The Email Marketing Masterclass with Israa Alrawi

Brent Peterson (00:03.254) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Isra Ararwi. Isra, please go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role, maybe one of your passions in life. Israa (00:17.778) Yeah, my name is Isra Arawi and I'm an email marketing for e-commerce, mainly, a deliverability specialist and also an email marketing strategist and retention growth marketer. So I play many roles and hats in a business. Right now I focus on clients that have either come to us for deliverability issues, you know, they're landing in spam, how do we get out? And also education on how do we keep you out of spam and growing. and staying in the inbox long-term, and with the deliverability aspect in place as well as your strategy. And my biggest passion in life is truly helping people in their business. I started and grew my own e-commerce store, so I understand that the struggle of a small business, there's a lot of components. And I honestly just got into this. It's... I do email, but I do email from a passion stand of like, let's get you profitable, let's get your business working. And really that's really my goal in life is to help as many small businesses as possible to be educated and make smart decisions so that their business, you know, thrives and does not fall off into the future, so. Brent Peterson (01:36.046) That's great, thank you for that. I know that in our green room, you graciously volunteered to listen to a joke that I'll tell you, and all you have to do is say, should this joke be free or should it be paid for? And so this is part of the free joke project. It'll take 30 seconds after we're done. We'll go right into this, we'll go into the content of what we're gonna talk about, but here we go. I never wanted to believe that my dad was stealing from his job as a road worker. But when I got home, all the signs were there. Israa (02:09.63) Should this joke be free or should somebody pay for it? Brent Peterson (02:13.259) Yes. Brent Peterson (02:17.058) What do you think? All right, good. It's a very good dad joke. All right, so let's dive right in. I wanna dive into email. I think that even before deliverability, a lot of new store owners or merchants, Israa (02:20.088) That's funny. I'm sleeping for a dad joke. Israa (02:33.266) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (02:39.198) They don't even think about email sometimes now because they think email's dead, but I disagree. I think email's such an important part of it. Tell us why you got into this and tell us a little bit about the email delivery. Tell us a little about how important email is. Israa (02:55.27) Yeah, so I actually got into it because I realized the only, the only asset of your business you truly own is your email list. And when I had my business and when ads were failing, the only way I could stay profitable was through my email list. And that's when I realized how important it is not only to collect emails and grow your list but to also nurture your list. for a lifetime and retain them as long as possible, or at least as long as the life cycle of your product or service in that business. So that's where it all came from, that you don't own anything. So if tomorrow your social media is shut down, your Shopify or your e-commerce stores are shut down, your business, you can't run anything on any social platform, all you have is that email list. And one big tip I give everybody, Don't rely on saving your email list inside of like an email service providers like MailChimp and Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign. Make sure you're constantly downloading it and saving it somewhere safe on your computer because those email service providers can also kick you off or you can be closed down tomorrow and then you won't have access to that email list either. So you own it but you have to protect it like with all your might because it's truly you paid for those people. You've worked really hard. Those are the people that are gonna come back and buy from you most of the time, more than cold traffic or new leads. So that's where it really came from that. Email is so important and it's not going away. I know there's been campaigns of SMS replacing emails or forget email, go to social media. But the data shows that over and over that your return on email. is the greatest channel out of all other channels. So this is where it comes from, why it's important, why people should invest in email and really truly figure out how to make it work for you in your business. Brent Peterson (05:06.354) Yeah, that's a really good point, especially who owns your platform. And if you think about a user that has all their, all their, um, followers on, on Instagram or Twitter, or if there's, or whatever it was called now X, um, that you have the, you, you are really at risk for those things to go away. The same would apply to if your store is, if you're relying heavily on Amazon to sell your products. But in this case, I think. Israa (05:23.387) Yeah. Brent Peterson (05:35.854) People forget how important it is just to make backups of their data because your data is your data, right, and it's portable. And saving it, it's a really good point, saving it in the cloud isn't always the best idea. And I would even say saving it as a Google Sheet isn't the best idea because for whatever reason you could get locked out of your account and having that file as a CSV I think is your best. Israa (05:42.046) Absolutely, yeah. Israa (05:59.883) I actually save it on a hard drive outside of my computer in case my computer crashes. So it goes to that extent that, you know, if I'm paying for this list, I will protect it. I will, you know, it is, it's the lifeline, bloodline of your business basically when things go wrong. Brent Peterson (06:16.682) Yeah, that's so absolutely true. So we're talking about email. Why is deliverability, and especially high deliverability, in your email so important? Israa (06:28.69) So deliverability is the, let's define what deliverability is. It's basically the rate of you in the rate of you in boxing and Gmail and Yahoo and all the ISP is out