Save Time and Boost Sales with Practical Email Marketing Tactics by Jamal Miller from Mailchimp
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're delighted to welcome Jamal Miller, Director of Product Marketing at Mailchimp. Jamal shares tactics and tips that Farmers can implement today to get more out of their email marketing efforts. Listen in to learn how you can fully leverage the Barn2Door & Mailchimp integration to increase your Farm's sales and save time.
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Cade Midyett: [00:00:00]
All right. Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. We've got a great conversation for you today with MailChimp, the best in class marketing platform for small business owners. At Barn2Door we already support more than 1000 farmers with direct integrations to MailChimp. Today, we're excited to dive deeper into new advanced capabilities now available to mutual customers of Barn2Door and MailChimp. While many Farmers start with a free MailChimp account to get comfortable.
You're going to learn today why an upgrade to a MailChimp essentials or standard account can dramatically increase sales for your Farm. Let's welcome. Jamal Miller, director of product marketing at MailChimp. Jamal, Welcome to The Direct farm Podcast.
Jamal Miller: [00:00:36]
Thanks for having me Cade.
Cade Midyett: [00:00:38]
Yeah, really glad to have you on. So before we dive into all this great tactical information about MailChimp and Barn2Door and the integration, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your role at MailChimp. And you know, what your responsibilities are as the director of product marketing at MailChimp.
Jamal Miller: [00:00:53]
Absolutely. So my primary area of focus is our integrations with other platforms and tools that entrepreneurs are using to grow their businesses and helping those entrepreneurs understand how they can get more out of those tools by connecting them together, whether it's a Barn2Door or another e-commerce tool, a social media platform, a CRM, whatever it might be helping MailChimp users understand how they can optimize their marketing. Do better marketing, get more out of their campaigns by connecting those tools together.
Cade Midyett: [00:01:24]
And on that topic too, of, you know, supporting small businesses in their marketing you know, since MailChimp was founded 20 years ago can you tell me a little bit about how the company has evolved and the mission of the company over that time?
Jamal Miller: [00:01:37]
Sure. Well, our mission, the good news is that our mission hasn't dramatically changed over that time. We've always been pretty laser focused on helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses and being a go-to resource for entrepreneurs and small businesses. What has changed over time is as we have become that resource for people and people have started to use us for their email marketing needs.
A lot of those users have asked us to do more for them and help them in other areas. So what's really changed more than anything is the growth of our platform and the ways in which we're trying to serve small business users, whether that's through adding websites and functionality to actually start your business with a website.
Functionality to send social media posts, or create digital marketing campaigns through digital ads and Google ads and Facebook. To tie all that together with your email so that people can get an overarching picture of all of their marketing activities and do so in a way that's going to take work off of their plate.
And make it easier for them to spend time on all the other things that entrepreneurs have to worry about. So I would say that the mission hasn't changed dramatically, but the ways in which we're addressing those needs have evolved over time.
Cade Midyett: [00:02:47]
As we both know, entrepreneurs and Farmers alike, both can never get enough time. Always so busy. So anything we can do to help them get a little time back is so helpful. And on the topic too, you know, diving into some of these specific tools that MailChimp provides to do exactly that. Improve marketing performance and get people's time back. You know, with Farmers in particular, we've got a lot of Farmers who serve multiple audiences between their retail buyers, their wholesale buyers, their chefs, their distributors. So can you tell me a little bit more about defining an audience in MailChimp? And you know, if there's any data that goes along with that as well?
Jamal Miller: [00:03:24]
Yeah, absolutely. You can think of an audience from the context of MailChimp as a common group of people who are buying products and services from you. So that can be a pretty wide range of people. And within that audience, the way we think about kind of optimizing your marketing is identifying segments within that group.
So if your audience represents everyone, who's interacting with your brand, maybe they're existing customers, maybe they're prospects but anyone who's kind of interested or interacting with your brand, then segments within that represent kind of groups of people who have common behaviors, buying patterns, demographics, locations things of that nature that are going to help you be able to better target and better personalized messaging for that group to optimize your sales ultimately.
What we've found is that people who are able to think about their marketing in that way tend to get dramatically better results. So rather than thinking about how do I message to my entire audience at once. Thinking about how do I identify the key segments within my audience and send specific messages to them that are going to resonate , is where we see people get the most value and we see outcomes as dramatic as 26% higher open rates for people who said segmented campaigns versus non segmented campaigns. 49% higher click through rates similarly for people who send segmented campaigns. So we really like to think about your audience has kind of everyone and segments within that, representing the opportunities to really target your marketing to the best person at the best time.
