Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Gary Redmond founded his Subscription Box business BusterBox.com in 2016 with no prior business experience (and no money).
After failing for many years, he eventually grew it to over $11 Million in total sales, learning exactly what it's like trying to grow a business on limited resources.
This led Gary to try and master the super-powerful and free (but often underappreciated) marketing channel which is email marketing.
Everything you hear on the show is proven, and Gary shares these battle-tested growth hacking strategies so you can implement them in your business right away to make more money.
If you're a beginner, you will get a grounding in the fundamentals of email marketing and how to apply it to get your business off the ground.
For more advanced folks, we'll dive deep into cool and clever hacks you can use to optimise and automate the most critical areas of your business.
This podcast is for entrepreneurs & business owners who want to learn how to use the power of email marketing to acquire, retain and upsell to their customers on autopilot.
Gary will also do his best to entertain and inspire you to create the business and the life of your dreams through your online business.
Topics covered include email marketing, e-commerce, consultant, coach, expert, entrepreneurship, automation, productivity, subscription boxes, advertising & business.
Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Personalisation Secrets - How To Get Your Subscribers Engaged
Unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your email marketing success with personalized strategies that truly connect with your audience.
Ever wondered how capturing simple details like a pet's name or birthday month can transform your engagement rates?
Join me, Gary Redmond, as I unpack my journey as a co-founder of BusterBox and reveal how our step-by-step sign-up flow has turned basic subscriber data into a powerhouse of personalized communication. You'll learn proven methods to gather essential information that elevates your email campaigns from generic to genuine.
Together, we'll navigate the art of email personalization across various business landscapes. Discover how segmenting your email lists and using merge tags can tailor your messages to resonate deeply with your subscribers’ needs.
Whether it's customizing content based on a customer's pet or creatively leveraging demographic details, these strategies promise to boost your open rates and conversions. As we conclude, I invite you to join our Subscription Box Success Facebook community for ongoing discussions and support in mastering these techniques.
Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your marketing effectiveness with personalization that speaks volumes.
- Please suggest any topic you would like me to cover by visiting unboxtheinbox.com
- Join my newsletter at garyredmond.com/newsletter
Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. So today we're going to talk about one of my favorite, one of the most effective strategies in email marketing, and that's personalization. So personalization can take your emails from really, really basic to hyper engaging, increasing your open rates and your overall sales. But you also you first need to know how to personalize effectively and the way to do that. There's three ways to do that. The first one is going to be to collect as much relevant data as possible when someone signs up for your list and there's three parts to this, not three ways, I should say. So we're going to collect the data. So, at a minimum, you want to capture each subscriber's first name. Okay, um, like I see, a lot of people still send emails without including the first name, and it always a question becomes like should I ask for the name when I ask for their email, because generally, isn't that going to decrease the you know the, the rate that people are gonna fill in your form? Usually, in my opinion, you, obviously it depends. Okay, it depends where, where you're capturing the email. If you're capturing on something like a pop-up, generally that's a good place to capture the name as well, but I find, in my opinion, it's better to have the name and to, like, lose a little bit of um conversion rate on the form than to not have the name and have thousands of emails with no names. Okay, because, um, you're basically not going to be able to personalize the emails in any way. So we we do both, to be honest with you, but the majority of our emails come from our signup flow, where we capture not only the person's name but a lot of information about their dog, in our case, for our subscription business. Okay, so if you don't have any data on your customers and you just have their email address sorry, your email leads or your email list, and you just have their email address or your email leads or your email list and you just have their email address, you can't really personalize in any way. There's a couple of things I'm going to talk about later in the episode about, like, the time that they subscribe. That might be useful for you, but, in reality, sending an email with someone's first name is the basic minimum in terms of personalization. So what we do, though, is we like your emails are gonna be a lot more relevant if you use information relevant to the reader.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we capture not only the person. We actually don't capture the person's first name in our business, and the reason why is because our customers buy for their dog. Okay, so what we do is we capture the dog's name, and we actually take it a step further than that. We capture their dog's name, their size, their breed and their birthday month, and the reason why is basically allows us to connect more personally with our customers and our email subscribers to become customers by speaking directly to their dog or to their experience as a dog owner to their dog, okay, or to their experience as a dog owner, okay.