there, the inbox service providers or the mail service providers. And it's important because if you can't get your email into the inbox and reach your audience, you're not your message is useless. All the effort you put in, you could plan this. grand promotion and you think you're going to get people in and people are going to buy or people are going to contact you for your service and you spent weeks doing this and then you hit send and you're in spam. And all that effort, all that anticipation just goes down the drain because you didn't reach the inbox. So deliverability is there because it helps you get to the inbox and stay in the inbox long term as long as you're doing it. Brent Peterson (07:28.546) What are some tips I've seen as I sign up for lists, I've seen some list people say, make sure I'm in your contacts. What are the, do you have some tips you can give to users that are sending their first email back to the client or that message that you've signed up for the list, do you have some tips to give those people? Israa (07:51.258) Yeah, absolutely. So let's start with, I think the most important part is the collection of the email. Make sure when you are collecting email, you are doing it in a quality sense. So if you want the audience to buy from you, make sure whatever you're putting out there to get them on your list, so like a tripwire or a lead or some type of offer, it makes sense to the people you want to put on your list. So I'm not gonna go out there and promote a service when I'm trying to sell a physical product. It doesn't make any sense to me there. The audience would be totally off. So make sure whatever you're putting out there to get them to sign up will match what you're gonna sell them on the backend or on the back of the email marketing channel. So that's the number one. So make sure it's quality leads. Don't ever buy a list. Don't go after people's lists that you're not sure of. make sure that you're always going for quality. And the thing is here, a lot of people get frustrated because they're looking to get as many emails as possible as fast as possible, where building quality takes time and it takes a lot of bit of effort. But 100 people on your list are willing to buy from you is much better than having a thousand people who have no interest of even, interacting with your business. So that's the number one, that's the first part of deliverability. When you are collecting emails, make sure you are going after quality over quantity. When you are collecting the emails, we focus heavily on automations and automated based on behavior. So when somebody signs up to our newsletter or to, or purchases from us, we automatically interact with them through an automated flow based on their behavior. That way we introduce ourselves, we introduce who we are, what we do, we give them information on what benefits to the products that we have for them. So we make sure they get familiar and they start trusting us. And the more they open, the more likely our domain gets, you know, has a stronger belt with like Gmail and Yahoo. Because Gmail, the bigger ISPs like Gmail and Yahoo, they look at engagement. Israa (10:11.942) Are people opening? Are people replying? Are people hitting click? Are they buying? It all matters. So the more you interact right away with your list, the higher domain reputation you're building with the mail service providers. And that helps you stay in the inbox. It helps you get to the inbox right away and stay there longer. It takes a long time to diminish your domain reputation. if you have that built in. So those are like the two factors I always focus on. Get quality leads, make sure you're nurturing them right away, telling them what to do next, what to expect next, and how they should see you in the inbox. Those are the two top ones. And then if we're going into like long-term email, emailing your clients, make sure you're always cleaning up your list. You know, if somebody has not opened your email in the last three years. or even now Gmail is now just cleaning out anybody who hasn't opened in the past two years. So you need to figure out your life cycle of your product. If somebody hasn't bought in the last two years and your product has that life cycle, you shouldn't be emailing somebody outside of that, outside of that window anyway. So making sure that we keep our list clean and we are only sending emails that our audience is truly interested in, not something that... has nothing like irrelevant to the business and irrelevant to what they signed up for in the first place. Brent Peterson (11:44.174) Do you recommend a final email? I've gotten emails from email people that said, hey, we notice you haven't interacted with us in a year. We're going to take you off the list. If you'd like to stay on the list, please reply or something like that to keep opted in. Is that good practice? Israa (12:03.214) Yes, so I like to actually create a, and I know businesses get a little lazy with this, but this is a really great way to start. When somebody opts into your list, give them an option to update their preference. So we create a form, we ask them, how often do you wanna be emailed? Do you wanna be emailed once a week? Do you wanna be emailed once a month? What type of emails do you wanna receive? That way I am segmenting, I am segmenting emails right away. And then I'm sending the emails, the interested parties, the right emails at the right time. So they're not being annoyed. Like I'm not just blasting that list every single time I'm sending out an email. I'm sending to the people who want to hear from us every single day, every day. I'm sending to the person who just wants to hear from us once a month and it's a promotional, we'll pick the right promotion for that month to send to them and that's what they will get. So. That's a really nice way to start your email journey with your subscribers is giving them the option. It helps because it gives them that power and control so they don't get annoyed by you. You're just another business who wants to take their money. You really truly care about their experience with your business. Brent Peterson (13:23.838) Yeah, I