Cade Midyett: [00:04:51]
Yeah. And I know from personal experience too, getting emails in my inbox, if it's more personalized to me and my interests, I'm way more likely to open it than just another generic email coming my way. So that makes a ton of sense. And, you know, specifically for our Farmers, any tips or best practices for them on thinking about segmenting their audiences and going about doing that?
Jamal Miller: [00:05:11]
Yes. Definitely some tips that would resonate with with the Farmers. One, I think location is something that you can think about. So if you have buyers that are local to you versus buyers, maybe that are national or regional there are opportunities to tell your message to segment and then tailor your messaging, right?
So, if you're their local, you can talk more specifically about how they can come visit you in person, how they can meet you at an upcoming Farmer's market, things of that nature. Versus your regional or national buyers who are maybe more so, looking for information on shipping, distribution to get to that larger scale.
Another way to think about segmentation is one-time purchase versus subscribers. They may be looking for different things and that's a great way to think about your audience, right? Your one-time purchasers today are your à la carte purchasers today. Those are the prospects to become subscribers, right?
So maybe your messaging to them, starts to lead them down the path of becoming a subscriber at some point in time. For subscribers, maybe it's the opportunity to upgrade to the next package. Try another offering that you have within the subscription service. So that's another good one to think about.
Engagement is another way. So. Kind of segmenting out your most active buyers or your most high revenue purchasers from maybe people that are a little bit lower. That gives you an opportunity, one to optimize and test for your best audience and to kind of find what's working and what's not working with those who maybe aren't buying from you as much and find ways that you can increase their engagement over time through offers, promotions, things of that nature.
And the last one I mentioned is a purchase category. So if you have someone who's, who primarily buys produce from you versus flowers you might have different versions of your email that are segmented out in that way. And you can use that to really customize the content that they see so that it really speaks to them and the types of buying decisions they're making.
Cade Midyett: [00:06:58]
Yeah. So a number of different ways to segment there and, you know, you can kind of think for your own Farm. What might make the most sense, depending on what your, you know, group of buyers Looks like? I really liked the call-out on subscriptions too. As Farmers are going in right now to selling their CSAs doing those pre-sales of their subscriptions going into this year.
perfect timing to start thinking about how you might segment your audience there for those emails coming up for the next few months. Definitely could be a great opportunity. Like you mentioned, Jamal, to sell those people who are one-time purchasers on your subscription. Or do some add-ons to the core subscription for people who are already subscribed. That's awesome.
And then going into, you know, along with having all of those buyers and different segments, Farmers also managed, you know, a litany of different customer relationships among all those people. And all of them, you know, like we were kind of hitting on before are at different stages of maturity and, you know, they require different levels of attention between those long-time loyal buyers and those brand new buyers. So can you tell me a little bit more about customer journeys in MailChimp?
Jamal Miller: [00:07:57]
Yeah. So a customer journey builder is a relatively new feature that we've launched that allows you to essentially set a trigger event. That then dictates a series of emails or messages that a customer can receive. There are a series of decision points that you can add into that journey.
So if a customer does X send them this, if they do, Y send them that. And it really allows you to think through the journey that you want to build for your customers and really be proactive about defining what your when your customers receive and when and how you can use those touch points to drive revenue.
So you can really think of a customer journey kind of in totality as including a trigger point. So some sort of trigger action that that enrolls someone into that journey. Decision points within that journey that dictates what someone should receive next and an end goal in mind. Right?
That's the other thing you should make sure that any customer journey that you're building should ultimately have a goal in mind that you're trying to drive your users to and that goal can be about getting them to make their first purchase. If they're a new customer, it can be about re-engagement.
If they're an existing user that hasn't purchased in awhile, there, there are a number of different goals that you can use customer journeys for. And the other thing that this does is really automate a lot of these processes, right? So you're proactively setting this up this series of messaging and these decision points, and then you kind of can set it and forget it largely and go about all the other things you have to do in running your business.
And we find that kind of automating emails tends to have a dramatic impact on your engagement with your campaigns. 93% higher open rates we see when people send automated campaigns versus batch emails. 174% higher click through rates when people are sending automated emails.