Speaker 1:So the two main ways you can collect this information is to first build these questions into your email email form, email signup form or your lead capture flow. Okay, this is what we do. However, we don't have a big long form with like six or seven different fields. It's it is. It is kind of that. But the way we've structured is we have a sign-up flow so only one question is presented to the user at a time. So the first question that we ask is what is your dog's name? And it's built into like a horizontal sign-up flow so when they submit their dog's name, it moves to the next step.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what I wouldn't recommend is having a big form somewhere on your website to capture this information. Like, like you know, with several different fields that the customer, a potential customer, can see. You want to try and structure it in a way where it's step-by-step and ideally you just have a sign-up flow where you can capture that information and after they submit their email, you can show them your subscription options. Okay, the other way to do that to gather this information the best is to capture it at the point that they give you their email, because you already have their attention. You already have the email. The information is, like, definitely going to be submitted with that email. Okay, if they don't submit the form, you won't have their email address at all. The other thing you can do is to send a survey post signup.
Speaker 1:I generally it's a decent solution, but it's not really ideal because there's so many people that are just not going to fill out your survey and what you kind of don't want to have is to have some of your email leads with some first party data, such as name and other information that you might collect. In our case, we use dog information. That might not be obviously the case for you, but you don't want to have some people with a lot of data and other people with none. Because if you want to use some of that in your emails, what can happen is if you use one of your, if you say hey, first name, okay, and the first name is not there, it's just going to say it's going to be blank. So we're going to say, hey, it's not the worst.
Speaker 1:But if you have it in the middle of a sentence, if you say like, hey, your dog, you know jimmy, or you know, hey, jimmy would love this, if their dog's name is actually, or the information that you use in that personalization tag is not present in their profile, it'll just be blank. So like hey, space would love this won't make any sense, okay. So I generally would capture it at the point that they're submitting your form, but if you are going to do that an ideal way to do it is to have a high converting form, and the way to do that is to usually structure it in a way where only one question is asked at a time and then, when they submit the entire form, all the information is sent to your email provider. Okay, so what am I talking about? So we have, when you go to busterboxcom, if you click get started, you'll be brought to a flow, okay, and the first question you'll see is what's your dog's name? And when you submit that, then you'll see what's your dog's birthday and breed, and then after that it's what's your dog's size, or maybe the two of those are reversed, okay, but it's all step by step. And then on the fourth step, you'll see what's your email. So when they submit their email on that step, then we're going to have all the information that they've entered up until that point. So it's really, really valuable.
Speaker 1:Also, another thing to be aware of. I know I'm talking about dogs. Okay, you do not have a dog business, so think of what information is useful to you If you don't have a dog subscription box for you to capture about your customers, for example, what are they interested in, like in relation to your product. Like are they? Are they a man, are they a woman? Are they a certain age group? I don't know what information is interesting to you, but you think of that as your business. Okay, but I'm talking about dog stuff here.
Speaker 1:Use this information and translate it to your own business, because if you know somebody let's say you have a I don't know a fitness snack subscription box Okay, if you know what kind of flavors they like or what kind of brands that they like or don't like, or you know if they're trying to lose weight or gain muscles, that's very, very important information for you to maybe pass along with their email address to do some basic personalization. The most basic one I can think of is if someone is trying to gain muscle or gain weight, you'll send them fitness snacks that are high in calories. If they're trying to lose weight, you will send them fitness snacks, emails about fitness snacks that are low in calories. Simple, okay. So that's the important thing to know is to understand what information you need and to collect it in a way that doesn't harm your email collection, okay. So once we have this data, it's time to put it to work, okay.
Speaker 1:The way to do this without getting overly technical, is essentially when you're going to send an email, depending on what provider you use. I use ActiveCampaign, but when you select a list that you're trying to send it to let's say it's your lead list you can actually just use the segment builder. So there's two ways. Okay, you can actually send different emails to people who have different, like I mentioned in the previous example, if you know like half your list or whatever, is looking to lose weight and the other half is looking to gain weight or gain muscle, and then you send that email about the fitness snacks that are high in calories to that portion of the list and you might do a completely different email for people who are looking to lose weight, okay, and you send them. It might be a very similar email, but the snacks that you put pictures in or whatever, um, are all low calorie ones. You can change slightly, tweak the messaging, okay. So that's kind of where you would do it to send completely different emails based on what people are looking for.
