Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress. As you can see today from a different location but I had a lot of construction at my studio so you know, every now and then you just need to be flexible with us. Today we have Tadas. Welcome Tadas.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Hi. Nice, nice to be here and nice.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: To see you again.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Yeah, actually I'm very excited to meet you live before.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we, we met at Cloud Fest which was a week and a half ago now, almost two weeks ago now in the middle of Germany, which.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Was interesting in some part of Germany. Yeah, quite far away actually. But it was very nice spot.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So please introduce yourself and I think if anyone's watching we can tell by the shirt that you're wearing where you work. But like I said, please introduce yourself.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Hi everyone, I am Tadas, product manager at Omnisend.
So this is a very brief introduction about myself. I can expand of course.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Please do. Because what does product manager do for Omnisend? And I think it's safe to assume some people will know what Omnisend does, what it is. But there's going to be people who.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll probably start with about the Omnisend part. So Omnisend is email marketing service provider if you run an E commerce store, so you need some messages to be sent to your shoppers and here where Omnisend comes in. So, so we help merchants not only by sending messages but capturing those visitors that come to your store, then sending various emails like automated messages, campaigns, et cetera. So many things that we do and we rely heavily on data part so that those messages are smart let's say. Okay, it's not like just sending a bunch of messages to everyone which is not recommended because people, people are different. Okay. So yeah, we can talk later about the segmentation part, how to select specific audiences and how to achieve those. So Omnisend does that and I'm a product manager in the team like the company is 250 people globally.
There are many product teams that are managed and responsible for various parts of the product.
It's complex. We try to make it simple so that everyone can use it. We're targeting small and medium businesses. So basically so that it's simple but it's complex in a way that it's smart. It can reach various your needs based on segmentation automations, anything like that and me specifically are responsible working in a team that is responsible for Omnisend and E commerce platform connection. So email platform, sorry, store platform. So like WooCommerce or Shopify BigCommerce with many different Platforms and without connecting your store to Omnisend, well you will not reach good results. So you can still use Omnisend without connected store but with very limited functionality like basically you could send campaigns like messages still it's messages but they will not be probably personalized. It'll be very simple, et cetera. But by connecting.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I was going to say you could actually use it as your mailchimp replacement. Just sending out just like that.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, and some people do that and I think that's fine. But where the value comes because why use some service that you pay and grow etc. Because we deliver value in a different more complex ways and we can cover that later on. Like how those automations comes handy to people. Yeah. So my, my team is responsible for the connection part basically. So what does it mean? Connection like you have your store, you have your WooCommerce let's say right on WordPress running connection means that we need some data from your store starting with your contacts. Contacts is gold basically. Right. So the people, your customers that you want to communicate with, you don't, you don't want just to sell things, you want to communicate. It's life. Right.
So contact information then that you have on your store, we sync some part of that information as well. Why? To make the messaging personalized because some people are interested in red socks, some people are interested in brown shoes and you want to distinguish that. Right. So we separate that and by having product information we can say and tailor the messaging part and then it comes like order information, the history which we use later on for segmentation purposes because not all customers are the same. There are people who bought recently, there are people who are not stopped buying and you probably want to reach out to them in different ways. So the order information as well as synced to Omnisend and generally all the events, what we call events, like all the actions, not all like some part of actions people do on your show on your store. We think that as well. So that based on specific scenario you could reach those customers as well.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Like what kind of stuff would that.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Be like if you viewed a page or a product page. Right. Or added items to your to store cart or start a checkout so we can cover later that on. But basically we call those specific user actions like user shopper actions or events. How, how we say yeah and based on that we can distinguish those customers and offer specific, different targeted messaging.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: So it's, it's capturing all the things that help identify the need of the customer. Yeah. And, and mind I add in a. In a boring way. Because if I.
What I love about Omniscient is not just the product, but specifically the campaign you're running or the branding stuff you're running specifically. I see them mostly on LinkedIn, but you guys advertise in other places. You specifically go out of your way of calling yourself a boring company. And I think that's a wonderful angle because boring for most people implies like, meh, no fun. But boring in your context means it should be so boring, so simple, so easy. It's like you don't need any brain capacity to process what we're doing. Doing will take care of that. I. Yeah, I've enjoyed that angle in many different outings that, that you've shown on the socials anywhere. So.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And it has this angle that you don't want surprises for your email marketing because you're spending money, right. And you. You don't want something like, oh, it's off the rails, something was done that I was not planning. So it has to work. Right. The messaging should be sent, reaching the right audiences, etcetera, on time, etcetera.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: So boring. And yeah, it's.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: It should work.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: But I think that's a, It's a fun reframing of a negative word.
And, and yeah, like I said, I enjoy.
I don't know how long you've been running this particular angle, but I, I think I've enjoyed every single angle in that direction. It's just, it's just fun to read. Like, because I. You find yourself reading the word boring, you're like, you can't wanna. Why would you want to connect yourself to boring? And then you read the rest of the ad, you go, yeah, that's a good one. It's a good one.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Our marketing team does a great job, I think.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, good, good. Lots of compliments in that direction. Yeah. Is that Bernard?
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There are many people actually in the team, but Bernard is leading that. Yeah.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: I was going to say, if I remember correctly, Bernard is. Is leading that team. Yeah. Good job, Bernard. If you're listening, you not only do this, but you are also.
Like we just discussed, you were at Cloud Fest. Yeah.
And this was your first time, right?
[00:08:26] Speaker B: In cloudfest. Yes, cloudfest. Hackathon, actually, more specifically, it was first time.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: What was that experience like?