So in addition to kind of taking work off your plate, it actually also is going to be a better experience for your customers because you're meeting them at the right points in time with hyper-relevant messages, right? If segmentation gives you relevant. Automation and customer journeys kind of takes that to the next level.
Cade Midyett: [00:09:53]
That's awesome. And we talk a lot at Barn2Door about bringing your in-person customer relationships online. So really meeting them where they are at and giving them that personalized touch, depending on where they're at in that journey really helps with that to bring that relationship online in a meaningful way. So can you tell me a little bit about if you have any suggestions for Farmers when they're setting up a customer journey and doing that configuration?
Jamal Miller: [00:10:17]
Sure. The first thing is defining what the end goal of your journey is that you want a customer to achieve. I think without that, it's hard to kind of think through. What some of those touch points might be and how you might help to nudge a customer towards that end action. So I would encourage anyone and I mentioned a couple of examples earlier, but a really common one is a new maybe prospect who's joined your email, your list that hasn't made a purchase yet.
Setting up a flow that kind of sends them a welcome email and maybe a series of messages that teaches them about your Farm, gives them a little bit of background about you and kind of how your Farm operates. Introduces them to the various categories of offerings that you have and ultimately is trying to get them to that first sale.
Another example could be what we talked about earlier in terms of getting à la carte or one-time purchasers into a subscription. Right. Perhaps you start people off and trigger a journey. Once they've made certain number of one-off purchases. And the end goal is to try and get them into buy a subscription.
So your series can talk about all the different benefits of being a subscriber. The value that you get from having a regular subscription, perhaps some point in that journey, you include a promotion that gives them 30 days free or something along those lines. With the end goal of trying to get them into subscription, but always starting with what is the end goal in mind that you're trying to achieve. Would be the one tip I would share.
Cade Midyett: [00:11:34]
Yeah, that's awesome. And such a straight forward thing, like getting somebody into a subscription, who's just made one off purchases can really, like you mentioned, increase their performance in the emails and then ultimately, you know, gain you more subscribers too, which is great. So definitely encourage Farmers to check that out.
But going along with that, of course there's not necessarily much point in talking about your subscriptions if you're not dropping them in your newsletter. So, you know, recently we're super excited to debut Barn2Door's product catalog integration with MailChimp that essentially enables you to do just that making email powered e-commerce seamless. Can you tell me a little bit, Jamal about featured products in MailChimp and how that all works?
Jamal Miller: [00:12:12]
Yeah. We're extremely excited about this integration. Essentially what it unlocks for you is the power of your full product catalog in the body of email campaigns. And it gives you a ton of flexibility to feature specific product SKUs in your catalog feature a group of things like bestsellers or recommended products and all doing so within the email editor in MailChimp, which as any of you who have used it, know is relatively straightforward to use.
Right? It's drag and drop, adding content blocks. Into your email body. And from there, it's as simple as selecting the items that you want to feature from a dropdown menu to, to display them in your email. So super exciting. And anything that you can do to kind of cut steps out of the purchase flow is, is always a great thing. And so we think this is a great way for you to kind of cut down that process and, and feature your products directly in email to get people right into the buying flow from your email campaigns.
Cade Midyett: [00:13:06]
And definitely want to emphasize how easy it is to like Jamal mentioned. I was going through to shoot a video just of the platform, doing a little demo. It only takes like a couple of clicks to drop that item into your newsletter. No problem at all. And super worth it. And I know, especially me as a buyer, if you just drop a couple, you know, delicious looking pieces of food in that newsletter, it's going to be hard to resist clicking on something and going to the store. So love that inclusion. and along with that, you know, aside from just featuring delicious looking food, do you have any suggestions on what kinds of products Farmers should be featuring in the newsletters?
Jamal Miller: [00:13:41]
I don't know. Now my, my mind is going to desserts and things like that. I think one thing to think about is if you have any bundles that are available as a SKU within your product catalog or your subscription, again, this is a great place to use your subscription and feature that within the body of your email. Like I said, it just cuts out a step in the buying process. If you're able to add those links in those products previews directly into the body of your email.
Cade Midyett: [00:14:04]
Yeah. And I think the thing that Farmers got to realize is that, you know, your customers really trust you to know what, which of your items are going to be the best for experiencing for the first time. And like what a good selection of items would be to try, you know, especially if you're a new customer or even if you're a long-time customer.