Speaker 1:Okay, the other way that we like to personalize our emails is to actually inside the email itself, you're going to have what's called a merge tag, okay. So the most basic one is, as I mentioned before, hey, first name is going to populate that person's, the receiver's first name, okay, connected to that email address in your account when you send an email. Okay, so we would have the dog's name. Okay, and what we find is in the subject line. If we put the dog's name in the subject line, usually it grabs a lot more attention than when you don't put the dog's name in the subject line. Okay, because if you see something that says, like you can go basic with this, like you know, hey, your dog name or your dog dog name would love this.
Speaker 1:Or you can come up with something like really, really pattern interrupting like dog name has pooed the bed and we've done stuff like that in the past. Like, so it's like you know, jimmy or whatever your dog's name is, rex has pooed the bed, and it comes into your email inbox and like what the hell is this? But it's going to get you to open the email, okay, and the other thing you can do as well is in the actual email body, like for us, we might mention the dogs, the dog size of the dog's breed. This is perfect for dog size dogs. Which means, hey, this is perfect for large, medium, small dogs, whatever they have. It's going to be populated, okay. Or you can use the dog's breed. Okay, so like, if your labrador loves toys, that loves to stand up to tough chewing, you'll want to check out our new line, okay, you obviously need to be careful and creative in how you structure the sentences, because everybody's going to have a different dog breed, but we find this very, very effective. Okay, and we definitely notice an increase in open rates and sales when we use the dog's name in the email and it's in the subject line as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so like, we don't do this a whole lot, but we could send emails, as I mentioned, totally different emails to people who have large dogs or small dogs or whatever, and, and like another level of personalization that we could go to, again powered by the fact that we capture two, three, four pieces of data about our customers or potential customers. When we capture their email, we could send different emails based on their dog's breed. Okay, so like you could send an email with pictures of Labradors to everybody who has told you that they have a Labrador. That would probably increase conversion rates, in fact, that's giving me an idea. Or you could just use the merge tag in the email. This would be perfect for dogs like DogName because they are a dog breed. So it'd be like, hey, this is perfect for dogs like Rex because he is a Chihuahua, and then it's perfect for dogs like Jimmy because they are a Labrador. Okay, so it's. You can get creative and it just sounds a lot more personalized when really you're just using merge tags and it's going to sound personalized to that person when they read the email.
Speaker 1:Okay. So again I will say this again this principle applies to any business. Obviously, our case is about dogs and you know different information about our dog, but there are pieces of information that your customer, you would like to know about your customer, that matter most to you and obviously matter most to them. Okay. So, whether it's like location or product preferences, or or you know their, their birthday even is something, it's something I'm asked often when I'm signing up for, like something like I think Tommy Hilfiger I signed up for recently and they were like what's your birthday? Okay, so they, they send you an email on your birthday. They know you probably got some money in your pocket, like, hey, you know, here's your birthday discount. Okay, it's a really really good thing you can do and it's really clever. So another one or two ones you could do.
Speaker 1:Like you could also send emails and you could automate these as well, but based on how recently someone joined your list. For example, if you have someone, if you wanted to send an email this week to people who joined your list in the last 30 days, you'd be like hey, you've been here, you know, welcome to the. You know, I see you're new on my list, or you're new on our list or whatever, just wondering what's holding you back from purchasing or do you need that? Or here's a special discount code, or here's an offer that we're running right now. Or you can send an email again segment segmenting people when you're about to send it, to be like they have joined the list over 180 days ago, so they've been hanging around your list for at least six months or more. And you can be like hey, I see you're hanging around the list a long time.
Speaker 1:Or you can personalize the messaging. Even though the email, the offer, might remain very similar, if not the same, you can personalize it to say like hey, you've been hanging around here a long time without buying. Like you know, here's an extra, an extra push. Okay, so a little customization goes a long way. But the first thing you need to do is you need to capture the information at the point that someone sends, gives you their email or do a survey, post, post, sign up but I'm not a big fan of that and then figure out the information that you want to capture and then use it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, use it to personalize the entire email or use it to personalize the email it's like, to personalize the email that you send and send different emails to different segments, or just personalize the emails that you're sending with the merge tags. Okay, so that's pretty much it. That's what we do. That helps a lot to get a lot of our emails more personalized, get more open to get sales, and it makes a real world of difference. So if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and like, like, share and do all those good things, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to me in the subscription box. Success facebook group. And yeah, if you're using personalization or there's something I missed, let me know in the group and I'll see you next week.