[00:08:34] Speaker B: It was very nice experience. So I did participate in hackathons before. We do we run hackathons on Omnisend, but they are a bit different. Right. Because on Omnisend, you know, the people they work with yeah, yeah. People can switch teams, but still, you know, the people.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: And on cloudfest it was a little bit different experience because we met people we didn't see before.
So this is exciting. It's difficult, but exciting at the same time and still knowing the differences because it was like, I think from five different countries, people join. Like it was eight.
Eight people in total in the team.
Yeah. So it was, it was very nice experience to me. Like the expectations were. Yeah, we reached them. It was so fulfilling.
And actually, yeah, I did not think that we can make it like to do something because once you meet people, so it takes time to understand the ways of work, how do you work and people work differently. And that's fine. The hard part comes when you want to move forward with different approaches. And I think we managed to, to, to solve that. Like it's a, it was a challenge, it was not a problem. Right. Because we kind of merged. It understood how to move forward and I think we, we released a plugin actually. So it was still mvp. Sure, of course.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: But yeah, I, I think the, the, the, the component you're touching upon is the thing that is vastly overrated. Underrated. Sorry, not overrated. Underrated. When people think of hackathons in general, hackathons inside a company, you already kind of speak the same language. You already established roles and perhaps some version of leadership that is a very specific goal you have. You sit down, you do the thing and generally is a day, and then at the end of the day you either have a version of an mvp, minimal bio production, viable product, or you don't, but you at least have the step towards getting there.
When you are joining with people you have never worked with before, you first have to establish the communication layer. Like, yeah, I'm saying this and this is what I mean. And there's always a disconnect between the two.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Which I think the.
So this was my second hackathon and it's, it's good to see that the preparation that goes into it because the people who submit the project and say, this is what I want to work on, they are automatically the team lead. There's most oftentimes a second team lead. But from there it kind of becomes the responsibility of the preparation part. Whoever needs to do whatever for that in predetermining the success of the actual hackathon days. And I think this is why Cloudflare particularly is a great format because, yeah, it's, it's. You, you'll. You'll have solved the direction already when you Sit at that table and sure they're still kind of testing where are you and what do you see? And I say this word. Do you understand it in the same way that I do it, you know, all of those things. But I think, I think it's a absolute fun type of collaboration. I, I, I enjoy it tremendously. What was the project you was, you were working on? Because you were team lead as well, right?
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I had a call lead as well, it was Polis. So two leads on the team. Our project was about very simple, very down to earth problem.
The name of it is WordPress Staging Environment Manager. But the problem we wanted to solve is basically to make life of developers easier. WordPress developers easier. The problem is this, that to make changes on your live site, people usually do a copy of live site.
So they call it test or staging. They do some things there. If it works on staging, then they replicate the changes on live as well. It's double work still it can lead to some issues and the solutions are there, but they are paid. And usually people don't pay money for those plugins and still end up doing things manually. So what we created during those two days is a plugin that actually does two things. It helps to set up the staging environment. So this is one like it was pretty simple thing, but then syncs changes from staging to live and we implemented not like very dumb way to sync, but a selective way to sync. On a file level, database level, you can omit some changes.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to ask for instance, one of the things would happen on a production site is new content would be added. If you were just to sync the post table as a whole the new content would be gone and you would have whatever was on this page.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: So we allow sort of even this MVP version allows to omit some changes you don't want. You see actually what's changed, you can compare that easily and then select specific change only specific changes you want. And it was done like in what it will start it on Saturday, then Sunday and some things on Monday morning. So yeah, it's live stagingtolive.com, it's there, it's open source. The main thing is just free for everyone to contribute. And actually even during the event we had a contribution outside of the team that was very, very nice person from Portugal because we were like writing many Messages on Twitter x.com and someone saw and made a PR pull request. It was some minor mistake made by us because there are lots of things to do. So we fixed that. So it was, wow, people are contributing.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: N Isn't that the beauty of open source? Like you share what you're doing, people catch on to it and go, oh hold on, we can actually make this better.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's really fun. So if anyone from the listeners wants to join, feel free. It's stagingtolive.com and anyone, they can find a repository there and start contributing if they feel that this is a problem of interest. So it's very down to earth problem. But we think we see from even this idea came from omnisend. Right? So this is how omnisend works. This is how we operate as a product. We listen to our customers and some customers actually complain that oh we did something and omnisend stopped working. Why it stopped working because you were not following specific requirements made by WordPress or WooCommerce. They actually do provide some requirements, recommendations how you should be doing staging. So we. Oh, okay, so you're not following. Why some difficulties, et cetera. So we thought that it's a good sort of a problem to solve and this is how omnisend operates. Right. So we listen to our customers, we talk to our customers every day, every week just to understand what are the problems they might have, what are the challenges they're facing so that the product would be easy but at the same time complex in the back end. It can do anything probably. But we make, try to make it simple.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: It needs to look simple.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. This is a must because nobody wants to have a complex products, right? Why to have that.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Well, generally my, my experience is that people love complex products. In any version they can get their hands on it, but they do not want it to look complex. They, they want it to, you know, just show me a few things I can change and then that's fine. But then I expected to do a whole bunch of stuff in the, in the.
When you said that, the. When you introduced omnisend and you mentioned a few things that it does, one of the key things I'd love to discuss is how it connects to WooCommerce. And you also mentioned BigCommerce.