mean, I can't emphasize the amount of emails that I get that all of a sudden I'm getting an email every day and I really don't want an email every day. And eventually, just to clean up my own box, I unsubscribe because I'm getting it every day where if they were to say, Hey, would you like to see this once a month or once a week or whatever? I think that is so important that you give them give them those options and then help them understand even on every email to say, would you like to update your preferences? Brent Peterson (13:55.633) That's really good advice to give people. Talk a little bit about the interactions. So you mentioned that number two was using some automations and being interactive with your clients. Is automations always, I mean, I think it's like always your first choice, right? But is actual. Do the email providers notice when you're actually sending them back outside of an automation? Or does it matter as long as you're interacting? Israa (14:26.478) Yeah, so email providers, I mean, they're as long as they see the emails coming from your domain, it does not matter if it's an automation or a campaign as long as it's getting there and getting the right engagement. You know, they measure the engagement based on their users that are receiving it on their platform. So like Gmail might have you might have like a list makeup of like 70% Gmail and 30% AOL or 20% AOL and 10% Yahoo. each one is going to look at each that percentage. So like 10% Yahoo is your total from your total list makeup, but to them that's 100%. So like, say you have 70% open rate on Yahoo out of that 10% Yahoo knows that okay, your emails, the people on our platform are responding really well to your emails, we're going to keep unboxing you. Where I'm Gmail, like you have 70%, but you only have like a 10% open rate. Gmail is going to say, uh-oh, you're not really engaging with the people on our platform well. You run the risk of being put in spam. So you have to understand your list makeup, the breakdown, how each subscriber platform, each platform, the subscribers on there, how they're interacting, and how you can really cater to that. So understanding your KPIs, which are your, basically your metrics for email, open rates, click rates, reply rates, unsubscribes. Unsubscribes don't, sorry. They don't affect your deliverability. They actually help clean your list for you. However, it helps you know when you are sending, like if you get a high volume of unsubscribed, like all of a sudden, you know you're not sending relevant information anymore and people wanna get out. So use unsubscribe as like an indicator of how well is my message being received by the subscribers? And is it something we should like double down on or should we change direction with that? So that's a big one. Of course, your spam rate is where deliverability becomes a problem. If you have high spam rates, you are going to get hit to the inbox, sorry, to the spam folder. So make sure that's... Israa (16:51.698) That's why we need to clean, that's why we need to stay engaged, and that's why we need to segment correctly and send the right message to the right people so that spam rate stays low because that's what affects your deliverability over time. Brent Peterson (17:05.658) So I'm curious in the spam rate, if somebody has opted in, theoretically, so you can still spam them even though they've opted in and basically you're sending them too much email, just help me understand how that works if they're opted in. Israa (17:21.798) Yeah, so somebody opts in and they say, I wanna hear from you once a month and you decide not to segment your list and exclude those people. And you're sending them every single day email. And they're probably replying to you and saying, hey, you're sending me too many emails, take me off. It's law to have the unsubscribe link in your emails every single time. That's law, that's the can't spend law. You have to have it in there. Most people will not hit it right away. They'll probably reply to you and let you know that you are Oversending emails, but at a certain point that subscriber will become frustrated and will hit They will hit spam over unsubscribe because you've kind of made you just made them mad, right? So I mean as there is an unsubscribe button in your email that they can hit but if you're angering Your subscribers and you're really not listening to what they want especially when they gave you permission to email them, they're more likely to hit spam on your emails. And I mean, you're gonna get people who hit spam on your emails regardless because a lot of people forget sometimes where they opted in or why they're receiving an email or they're just having a bad day and they'll unsubscribe. The key is not to keep that spam percentage high all the time. So like we don't wanna see an uptick. Like if you have a one bad day, like one off day, Spam rates go up in like quarter four, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because we are expanding our list and it's more marketing and promotional period. We can see an uptick there, but the key there is not to keep it going up. We want to make sure that it's like a one-off event over a period of time thing. Brent Peterson (19:11.522) I want to jump back into the metrics. You went through some of those high level metrics for clients to recognize. What are the recommended metrics that you would have people look at week over week? Israa (19:25.87) Yeah, so I like to use open rates as an indicator for, you know, people go to open rates and they stay open rates. So anytime I ask the email client or a client that would come to us, you know, how is your email? They're like, oh great, my open rate is 70%. And that's it, like, there's no other, they're not looking at anything else. Open rates, I like to use to actually measure deliverability. So if you are getting 70% and all of a sudden, one email drops to like 20%, I know right away we have a deliverability issue. There's like no doubt that discrepancy and open percentage drop means you are hitting spam, people are not reaching it because there's no way you go from 70 to 20 overnight. So we use open rates for