Dear Friends,
I know it has been a bit since I sent my last Behind the Scenes Email. First off, you may notice a slight change in the way this email looks. I have tried to keep it as close to the original layout as possible, but some minor differences are inevitable. The main cause of this was a switch from our prior email provider to Shopify email.
A few years back we began working with an excellent marketing firm who helped us get our email systems up and running. They set us up on Klaviyo since they knew that platform the best. That's where all our email flows were built.
The Flows are series of messages that usually have some branching logic in them. The next email you get will depend on how you interact with the prior email in the flow. This allows for some cool and complex marketing activities, like providing information about how to refill your journal if you got a journal.
Well years have gone by and our emails are beginning to look quite old and tired. Some of them have products or colors we don't even sell anymore. So as I work on overhauling all our website design, advertising strategy, and other creatives, it seemed to be a good time to rebuild our email flows with new content.
Since I didn't build the original flows in Klaviyo, I wasn't familiar with their platform. We also haven't been using Klaviyo to its full potential. Thus it was also a good time to evaluate if we wanted to jump ship to something else for our emails. In the end, it was about a third the price to use Shopify Emails rather than Klaviyo. Hence the difference in appearance.
It's hard to tell if the new flows are working as well as the old flows, and this issue is compounded by a totally new marketing strategy we implemented last week.
After some discussion with our Shopify expert as we evaluate switching to Shopify Plus, we realized that our marketing funnel is more of a flat plate. Normal advertising follows a somewhat generic funnel with each company adding their own flavor to it, but it looks something like a three fold approach. Awareness, Consideration, Conversion.
For an analogy, we can think of a store. Awareness is exactly what it sounds like, someone knows that you exist and roughly what you do or make. This is a broad bucket, but should have some parameters. Ideally you can narrow that top bucket by interests, or other demographic data so that the audience isn't everyone everywhere. This campaign is purely trying to get the ad in front of as many eligible eyes as possible for the cheapest ad spend.
Below that is Consideration. This is people who land on your site (walking into the store) and browse for a little while. They haven't picked anything up off the shelf, just looked. From a marketing perspective this audience can be built off people who interacted with the advertising in the awareness bucket. (for example, watching 7 seconds of a 15 second ad).
Finally there is the Consideration bucket. These are people who picked something off the shelf, but didn't make it to the end checkout. The digital version of this is Add to Cart, but left the site before checkout. A lot of people do this, me included, and the reason for leaving the site can be anything from price, to shipping options, to simply getting distracted.
Technically, there is also a fourth bucket which is remarketing to past customers. These people usually have their own campaign which is often built mainly on email.
So we have totally overhauled our ad strategy entirely and it's too early to tell if its working. So now we don't know if our emails are working, or if our social media ads are working.
What an ideal time to overhaul the website as well.
Actually, the website overhaul has been in the design works for a little while now. I've talked a bit in previous behind the scenes about how we are trying to figure out what the right design is for the customer journey. Mostly, it involves an enormous amount of new photography and videos.
This mainly falls to me.
So my time has been spent working on the website backend. I'll try to go more into that in the next letter. If you want to hear more the Podcast is back. The latest episode was posted today on Youtube. You can also listen to it on Spotify or anywhere you can find podcasts.
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin MurdyCEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