If you're building something for an E commerce solution, do you build it generically or do you build it specifically for a platform? Like anything you build for WooCommerce. Is that verbatim to be used on BigCommerce or do you selectively have. Good question.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: So our idea is that OmniSend should be available to all like platform agnostic, what we say it shouldn't be like for a specific platform but there's a catch. Platforms are different.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: So the functionality wise, this like the interface wise, we want to make it similar across platforms and we do this if it's possible. Not all the cases actually, because there are some specifics and I can mention probably one.
So as platforms are different, so some things needs to be tailored to a specific platform. And one case comes to mind, which we worked recently, is the way the platforms manage discounts. Right. So on Shopify, it's made in one way, woocommerce another way, and you cannot make the settings similar. So we made some tweaks. But basically to answer your question, we kind of want to make it similar because people move from platform to platform.
We have many cases where people Switch Shopify to WooCommerce, WooCommerce to Shopify and any other platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce are two major platforms globally. Right. And for some reason people do that and that's fine. And once you switch, you don't want to see some changes on the products. So OmniSend should basically feel the same even if you switch platforms. So that's fine.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: I bet that's a challenge because going back to the example of BigCommerce, again, you have BigCommerce as BigCommerce, but you also have it inside of WordPress. Yeah.
How.
How would you handle that? Because that's, that's more than a little channel is making sure that you can sync functionality from platform to platform. But if one platform is inside another platform, it becomes, you know, we're.
Isn't that essentially the basis for the Inception movie?
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Like stuff keeps deeper basically still people connect from. Our customers are using BigCommerce from BigCommerce so they're just landing there and then they see a product just on the left side of the navigation bar and that's it. So they see Omnisend there. It's different experience. If you use from WooCommerce WooCommerce is a plugin and OmniSend is a plugin, a connector basically. And you start using it on the web application.
Technically it's the same, but for BigCommerce on WooCommerce it's a little bit different and how this feels, but the functionality is basically the same. So there are many layers that connect and solve that part. I'm not that technical to explain how it's actually done, but I did not hear any complaint that oh, how to do that, how to use BigCommerce like OmniSend on BigCommerce or vice versa. So it's to my understanding it's salt and it's working.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So when you find yourself in need of switching all things working on your end basically are just doing what they were doing. You might just see the integration to be differently.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's your, your store part is, will be like platform part will be different. Yeah but the product itself is more or less the same like 99, 99% is the same. There are some minor differences across like discounts part I mentioned before.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah. But I bet there's a challenge in making sure.
So for anybody building solutions on top of WordPress you already have to take into so many other types of solutions out there that might conflict with yours or also need an extra integration or some afterthought or forethought. You know the matrix of things you have to keep in mind to make sure that the solution you're building is not interfering negatively with anything else.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: And then you have different platforms to work on. I mean I'm not suggesting 250 people work at OmniSend just because that complexity layer but I'm sure it's a part of it.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: It's a part of it. And actually you can feel this for WordPress and WooCommerce part because taking Shopify as an example, it's a closed ecosystem so everything is checked and we will not run into many issues like Omnisend and other apps because similarly like Shopify, WooCommerce people are using many different, different applications or plugins. Yeah but there are more, definitely more issues when it comes to WordPress because it's an open ecosystem and anybody can write a plugin and then those plugins if not followed like if those coding like standards are not followed, it starts to break things.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: So it for sure will.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And who's to blame? Like yeah, omnisend does not work. Yeah but there are any, some different plugins who start interfering and we try to prevent that actually we build various mechanisms to catch that our support teams understand have a short list of plugins who could potentially break things and we try to solve that. So it's always if people run into issues our support is number one and it helps, it helps people to understand which specific plugins are causing issues and if it's for some reason it can happen happen. So we fix, fix some things. The good news probably is that on how to say the situation of big numbers. So there are many different plugins for the same specific purpose let's say but there will be probably one or Two, the leaders they will be leading. Right. So you don't need to kind of make kind of support for every hundred, like each hundred of different categories of, for those plugins, there will be some leaders.
So it's makes things easier.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I, I get that.
You know, having seen the complexity on just some elements to build solutions on on top of WordPress. And then, you know, I, I talked to a lot of different WordPress plugin providers, builders, whatever you want to call them, every single one of them has this as their biggest challenge. Right. Like just from the start, trying to figure out, okay, so what, what is it all you have running in your site so I at least can get a glimpse of where we are then can you please send me the list of the plugins you have installed? Can you. And then you need to replicate it and you need to, you know, there's, there's so many things that you need to weighed through to build a solid product.
When I was working at Yoast, this was one of the things like people complained about the most when there was an update from Yoast, because they would say, it's Yoast. They screwed it up. My whole site went down. And it was never that, but it was, you know, stuff was being exaggerated. But Yoast is a plugin that is running on millions and millions of sites and with all the combination of plugins that you can have, plus your custom solutions, like you can build your solution that does and hooks into other things that you can't just simply cannot foresee. But the level of complexity that larger solutions like Omnisand, but also, you know, like, like Yoast, it's just, it baffles the mind if you were to approach this mathematically and try to plot out the number of possibilities that are out there. It's wild. It's wild. Anyone? Anybody who's never looked in the chance calculation. So the what is the what is, what are the odds that this is happening is wildly, wildly big in terms of Extremely.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Extremely, actually. Yeah.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: And people take it for granted that, that a solution just works boringly, but that it just works. I like that, I like that you take a lot of, you give a lot of tension in that direction. Yeah.
One of the things I'd love to talk about is the integration into Woocommerce specifically, because there is, you could say Woocommerce sends emails.