deliverability measurement and also we use it for engagement measurement of like how well our emails are being received. So... Like if we want to make sure we're getting like 40% open rate and we want to get to 50, you know, we'll start testing certain subject lines and certain promotional angles to see if we can get our audience more interested in, you know, opening our emails more often. So that's how I use open rate. Click rate is really the indicator for me and the business, you know, the mail service providers of like how strong your engagement really is. So email is a, is a, It's a medium between your subscriber and your landing pages. It shouldn't be used as a landing page itself. So you want to move the subscriber from that email to somewhere else, or at least have them reply to you so we get a reply rate. So there always should be some type of action to take inside that email, because that's the whole point of using email marketing, is to take action. And the content inside your email will indicate. So like you can have a 70% open rate, but then like you have a 0.1% click rate. You know that content is not, it's not, you know, you did not, you did not engage your audience or they're not interested in it. So that content is really important and getting that click is really important. So we really heavily focus on how do we get them open? How do we get them to click? We want to at least a 2% click rate and over. Israa (21:51.49) at most times, you know, but it also depends on the messaging. Sometimes we just want to deliver a message to the audience, like letting them know something important without like an action. And like those emails, you know, we will disregard the click rate. But most of the time we focus on click rates because they are the indicator of engagement inside of your emails. Um, you have bounce, the bounce rate bounce rate. Actually, if you have a high bounce rate, that means you're not cleaning your list. Well, And you're not probably nurturing. So this is where automations really help because automations help you filter quality emails right away so that by the time you send out weekly campaigns, you already have the right people on the list that are qualified to receive email. So if you see like, if you send out an email and you have a really high bounce rate, that means your list needs some type of cleaning or you need to go back and revisit how you collect emails. Again, spam is how annoyed people are with you, how frequent, you know, spam is typically you will get some type of feedback before people start hitting spam at a high rate. The time we actually see a high spam rate or a high unsubscribe rate is usually on the first campaign sends if you haven't sent in a long time. And that's fine because that first send people are going to open unsubscribing, they don't want to hear from you again or you know are annoyed and will spam you. But then after that first send you should be able to start controlling your unsubscribe and your spam rate because you're getting that data feedback. Conversion of course if you are running an ecommerce store you want to make sure that your offer inside of your email translate to a conversion. So we will use conversion to see if our promotion or our messaging you know. led to people buying. So that's there as well. If you do, if you measure your conversion or revenue rate inside of your emails. I'm trying to think, I think those are the biggest ones that we look at in email. And of course, if you are in, if you go into more depth in data, we talk about like retention, lifetime, like how Israa (24:12.594) what's the lifetime value so far and how can we increase it. That usually is like more of a multi-channel of like using some type of analytical platform and Google data and all that fun stuff. But I won't go get into that because it's a little bit confusing. Brent Peterson (24:27.355) Yeah, I know I'm on a list for a writer and one thing that she does is ask to forward it, ask you to reply to it and tell us or tell her something. And I know that on those, she's a big list and I'm always impressed that she actually gets back to me. It may take a day or two, but she actually does respond to me replying to them. So I guess it depends how big your list is and how much time you have, but I think it's always a great idea to say, hey, I read every one of these emails. Please reply and I will absolutely get back to you. Israa (24:48.893) Yes. Israa (24:54.782) We'll be right back. Israa (25:04.902) Yeah, and I mean, that's really the point of email. If you want to build a strong email list, those first couple hundred people on your list are going to be your champions. And if you can really build that strong foundation with them by replying and interacting with them and including them and your promotions or input and feedback, over time, they kind of become your loyal base that builds the next level of email. subscribers and they'll go out there and recommend you and bring more people in. So it's really important when you're starting a business to really focus heavily on those first subscribers because they are like you know they're kind of the founders with you to help you build that business. Brent Peterson (25:54.338) All right, so we have a few minutes left here. I want to just briefly discuss platforms You've mentioned make clavio and MailChimp. Is there platforms as people grow and is there something that people should get started with you have and is there you have opinions about I'm Interested in opinions as well about you know What where people should just dive in if they have a new let's just say they have a couple hundred subscribers They want to start a new email marketing campaign. What should they be using? Israa (26:22.034) So I don't like to recommend one platform over the other. And the reason I don't do that, I know a lot of people will have some type of partnership with an ESP and they wanna promote it and that's great, but my problem with that is I believe in educating and empowering a business owner to make a sound decision from the get go. So what I usually tell my clients when they come in, like which platform should we use? Should