of the more famous like patterns. It's just like donut. There's this story where I think this knife company was designing patterns and they wanted to do a Desert Warrior knife, but they actually put Dessert Warrior and then the guy makes like a donut knife. And like that was the start of it. And it's a common, like a number of people have now engaged with this, this brand. They kind of license out the IP and it's, it's very like hype driven, drop driven. So we did that for the very first time. And so we've only got a thousand units. We do a. And I'd love to hear your guys feedback on this strategy. We did like a VIP customer experience where it was like just four or five thousand people. We said, hey, you guys are our most valuable customers. We appreciate it so much. We want to give you early access to this. Then we did a customer exclusive rollout and then we did the public launch. And there's really two issues. Well, the big issue was I don't think the pattern landed with our audience. Like the people that we had in our CRM list were just unfit. We tried to explain the lore but like unfamiliar or disinterested in this and like we did not sell through nearly the way that we anticipated and we drove a lot of awareness. We had like Marques Brownlee tweeted about it the day before that it was dropping the next day that got like half a million impressions. We did a good job kind of like building awareness and interest both within our our list and, and publicly Drop just doesn't land. We don't sell through organically. It ends up crushing in ads which was like our fallback plan where it's like, hey, let's we could put paid media behind this. We'll see how it goes. So clearly people wanted it, but those people did not exist in our list. So moving forward we've got. I think our job will become easier because I think the. The future drops that we have will be better fits for our audience. I won't talk about exactly what they are, but like just a better f our customer demo. But one of the big things I think we can do better is this like the, the idea of teasing like before it ever is put up for sale, someone knows days before or weeks before that this is coming. We kind of build up interest that way. And then two, I think we're going to use it as a way to build up the SMS list. So doing like a customer exclusive launch, then an SMS exclusive launch, maybe email after that, then public and like really spend a lot of time pre public launch so that we could sell through as much as possible beforehand, have a really easy sellout moment and then kind of like it's not quite a Gotham moment like the guy from 100 Thieves described in the book, but we do want to have like a sellout moment where we make that another like messaging beat within the campaign where we say, hey, this is now gone. I think that drives scarcity. It reinforces the idea of exclusivity. It should also theoretically help us on future launches of drops Drop. So that's like, that's how our playbook has been developing. Do you think I'm missing anything? Any other guidance you'd give?

[Carly Craig]

No. It's very similar though to what Portland Leather Goods does with their customer base. So when they are looking at launching a new product, they first test it by giving it to them as like a first look and then if it does well then they add it to their main line. But it's a great idea.

[Andrew]

Yeah, they have a. What's his name? Matt Fay, I think from Portland Leather Goods. Yeah, he talks about their like very engaged Facebook community. We don't have anything like that. But Connor, your, your value add community could do the same thing where it's like you have a couple thousand customers who are super engaged, have spent quite a bit of money and that becomes like its own distribution. Channel for anything that's like limited edition exclusive. Improved sell through is also value add to to, you know, important customers.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Isaac]

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[Connor]

We're trying to do the same thing that you mentioned in terms of the. The hype building. Like, we've done this in the past with. We'll create these landing pages that are just all about the product. And it has like, you know, coming soon, opt in to like, if. If you want to know first, which has been good. And. And if you look at the segment, like the revenue per user and it's like, worth it. Like the. Those segment of people that are engaging with, that are converting incredibly well when you actually drop that product. And that's honestly, no, not that different than what we did with the super bowl, right? Where we had this whole influencer, organic, social kind of like, you know, the equivalent of the teaser. And then we had. With the super bowl happened and like, we had so much momentum going already versus just launching the super bowl. And that was the beginning or just launching the product. And this is the first time people are hearing about it. So I think that the concept, like, scales well to other. To other, you know, parts of the business. One example we're looking at right now that they're doing a really nice job is. Is uni. They have this really cool landing page on their website that has, like, really compelling product video and imagery and. And content, you know, join the wait list. Like, like, it's. It's a very compelling page that I would definitely opt in. And this is the type of stuff that we're trying to do more often. I think for some of our, like, tier A launches where we're building hype with our own media list, but it also lives on our core site. Totally, like organic traffic or paid traffic is also opting in. And now we just have this like, huge moment where like, we launch or we just have built up so much demand that this thing just really goes really quickly. So we're trying to get better at that. And then on the cooking with hexcloud, we're trying to just, like, seed it with that audience sooner so we can have, like, reviews from our best customers sitting there once we launch publicly. So it's like, all right, three months ago, we opened up, you know, 50, 100 units to cooking with Hexclad at maybe a discounted price, maybe not. They bought, we followed up with them. We got like 20 solid reviews out of those group. And now we have this like, like, new product and literally the best people to write a review have written a review. So if now this cold audience is hitting this page and it's like, this is the best review social proof you could ever see. Like, that's. That's also we've gotten better at but we're still probably only like a 4 out of 10 on it. And we're trying to get further and further ahead of of these things so we can do stuff like that.