Great. Omnisends and emails.
What is the difference? Sure.
What I think is interesting to look at is the different types of, like, what are triggers, what are things that enrichen the experience because yeah, like I said there's, there's so many options out there and maybe some, some people go like, but you know, WooCommerce is already sending emails and.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's part, part true. Like it's true that they're sending. Right. And those emails are like, we can call it like fundamental but it's basic. Basically they are what we call transactional.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: Right. So I have a couple of sticky notes like order confirmation, cancellation, failed order, failed payment processing order. Those are using those type of emails that the Woocommerce has. You will not like build loyalty, etc. Yeah, you will make sure that the order is delivered, maybe that you're informed, but you're not stopping here. Right. And actually the Woocommerce itself, they recommend using other services like Omnisend for example. Right. So that you enrich your shopper experience.
So yeah, and Omnisend actually does that. We can, we can dig deeper into those type of triggers and there's. It's not only about the triggers. I would say it's about the, the merchant growth journey. How I should say like it's.
We can cover that. So yeah, WooCommerce does and many platforms actually have these capabilities like send transaction, order confirmation. All is good but when it comes to really understanding your customers. So you need other type of guys that dig deeper into data, try to understand your shoppers and can suggest best triggers how you say to. To reach customers and the reason is like why do you need email marketing? It's just not for like to communicate. Right. It's true. But you want to earn money. Right. So E commerce is about earning money, so it's about revenue.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: I think this is actually a good thing to, to highlight a little bit.
I oftentimes see the misinterpretation of the word email marketing meaning I'm just, I'm sending emails with the intent to sell something and in basis. Sure, that's it.
But it, that is it just that it's the basis. There's just. This is where it starts. That's the base functionality of the huge container thing. That is what email am I sending, when am I sending it based on what I'm sending it, what is in the message? All those things. Yeah, but I guess then we, we hit the triggers. Right? What are the.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Yeah, like I think we can go into more details but I would like to talk about before, before we dig to, to, to. To the trigger part.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Because it's related people usually think and it's. We learned this by talking to our customers that you shouldn't be sending too much, which is common sense. Why to send too much emails. Right. Makes sense really.
And usually what we see from the results like talking to our customers, on average there's three or four automation set up and people are good, they think that it's a good optimum, like three or four automations, we can cover that.
But actually what we see from the larger brands, it's like seven, eight Automations. And actually once we talk I can probably give you like 10 ideas like how it comes.
So this is one like I think it's Automations is about quality, quantity, you need to set up specific. But it's not like quantity, quantity, quantity with quality as well. Yeah, okay. Because these are not like the same 10 different automations. These are very, very purposefully targeted.
So it's very. And the more you target, the more, the better results you can get. If you start, for example, if you start sending, you have like thousand contacts in your email list and you start bombarding everyone like thousand list, you will get poor results. It's by definition because it's for everyone. And people we know, it's. They are not similar. Right. The people are different and when you start to slicing them like into various segmentation like by frequency, how, how frequently they bought, like what was the monetary value of their purchase, how frequently, how recently they bought you, you start shaping it's many different segments and you can reach them with very different type of automations. Okay, so it's the.
I'm talk telling this because the myth, like the assumption we hear from people that. Hold on, it's like okay, three or four is enough, it's good. But actually the data that we run, we had this experiments, we were a data company and I think I'll keep repeating myself during the podcast.
The data shows that no, it does not reduce open rates, it does not reduce click rates, it does not increase unsubscribe rates. So the more the better. Probably. Right. So it's not that I'll start sending five more automations and the results will get worse. And there's a reason, because those messages are not overlapping. Probably.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:43] Speaker B: And we could probably go to the.
We can call it funnel, we can call it pillars. Okay.
Because just mentioning those triggers would not make sense much. Right, yeah. So I believe we can look at this as, as a journey of a shopper.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So I was going to say for somebody who has no idea what that magic looks like, what is the journey? You literally said what I was Going to ask the. The journey of a shopper and when, when does somebody enter a funnel and perhaps even what is a funnel?
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Yeah so there are probably worth mentioning like four pillars we can say and it should start by like from a shopper. So first time shopper just visits your site, it found you somewhere on Google, someone mentioned you etc.
But when people come to your site they're anonymous. Right. So yeah you just. They certainly in Europe, in Europe maybe all countries probably have some level of those gdpr. It's Europe but basically you still don't know much about that person.
So the first stage is capturing those people and the first step is not actually about sending something but capturing. So it's about the forms, the pop ups. There are different types of pop ups, we can cover that a bit later. There are many details. So the first thing to start communicating you need to capture that.
So you do it by embedding omnisend form or any other form. We suggest our form because you will not need to pay for additional tools. There are many tools that offer similar functionality but why to pay double. Right, so the first thing is try to capture those people that come to your site because as I mentioned before there just many people that come and leave.
So how do you capture that? So the first step is capturing the people that come, maybe try to stop them leaving. So again the same forms, et cetera. So the first part is not about sending but the first step is about capturing try to capture those people.