So I think, you know, really emphasizing that, putting together a bundle, you know, people love stuff like that. People love a breakfast sampler if you're, you know, a pork Farmer. So definitely lean on those bundles and subscriptions of course, are great because people can just buy and then let it run. And that's super easy. So love that call out. But then, you know, even taking it a step further from just, you know, featuring items that you choose, I know that MailChimp also offers some advanced capabilities, leveraging machine learning to automate the suggested products for people to purchase. So can you tell me a little bit more about that smart marketing and those recommendations?
Jamal Miller: [00:14:55]
Yeah. So, I mentioned kind of all of the power that comes with connecting your Barn2Door store with MailChimp. And one of the really cool things that we have is something that we call smart recommendations. Which actually allows you within the body of an email, to serve up personalized recommendations for each individual recipient of your newsletter.
Based on what they've done in the past, things they've purchased from you in the past. So it's a really powerful tool and it takes no additional effort on your end. Again, it's, it's as simple as drop in drag. Or drag and drop rather a block of content into your email selecting that you'd want to include the personalized recommendations as your content block.
And from there, we'll do all the work in the backend to look at your full product catalog. Match that to your users and suggest the right products for them. Dynamically for everyone who receives the email. We also have some things like subject line recommendations that give you some tips on how to make a great subject line, making sure it's not too long, not too short the right number of emojis, if you're into that kind of thing.
And again, based on kind of billions of data points that we have over the years from MailChimp around what works best with email. We're able to use that to, to kind of give you some tips, some hacks, to take some of the work on your plate off of being an expert marketer and let us help you out.
Cade Midyett: [00:16:07]
Always love to have a bit of assistance. You know, we're not necessarily all experts at writing a subject line the first time or anything like that. So getting a little bit of help can go a long way. And I know, like I mentioned before seeing stuff personalized in my inbox, pretty tough to beat an item that's, you know, specifically picked out for me, if I'm the kind of guy who would love to buy a breakfast sampler perfect for that, just to be dropped right in that newsletter coming out to me. So that's super cool. And I mean, just super efficient too, from a Farmer's time. Can you tell me a little bit more about how Farmers can. Utilize those recommendations, the smart recommendations to help them save time. Like we mentioned and increase their sales?
Jamal Miller: [00:16:47]
Yeah. So I think it's a great way to think about delighting your audience first and foremost, right? Like as people understand that you understand them, and that you're going to serve up content, that's directly targeting them speaking to their needs. Using these kind of AI powered tools will help you to build that relationship with your customers. Over time, it will increase your open rates and click through rates because they'll know every time you send something, it's going to be personalized just for them. And ultimately that's going to increase your revenue, average order value, things of that nature.
The other thing to think about is that this automates work for you at the end. Right? So it's It's another way to take work off of your plate, where you don't have to think about creating, you know, 20 different segments within your audience to represent all the different SKUs that you have. You could just have one segment or have a couple of segments put dynamic content in there that actually serves up the right content for each one of those recipients and takes work off your plate. So we definitely recommend that leveraging the integration with Barn2Door. You start to play around with some of that dynamic product content in your emails.
Cade Midyett: [00:17:51]
Definitely a lot more efficient than sending out a tailored email to every single one of your customers. So definitely an improvement there saves a lot of time. Yeah, that that's awesome. And then Also just talking about, so, you know, let's say we're the Farmer, we've set up all this stuff, we've gone through all these new features, really exciting featuring our products and everything.
We've done all of it, but there's still one more step at the end, which is actually, you know, how do I measure if any of that stuff worked? So, and that's also, you know, great news, a part of the integration between Barn2Door and MailChimp. So can you tell me a little bit more about the concept of revenue attribution? And you know, is it difficult to set that up? Is it automated? Just tell me a little bit more about that.
Jamal Miller: [00:18:31]
Yeah. So it was really the Holy Grail of any e-commerce marketing, right. It's to be able to understand your full funnel and know what channels are driving revenue for you based on your different marketing activities. And like you mentioned, the good news is that with this integration you get that out of the box, right?
So once you connect to Barn2Door, every time you send out an email campaign you will have tracking that tracks back to your website and your e-commerce store, and we'll be able to track back to any sales that happen through that email campaign. And we'll attribute those back to the appropriate customer so that you have an idea of kind of at a customer level, how people are interacting with your campaigns and what that's driving in terms of sales.