[Carly Craig]

I'd love to tell you guys about Montana knife companies drop.

[Isaac]

Let's do it.

[Carly Craig]

Okay, so they have their tried and true products that they always have on stock on site and their biggest lever for driving growth is their drops. Excuse me. So first you have to know that people who buy knives are often collectors and have many, many knives. And so each week they do it the same time every week and they make each email. They do email an SMS like it, it's out of a magazine. So they do this very elaborate photo shoot with with it every time so that even if the person isn't planning on buying anything, they always want to come and see the new knives because they're collectors and they appreciate them and they just do these beautiful emails. Actually most of their email marketing is directed all around these drops. I think they send like four or five drop emails every single week and they even started doing secondary drops on Saturdays with accessories. But anyway, the point is that often it drives people the site just to see the beautiful email that they've created this new knife and then they'll go and even buy the in stock things they're on. Totally what I wanted to say Connor are that you mentioned like, oh, how do we add more scarcity? This, this reminded me of that because it's limited every time they do these drops too. So they know that, that they have to be on site at 7pm on Thursdays and they said over time as they continue to do this every Thursday, people are on half an hour before waiting like they can see that everyone is coming back every week because it's going to sell out super quickly. Which is something that Portland Leather Goods does really well in their community too. So I am in there just watching and seeing how they do things and they have this like damaged or blemished sale that they do it. It's called like a C grade or something like that. And it only goes on for 15 minutes. And you're supposed to only buy one product. The customers can buy one product. And after this 15 minutes is up, you see all of these people going like I got six of them, I got, I got three of them because I asked my daughter and my son to get on same time and then you know, only a small portion of people actually got one of the bags and they're still really Nice bags. Bags. And all of the other people in the community are pissed. So it's really creating this really interesting polarity as well. But then it makes it so next time that they have a drop into this community they are ready and they're there and they're like waiting for this and they want to know ahead of time when it's happening because they're mad that like this lady in Arkansas bought 10 bags and she was only supposed to have one and they didn't get one that time.

[Connor]

Or like this competition almost. Yeah.

[Carly Craig]

Cool. So cool to watch.

[Connor]

That's so cool. That is really cool. And I love how, I love. How is it? It's Montana Knife Co. Is that what it's called?

[Carly Craig]

Yes.

[Connor]

I love how they. I think there's. There's so much value into like conditioning your consumer by via consistency. It's like every Saturday. Like they're there, they're waiting. God, there Was this in 2020 there was this, this Covid brand that's still probably doing well. They were selling those like it was children's furniture that you could reorient in a bunch of ways. And I remember being at the Homestead office like me and Zach and like, like Riley and like four others on our team and we think that they probably sold out like $5 million of inventory in like two and a half minutes. It was the craziest shit in the world. And like to have an audience that you can build that level of demand for on a drop is just like I think that's every brand stream and it sounds like that's like what that Montana Knife Co company is, is like getting at. And same with Portland Leather. It sounds like with some of these other activations they're doing totally.

[Andrew]

You know, I like hearing that story about Mon Knife Co. You know there's obviously revenue that you can attribute to drops which for them is probably extremely meaningful. But just having the product and operations process in place where you can have something new every Friday and just the value of that mind share is crazy. And that's those people coming by coming back and just buying the standard thing that's always in stock. But they wouldn't have otherwise been there I think often goes overlooked. We had an interesting again we have all these new seasonal launches. So we launched traditional Flash which is this tattoo design. And what I thought was really interesting is also performs incredibly well in ads. Great click through rate, great engagement. All of those things we pulled, I think we talked about this on the last episode also we pulled the line item level data and almost half of the revenue was attributable to other products. So all we need is like the new color, the new design to get in front of someone who's. I would imagine a lot of these are relatively, it's a relatively warm audience. They know what Ridge is and stands for as a brand. They're coming through and then they're finally buying the, the standard black gun, metal carbon fiber wallet. So that just seems like obviously justification for investing in product design and newness. But then also again coming back to like how do you activate that? Via email, SMS communities, things like that. That's why I read in the book, I was like, yeah, it felt very like retention oriented. So much of it was about leveraging community across a number of different channels.

[Carly Craig]

This actually kind of goes into short form video as well because obviously Isaac's known for that. But then there's like a Peachy Babies. Are you guys familiar with Peachy Babies, the slime company?

[Connor]

Yes.

[Carly Craig]

Okay, so they, they have the same sort of virality as Mini Katana, but it's the same idea. It's. You have to have the, the different skus. Like Minitana really did do a drop style even though it wasn't necessarily the strategy ahead of time. But the slime company did the same thing but because it was so easy to make and it was in their own warehouse, they could have, you know, 20 new slimes every week. And so people just loved seeing the new thing they'd come up with what is the new little item that they put in the slime or what is the new sword? And it's kind of the same idea as the Monopoly knife company where they just are coming to see what the new thing is and then like you said, buying, buying other stuff. So it's pretty cool.