Now the second part, the second pillar you have those people that they provided a consent right. So you show a pop up, you say I'll give you 10 discount, 5 Euro discount or whatever based on your. If you give me your, your email, phone number etc. So it's an exchange like right. So you change and you have that person, people that consent that you will be sending messages and what do you do then you greet them. Right. So it's. The second part comes when you start pulling those people subscribers into your sales channel. Yeah so the second part is that you pull in into your sales channel and there are a couple of options steps. So you do welcome automation. So the trigger is that if you have a subscriber you send a thank you message. So this is a first and actually the most popular automation across WooCommerce and other platforms as well. Yeah, is welcome is the most popular.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: As well on my newsletter and we use them for scanfully as well. It's just, it's a great way to get connected and get some feedback and information I can see that's been the popular one.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's popular across like I think it's a global bestseller for. For everyone once you have those people. So it's important not to forget like you don't stop with bye byes just sending welcome. We usually suggest to start sending some campaigns for newcomers. Right. Because people came for a reason.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: You could make a very smart form try to capture the interest where they're looking for etc. Etc. So or by the pages or by the specific products they were looking at. You could still start sending some personalized communication. Basically the second part is in the first step you capture those people. In the second step you kind of greeting them saying hi, welcome.
[00:36:02] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: And the third step is probably again it has this two bestsellers how I call it. You want to recover lost sales because people already come to your site. They started doing some activities probably they're looking at some pages, looking at some products and we as we started this conversation that we track that information. Right. Like the visits. Yeah.
And we track and we can. And the the merchants can try to then back them based on their browsing history etc or they started doing some actual purchase. They did not finish purchase but they started so added it to cart. Added to cart, started checkout. So these are two. Another popular most popular automations. So I don't know if people are aware about the difference because sometimes they are not familiar why to use abandoned cart, abandoned checkout. What is the difference? And the difference is well profound. And it's kind of if added to cart is earlier in the shopping journey. Right. So I'm just okay, I like this shoes. I click add to cart but not end up buying. So my intent to buy is a little bit lower in comparison to person who added to cart went to cart itself and started checkout. So starting checkout means that okay, I'm thinking I'm already starting clicking adding emails. But maybe there is no discount or so their intent is way higher.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Or they're just being distracted because I don't know maybe they got a phone call.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Whatever phone call or the payment was not processed. That part can be as well. Right. So so not that much but that as well. So I started click the button. All the funds are not in my cart. I forget it. So basically added to cart and started checkout. Our second and third most popular automations as well. So we have like top three is welcome added to cart, start to check out. So these are like three triggers already that helps to recover sales. There is still more depth to it. So if you want to recover people that are still like not that high in buying intent, we can recover people that saw specific pages or specific products.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: So I was gonna ask that like can you, can you, can you highlight.
Okay, you've saw that product, you saw that product. But if you saw those two, surely you'll find these, these and these interesting as well. You can, you can.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Recommendations.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: So our recommendation engine is still like in building but basically yeah, you can achieve the same result. Right. So the personalization part, it's definitely not that the results like the, the order rates will not be that high as for start to check out or add it to cart because seeing a specific page will have less like buying intent. Right. In comparison to people who clicked added to cart. Right. So it's, but it's still worth trying to recapture those people because they're, they're started, they're exploring your side, they try to understand so why, why leave them on the table? Right. So you can, by doing those product abandonment or browse abandonment flows you increase your chances of success like generating, generating more additional revenue.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: So there are three funnels or three campaigns or what would you call them?
[00:39:36] Speaker B: The automations.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Three automations you should set up for any new store. Yeah, welcome. The added to cart and the started checkout.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So this three is a must, I believe. And basically people stop there because like from, from our data we see that they stop here.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: You're saying that's the beginning, that's great. But you should add six more.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, yeah. I, I find this funny because as you were explaining it, my head went like, yeah, I've always heard to just stick it to like two or three and just call it a day because people get tired of any of emails. But as you were explaining it, I was going like hold on, hold on. I get, I get more. There's a few shops that I shop at that I get more emails from almost daily and I'm okay with it because I'm just scanning them to see is it actually something interesting? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes I click on it so they have more data of what I like. And, and I'm okay with it because the recommendations that I'm getting are getting better and better.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And actually to me it's like if you're into E commerce, if you're selling. So learn from the best and the best usually gets more revenue. Right. And, and we see that from our larger brands. So they don't stop from like having three automations. Yeah I see accounts that they have 20 like wild.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: I'm guessing those are very specific things.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah they're very targeted but that's the point and the beauty of automation that all those 10 automations are not the same forever. Like you will not start receiving daily. Our automations are quiet to be frankly smart. They have frequency capping. You will not end up like receiving 10 emails per day. Yeah, for sure you will not unless you select the. There's a specific.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: I'm imagining you're going hold on, this is the ninth email you're adding. You really want to send this one as well?
[00:41:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And so I just should say that you should like the people that run E commerce they should learn from the best. Right. So not like best other people who are actually selling and selling big numbers so they don't end up running three or four automations, they have many, many more like at least 10, like 8 is already a good number so it's, it's definitely good. Yeah.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: So that essentially means what you're saying is instead of just do the welcoming and the, the smart things, the bare minimum you should start thinking of what type of hyper focus can I add to. You know this is an overused word but who is my avatar? Like who is actually my client and what is the perfect example of that look like as well as what are versions that are just kind of different but the core is the same and how do I track them more?
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: While also servicing and you know it makes a lot of sense but it also means what you're essentially saying is if you have an E commerce store there is no way you, you cannot be you know, very data driven. You'll need to know data. Yeah. Whether you use omnisend or not.