we stay on the one we're at? We look at the features they need. So what do you need in your business that this platform can do for you? If I can't find the vital ones, like the really important ones that we need, I would not recommend like switching or taking on a platform because at the end of the day, if you're on like a, let's say you're on one platform and then you start growing and that platform doesn't serve you anymore. Like you can't do certain functions on there that you need. you're going to have to switch out again eventually. And the switching part takes a little bit of leg lift. And you need to kind of like an expert on your side to really figure it out. Or it's going to be a trial and error. So it's kind of a hassle for somebody to keep switching from one platform to another. So what I always say, reach out to the owners. See if you can test the platform or at least start a free trial. Look around. See what works for you. Is this a platform you want to be on? and then decide, okay, yes, this is it. So for like, let's say, I'll take two drastic ones. You have Klaviyo, which is built for e-commerce, e-commerce businesses and DTC, it's great. It's probably one of the most sophisticated ones out there for small businesses outside of enterprise. And then you have like Active Campaign. Active Campaign is very intricate and it works really well for like service providers. I think you have to be on the highest level to even see revenue. So, So if you're not even like worried about revenue, but you just want to get that interaction and like build that system, ActiveCampaign is probably more of your jam. Or Klaviyo, Klaviyo is really product-based. So we use Klaviyo for a lot of our clients. It is one of the top platforms out there. They are a little bit pricey. So if you're gonna get on there, you have to, you're kind of like forced to use it to get your money back. So. Israa (28:45.146) But I mean, it's well worth it if you are really heavily focused on retention and, you know, growing your less than your revenue. So. Brent Peterson (28:54.518) If you have a bit of advice for somebody now going into Q3, Q4 this year, they want to start a great email campaign, they'd like to have it all ready, let's just say for Black Friday, what would that advice be? Israa (29:07.122) So we are actually prepping for Q4 now. We started in July. And the reason is because you want to build as big a list as possible before you get to Q4. Yeah, Q4 Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, because that's where you're going to make the money back. So what we do right now, here's like two tips that I do. I create some type of no-brainer campaign. I call it the no-brainer. So like. you put out a campaign where people are willing to give you their email. So like, Hey, sign up now. And you're on the list for, you know, this giveaway where we're giving five lucky winners, their entire order on black Friday, cyber Monday, a hundred percent off or something like that. Um, people sign up, but, but we make it, we tear it up where like almost everybody can be a winner at some point so that we can get as many people as possible. And then we run, um, add campaigns to these. and try to filter in as much traffic. That's one thing. The second thing is using your email list to figure out, using your historic data and email list to figure out what is the best promotion to put out there during Black Friday, what is gonna convert for you. And this is where your email list is like a gold mine, because you can literally just ask them and they will tell you. So you don't even have to like go to social media and hope and pray somebody sees your post or run ads and spend money hoping you get some type of feedback. Your email list you already paid for, it's there, it's free. Send out that email and ask, what would make you buy this Black Friday? What is the biggest deals or what are you shopping for right now? Or what are you putting your eyes on? You can even ask them like, what did you buy on Prime Day? like use the Amazon deals that they bought. They thought that was a great deal to like play off that. So we kind of like survey them to get the best options and then we will run a test to see which one really truly converts right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday on our VIP list and then the true winner gets set for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And you know. Brent Peterson (31:24.504) That's it. Israa (31:26.062) We've done this many times. I've, you know, we've scaled, we've done 1 million days on this strategy. We've taken somebody who's done like 10K one year to 150K then second year. So it works really well, but it takes some work right now. Brent Peterson (31:43.786) Yeah, that little bit there, start now rather than later, is such good advice. Isra, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. As I close out every podcast, I give the guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug. You can plug anything you'd like today. What would you like to plug? Israa (32:00.002) Yeah, so I do run a platform, my team and I run it. It's called thewinbox.com. It's an educational email platform. If you have questions about deliverability strategy, we do have services you can submit forms there for. But the nice thing about there is we also have free resources and we have a blog where we do a lot of educational tidbits of information for email so that it's easy for you to digest. and then take back and apply in your email. Email marketing services for your small business. So definitely check out thewinbox.com. We are growing it. I'm excited. If you have any type of feedback for us, we would love to hear from you. You can also follow us at the underscore winbox on Instagram, or you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. I love to connect with anybody and... you know, just help them get them on the right track. So. Brent Peterson (33:01.27) Great, and I'll put all those links in the show notes, and it's thewinbox.com. Perfect. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much. Israa (33:05.958) Yes, the one's about to say. Israa (33:11.686) Thank you.