[Andrew]

100. 100.

[Connor]

Are they leaning on. Can I ask one more question about. Curious about the Montana Knife Company? So are they leaning on. All right, so a little background here because we are thinking about like how do you roll out a, a new product? When we roll it out, we do not want to discount it because it just devalues the product. So we're trying to find the balance. Like, like, oh, it's a sale period. It's November, let's say. And we want to take advantage of the high buyer intent, but we also don't want to discount it. But we worry that if we don't it's not going to seem as, you know, whatever, desirable when you're comparing it to some of the other products that are on Sale during like a Black Friday. So the question becomes like, how do you take advantage of that intent and drive revenue on it when it's not discounted? I think there's some like, like, you know, there's less, there's offers that are less like devaluing than others. But I think one of the things I'm thinking a lot about right now is we're having this conversation just like bang hard on scarcity, like build a lot of demand and then be like, hey, here's our brand new product. We only have 500 of these right now, so if you want to be the first to get your hands on it, like, you should buy it now. And then we're gonna have a, a proper like extended rollout in Q1 or whatever. So that's why I was gonna ask you about Montana Knife Co. Like, like, if they roll out like a new color or a new style, are they really hammering scarcity on this to like really even make that demand even more effective at converting?

[Carly Craig]

Yeah, they have a limited run for it might only be like a hundred or three hundred, whatever it is. But the purpose is getting them to site and getting this like affinity for the brand. So it does, there is some revenue from the drop, but it's just overall growth for them.

[Connor]

Right. Okay. I check these guys out.

[Andrew]

Awesome. So I think we did pretty good coverage on the book. We got through a lot of what I wanted. Before we let you go, Carly, you had something in your notes that I have to ask about. You spent quite a bit of money on coaching.

[Carly Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Being coached, from what I understand. Curious. Any lessons from that and advice for someone who also wants to get like more formal coaching?

[Carly Craig]

Yes. So I.

[Andrew]

And also, will you say the dollar amount?

[Carly Craig]

Yeah, I don't mind. I think it's important to know how much I invest in myself. I mean, so I'm, I'm 31 and have had quite a lot of work experience in my life. But the only reason that I'm in the place that I am now is because I spent the money that I was making and on coaching. So, for example, the most impactful one early on was my executive coach, which, I mean, I was like 27 whenever I hired him. And he worked with me for two years every week. And every issue that I had, I was able to come to him and we, we talked through all of it. He also really helped me implement eos as well. So honestly, I don't think that my agency would have made it into the seven figure range. I don't think that we would have sold it. I don't know that I would have worked with Isaac. Like there, there are so many things that happened because of that coaching. It's like it 10 xed my experience. So it wasn't just mine, it was his. And then getting to implement that over time. I've had a number of different types of coaches, but the executive coach was the most impactful and it really helped me make the best decisions to grow our company as fast as we did.

[Andrew]

If someone, if someone wanted to look for a coach, how would they do it?

[Carly Craig]

Oh, gosh. I guess right now if I was looking for a new coach because I would be choosing something very specific. I like to use Mentor Pass and sometimes I'll end up talking to people I don't know four, five, six times and then learn one specific thing and then go to the next person. So I mean probably 10, 15 grand of that 150 went to Mentor pass and me just talking to lots of different people. So I would do more specific topics now, I think because I have already had like the holistic executive coaching. But I guess probably just ask on ask on Twitter. Hey guys. No one here at executive coaches and I'm sure there are a bunch that come out.

[Andrew]

Connor rolling's on mentor pass. So if anybody's looking for Connor as a mentor, I think they could book out a couple hours.

[Connor]

Well, well, my, my time is set to zero right now. Sorry. Sorry, Kenny. I love you. I'll get, I'll get some time back. Yeah, time set to zero right now because it's a. It's a busy season at Hexclad. Fair enough. So we'll, we'll see. Maybe I'll be back there one day.

[Andrew]

Amazing. Well, Carly, thank you much. Thank you so much for coming on. Great episode on email and sms. I recommend email is not dead to any retention marketers out there. Where can people find you or any. Any closing comments?

[Carly Craig]

Amazon and you can find me on Twitter. I really don't post nearly as much as I used to, but I am still there checking it and, and stalking everyone else.

[Andrew]

Amazing. All right, thank you again.

[Connor]

Awesome.

[Carly Craig]

Thanks guys.

[Andrew]

All right, thank you again for Carly Craig to coming on. It was a great episode. Make sure to share with your marketing friends your retention family like and subscribe. Give us comments on YouTube, any feedback. Much appreciated. And lastly, but as always, thank. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich Panel, aftercell and North Beach.