What I'm hearing you say is if you're not already highly targeting and using data in one way or another you're already losing out.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Yeah. To me you know I think it's the email marketing in general is more like science than art. It has both actually art part as well because you need to be creative.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: Like with the words you're using and how you're.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: Yeah, because like just think about that like who is more important creativity or science here? Creativity means that I can create like super creative message but send it like to everyone.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Or the wrong person.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Wrong person to everyone means you probably end up with the wrong person. Yeah, the results but if you create average message like creativity wise but you'll start like very deep, very different people based on their recency of Buying monetary value, like how much they spent.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's also a good one.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: You'll probably end up more targeted and more targeted means more personalized and it will grab your attention. Right. So to me it's more science. It's both, but more science probably.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: I get it, I get it.
You could go as far as say if you, if you don't approach it from science first, no matter how creative you get, you're never going to maximize the outcome of the effort you put into it.
[00:44:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you, can you go as far and say if you look at the data enrichment, right. So you have, you have a customer and that customer does repeat purchases every couple of months, but it's basically roughly the same type of stuff that they buy on your store. But you have so much more that they, that you think might also be of interest for that client. Can you like build a client's profile where you have that much data on that particular client customer. That way you can say, look, you've been very consistent in purchasing this particular product. I would like to set up an automation that when the next time comes where I can kind of guess that this is about the time you're going to do it, send you an email saying look, I'm calling you out here, I know you're going to purchase this, but have you also considered that I'd be curious if there's, first of all, can you, is that the level of fine tuning you can do and would you think that would be too forward to say that type of messaging?
[00:45:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So if I understand correctly, so we have this capability, actually one of the AI features that we have in Omnisend, what we call this RFM thing like recency, frequency and monetary value. So these three type of, how to say properties are mixed together and based on that we create segments because automations are very close with segmentation. Right. So it's different triggers, different actions of people and what you say like okay, people, somebody that someone that started buying but stopped buying, for example. Right. So there's people, you see that they were clients but are not buying right now. So we call those people needs nurturing. Right. So how to nudge them? There are many ways you can like start sending specific campaigns for example just to kind of try to activate those people. So this is again like additional messaging or some personalized product recommendations can be sent to people because you know the history of their purchase behavior. Right. So you could recommend things that was based on their buying history.
Yeah. So these people that we and Actually it's you know I'm a sense it's quite easy to do because those segments are listed. So you can use like those segments and including specific automations or campaigns and start sending them right.
The data is updated like daily. So you can start sending not only month one, one once per month but you can just increase the frequency right? Because the more contacts you have so it makes sense to start sending frequency, start sending more.
It will depend like discrepancy depend on your number of contacts. If you have not much like 500, of course you will not be able to send that frequently. But the goal of those sending and like everything you do is to increase the amount of contacts that you have. So for those people who stop buying there are many scenarios, right you can do cross, cross sell workflows just to increase them so that they would start. But I think what I would like to mention which is maybe a little bit of a provocative thought. There are people who stopped buying and for a reason. Maybe they found another competitor.
We call them about to lose people, right? So they made a purchase like quite some time ago but you still have them in the list. They're still a subscriber but they do not open your. Your emails and there's a reason probably they. Yeah, many reasons probably, but just stopped. What happens is that you end up paying for these customers but not active, right? Like paying because the billing system on Omnisend is by active subscribers by the number of subscribers that, that you have and if they are not active it doesn't make sense for you to keep them. I understand that people like, like okay, it's. It's my. They are my customers. I want to keep them. But what we see the best action is just to kind of give them one more chance send a campaign and if they do not open just unsubscribe them and leave them. You will reduce the bill and increase your probably open rates, your health metrics will be better etc. So yeah, there are many more tactics later on. I can share a couple of resources just where people can read through how we do that, how we recommend doing specific targeting things, etc.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: I think that's fun to add to the show notes because I one one of the reasons I I like you really going in depth in. In things that work and how you. You need to have your focus more on the data science part. Yeah, I mean sure you need the creative like good copy is as important. However it's the step two. It's not the first step and I like that approach so we can add those resources to the show. Notes.
I have another curiosity, if I may ask.
AB testing is a good example of something that there's different ways of implementing a B testing. I've used them for my newsletter, for instance, where I'm like just kind of want to see what if I do the heading like this and what if I do it like that? Do I see more clicks, yes or no personalization in there? And I a B test them and they're fun little experiments, but I would imagine those work in email campaigning from Omnis as well. Do you have. Do you have a B testing? Is that part of this?
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, and we actually recommend people doing that to make things simple. We even have presets that are like a B test based. Right. So we allow various parts, the split part basically to make it. Make it similar. So the easiest part is to split audience specific people from segment split into two parts and then send different messages.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: For example, is there a way to determine what you would use for the AB testing?
[00:50:52] Speaker B: What do you mean determine?
[00:50:54] Speaker A: Let's say I have a segment of people speaking Dutch, but they live in Belgium and they live in the Netherlands.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: So you can send the Belgiums this one, see if that works and send the Dutch people send that one. Same language, same message.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So basically you do a split audience split and some add some specific filters that wish to be included in that part. So it's like audience split, right. So you have, you can like even for people, the same people from. From Dutch, you can send just similar messages and try to understand. And you can go crazy like do this tree like okay for that and that and that.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: So you can do consecutive A B testing.
[00:51:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so just you do many, many splits. So but. Well, we saw that huge trees basically where people run crazy. But. But there is a purpose probably, right? They're testing, et cetera. So they just want to dig deeper into the people who optimize. It's not like the mainstream part, I think like having a single tree, like the split is totally fine, where you later define a specific thing. So you can split by audience part, like you mentioned, right. You can split it by frequency when the messages are sent. Maybe the timing, we know the timing is important, right. Specific products, follow ups, etc. Might be sent better for different time periods. Right. Like those abandonment parts still can be sent by. Okay, shall we send it after the day or Shell will send it after the three days and there are no probably silver bullets. You just need to test yourself and to Understand what testing makes sense. Right?
[00:52:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:30] Speaker B: Testing usually works when you have large numbers. Because if it's like small numbers, 3 there, 4, 2 there, you will not get significant result. Because testing is about.
[00:52:42] Speaker A: I think a B testing is one of those things where people, they're really happy that they have it to their availability. But the, the data says.
I forgot what the actual number is. But you need about a thousand, I think in the bucket to have the a B test have a significant reading in terms of. Yes, they picked A. And if you do that in smaller segments, it's just there's error rate will be bigger.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: I think you should be fine with 100 as well. But you need to have like very different, let's say, results, let's say. Right, so the smaller the difference. The difference, but the amount of people in each bucket.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:27] Speaker B: So the difference needs to be bigger so that it's like meaningful. Because if you have like 100 here and 100 here and the difference is 5 or 10%, it's probably the same actually. Yeah. But if you have like thousand here and thousand here, 5% difference is probably not the same. Yeah, because it's. So the bigger the bucket, the smaller. It's more like catchy to the small movements instead of if you have smaller. So then you need to go to the very different, like level of, I don't know, creative messaging, for example. Right.
So the smaller the, the amount in each bucket, you need to go crazy with your creative part. The art needs to be very different then.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: Right?
[00:54:11] Speaker B: Very different.
[00:54:12] Speaker A: That's a good giveaway. That's a good tip.
I was. So what I was referencing was I was aware of the impact of the a B test versus the, the size of the population you. And that you know, at a certain point the variance is going to be that anyway. So yeah, what does it really say? But that's a great feature. So not only can you do that on multiple levels within the segmentation that you do, but you can also create the levels of a B testing and all that in terms of the content you write for whatever version or segment you can. So that means you end up with what may look like one email, but is based on, I don't know, 40, 50 different decisions based on the data available per customer, per history and, and all of that.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's hardcore. But yeah, I mean, we suggest starting simple because it can scare people. Right.
[00:55:11] Speaker A: Like, but you can see how when you go like, oh, this is cool, I get more data used to building more and more and you Play with all the variables you have.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: And I guess what you're already saying is very tempting but just start fresh, clean as much as possible, as long as possible so you have solid data that you can actually build upon instead of just go wild in options and changes.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: As you can tell, I'm fascinated by the field. Not only am I sending the weekly emails for my newsletter and our onboarding for scanfully, there's just, there's just so much to learn from this particular marketing field.
[00:55:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:53] Speaker A: That you know, I'm tempted to say yes it's email marketing but it's just wildly different than general marketing.
You, you'd always, you'd almost want to just name it something different because of the, the impact of what it has.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: And, and encourage people not to stop from those like three key and best automations like welcome abandoned cart, abandoned checkout. You definitely need to go deeper.
Add the like order shipping confirmations. Actually those are transactional. They still generate revenue. So do not forget that these are very important. They build trust. Because if you're not sending like nobody likes if you don't get the confirmation of order. Right. And like in seconds you made an order you need. I need to get it. If I don't get it, I'm frustrated.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: Something. Where's my email? Yeah.
[00:56:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So do not forget those. Once people ordered, ask for review. All right. So it can be automated. Reviews are very important. They help build trust of the merchant of your store. If people say fine things and you deliver good service, why not to showcase this to other buyers as well? So order follow ups. Asking for product reviews is a very good tactic. Right.
There are some cases where people actually. Well merchants do not have products actually and products are out of stock. And if you don't have this out of stock capability like remind me where the. When the product. This is, this is actually back in stock. Automation actually has the best results in terms of order rates.
[00:57:34] Speaker A: I was going to say that is. This is the one thing that I miss for every single store where I go.
[00:57:40] Speaker B: Yeah. You have missed opportunity.
[00:57:41] Speaker A: It's at zero. Just let me know because I will purchase it as soon you have it back in stock.
[00:57:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think this is a missed opportunity. Not many people do that. You can achieve that with Omnisend again. So there's a couple of elements included you need to add like email selection because if you don't have product it has to be I have as a shopper to leave my, my contact somewhere so that I'm reminded afterwards. And the best Part about those is that they have really, really the highest order rates. Because I'm purposely leaving my email.
[00:58:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:15] Speaker B: Because I want this product and it's not in stock. What to do.
[00:58:18] Speaker A: Heck, I think you can actually charge them as well.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:22] Speaker A: So I find just send it when, when you ever have it.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So this, this is. And actually quite recently we just added the reporting part on the waiting list. Like the most popular products that people are waiting. Because usually it's hard to tell, you know, which products you don't have. But as a merchant, you don't know the.
How many people are willing to buy those missing products. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like. I think this is very important because yeah, I see, I see a stock, I don't have those 10 items. But those 10 items are not equal to each other. Right. You probably can tell by the order history of those items which are more popular. That's fine. But how many people are actually willing to buy. Looking into the future.
[00:59:09] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:59:09] Speaker B: And we have this report as well. It's very fresh feature released just this last week.
So you can see that as well. And why I'm so excited because it has like the best order rates and again, it's about science. Right. So why I'm sending, because it has good orders.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: I think the only thing I can add to that. It just makes sense to look at it from that perspective because yeah, if you. If the amount. I'll give you an example where a shop that I purchase ever purchased quite frequently. It's a Dutch shop, it's called Fitness seller and they sell fitness stuff. So weights. And I have a specific requirement of the types of weight that I have. But they buy them in bulk and then when bulk is gone, they have to wait for the new shipment.
And I emailed that guy at a certain point because I've purchased so many things that we've exchanged emails even separately from the orders and stuff. And I said, why don't you have a reminder system in there so when you have the stock, I don't need to check your store every single time. You don't need to remember that I'm one that you send that email out to. And he goes, yeah, yeah, I really need to look into this. This is a, this is a couple years back and at some point he implemented it. He has a custom system, so obviously not the smartest choice, but whatever. He finally implemented and he sent me an email like I have that implemented. You can now add your email address to it. And months later we, we emailed back and forth. And he was like dude, that was a good one.
[01:00:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: And he goes like, because I never know like I had, I would be collecting email addresses from clients. Like let me, you can, you can send me an email that you would want that. And he would then collect the, the whole list. And yes, he had the like a whole table. This product I need to email that one. That product I need to email.
[01:01:04] Speaker B: That's awesome. And actually if talking about the email collection so just a little bit rabbit hole. But people, people what they usually do, they, they run a single pop up, pop up on the screen I enter. But this is I think is a missed opportunity. You need to add embedded form somewhere in the footer in the middle of your. Right. So it's embedded, it helps to collect.
[01:01:28] Speaker A: It'S additionally or additionally.
[01:01:31] Speaker B: Additionally, yeah. It does not interfere because maybe someone will just click this pop up, close it. But when they're browsing maybe they see some interesting information and okay, I can add this. So you still need to be proactive. Right. So you need to kind of add this and make less sort of friction because maybe they will be interested.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:54] Speaker B: Embedded forms are less in sort of sign up rates but still it has a potential. So why to miss that opportunity.
[01:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good one.
[01:02:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So that part, I think this is controversial a little bit but those things that, that some stores you're using to capture when people are leaving.
[01:02:14] Speaker A: The exit intent.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: The exit intent part?
[01:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:02:17] Speaker B: If you're new and starting your number one goal is to build your customer base like email base. Right. And this actually a good tactic and many people stores are doing this. It has good signup rates and it again helps to reach those customers. You can blend this intent with some mini survey. Why are you leaving? Just kind of to understand a little bit. Maybe you. Okay, if you are scared about this because it's a little bit of intrusive, you can run it for a short time maybe. Right. Just for a month and gather some understanding. But basically what I wanted to say is that you never stop on implementing a single thing and that's it. Like automations.
[01:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Also this is data testing. This is science. This is, let me add, I, I do have a question about the exit intent.
I found them because I've been using them. I found them highly effective when they were sort of introduced. And I don't know how long this is ago. What is it, 10 years? I don't know.
I, I, I have a feeling that people are slightly more like okay, I've seen those click Away, Click away anyway would you. Does the data back up my suspicion that they've become less effective as, as, as opposed to in the introductionary years?
[01:03:44] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Like it's like I don't have like specific data but it's very, very expected situation because like if it's a new thing so okay, it will grab your attention. Yeah and then, yeah and then, but, but still I think this is a thing that you need to add at least periodically like at least for some time just to. And you can mix it with some surveys right. So you can embed a little bit like click. Okay, why are you leaving? You just gather data. It will help you grow.
It's like for me it's quite strange. Like people do e commerce and they afraid somehow that it will be too intrusive. But good brands, like big brands, they actually doing quite aggressive and they doing it for a purpose because it works. So once we talk with those various sizes of customers, smaller ones are definitely more on a cautious side.
Well I think it's enough. It's like yeah, but actually should be.
[01:04:44] Speaker A: Acting perhaps even more aggressive than the big brands.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah but I think people learn it through time because yeah they meet us or meet other people. Merchants there are many meetups globally right. Happening and they understand that these things are working like your podcast I believe is again educational tool for merchants just to kind of understand that this might work. So bigger brands, maybe they say yeah we're doing this, oh it's okay. But smaller brands where is actually the biggest part of merchants is like small medium enterprises like businesses. Right. So sometimes they're too cautious. So I think one of the messages I think you need to be more data driven. It's like look at this as an experiment. So if you're running a new pop up like okay, do not run it like always like try it. Why not to try it and if you see it's impacting any, I don't know something you can just switch it off. It's very simple, you don't need to code or anything. Think right. So it's.
[01:05:51] Speaker A: I think that's, I think that's a wonderful bunch of tips to, to wrap this, wrap this up because I think just by implementing the things you just suggesting based on the. Don't go too easy on the automations. Go deep.
[01:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:09] Speaker A: Play with the number of their test them. You can turn them off, you can turn them on.
Play with the different types of email capturing methodologies we have available but play with it. Don't just sit there and think yeah, this will probably be it.
I'm assuming here, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming you'll want to be at the point where you may get the first email saying this was too much again, you go. Okay, maybe I'll dial it back a little bit.
[01:06:41] Speaker B: I think it's a good benchmark. Right? So. Okay.
[01:06:45] Speaker A: Find the limit.
[01:06:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Thank you so much for taking us through what, what Omnisend does. I think this is for anybody who really wants to. No, let me rephrase. For anybody who is doing any version of marketing that involves selling something on the Internet should look into testing out Omnisend because it sounds like it's. It's a super complete solution.
[01:07:10] Speaker B: Thank you, Remkus. It was a pleasure talking to you and I hope audience will find it interesting as well.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: I'm sure they will. If you send me those show notes, we'll add them and then they can even research further. Thanks so much.
[01:07:24] Speaker B: Thank you.