Also in the aggregate, you'll get a better idea of what your kind of average lifetime value is across all of your customer sets. We also have in our advanced offering something that's called purchase likelihood. Once you connect your e-commerce store, which allows you to look at your entire customer base, and we'll actually suggest to you people who are most likely to make a purchase in the upcoming months.
And we'll kind of break down your entire audience, by the people who are from the most likely to make a purchase to the least and give you another segmentation point where you can think about sending specific messages to your most valuable users or the people who you think are closest to making another purchase.
So a lot of really cool stuff related to revenue, like I said, that is what every marketer is looking to get to is that kind of full funnel view. And we're excited to be able to bring that to you at this integration.
Cade Midyett: [00:20:04]
Yeah. And as any Farmer listening, who's attempted, you know, flyer marketing or sending out, you know, mail pamphlets or newspaper ads or something. It can be tricky to measure the results of the marketing that you do. Oftentimes it's not easy, but for such a clear way to see how many sales and the, even the proactive stuff, like the likely the purchase likelihood.
I mean, that's just super next level marketers dream of that stuff. Just like you mentioned. So love it. Can you tell me a little bit more about AB testing? You know, in context of all these cool features, we've talked about, you know, what is it and how can a Farmer go ahead and set up an AB test in a campaign
Jamal Miller: [00:20:45]
Yeah. So, AB testing comes in a couple of different formats. So there's the concept of AB testing, which is really just Version A versus Version B. And there's not much variation there. Typically you try to test one thing at a time. So maybe Version A has one subject line versus B has a second subject line, and you see which one gives you better open rates.
There's also the concept of multi-variate testing, which is where you actually test multiple elements within an email campaign at the same time. And it gives you an idea of. Kind of what combination of factors kind of contributed to the best performing version of that email, right? So you could have multiple subject lines multiple versions of your header and multiple versions of let's say your copy your body copy of that email and you can test different versions of those things all at the same time. And come up with the best combination of subject line, header, copy to drive engagement with your emails. We have the capabilities to do both with our pro plans you can, and premium plans. You can do the multivariate testing that I mentioned. With our other paid plans, you can do AB testing. And it's a good way once you've kind of gotten a little bit further along in your email marketing program and setting things up, and you've learned a little bit about what works and what doesn't work.
It's a great rate to really tweak and kind of play around the edges of your campaigns to get to that optimal open rate that optimal click-through rate that optimal revenue. Down the line and we try to make it as easy as possible as with everything else we have in the platform for you to get up and running fairly quickly. But it's a great tool kind of once you've gotten your base campaign set up to leverage.
Cade Midyett: [00:22:17]
Yeah. It can be really surprising to see, you know, how much a change of a header or a subject line can make a difference on a campaign. So definitely test that stuff out. Give everything a shot see the data and then you can go with what works. But thank you Jamal for your time and all of your great advice for our podcast listeners. And before we sign off I'd love to hear your thoughts on what steps a Farmers should take to implement some of these advanced capabilities that we talked about with MailChimp. Should they sit down and write out a plan or should they just jump in with two feet?
Jamal Miller: [00:22:47]
So I would definitely suggest doing some planning upfront and really to understand what you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day. because if not there's a chance that you'll kind of get results back and not really know if they're good or not. Right? If you don't have a goal set in mind and what you're trying to do accomplish ultimately.
So take a little bit of time to plan, understand what you're trying to do. And then take some time to look across the suite of our tools to see what's going to help you get to that end goal. Whether it is automations or whether it is those dynamic product recommendations, testing the subject line, kind of understand what you're trying to accomplish ultimately first, and then you can kind of dig into some of these more advanced tools. But the good news is once we've kind of, laid out your plan of what you're trying to accomplish, most of these tools are easy to use and allow you to get relatively quick results to understand what's working, what's not working with your marketing campaigns.
Cade Midyett: [00:23:35]
Awesome. Yeah. So definitely a great call out. Start with your goals, figure out what you're trying to get out of your marketing as with any marketing you do. And then, you know, you can really go from there. And I feel like, like you mentioned, a lot of these features just kind of naturally slot in once you figured out where you're trying to go with your campaigns. I'd love to extend my thanks to you, Jamal and the entire team at MailChimp. For your role in helping support Farmers alongside Barn2Door, we are delighted to partner with MailChimp to give Farmers the best in class email marketing tools. They need to increase buyer loyalty and save time for more information on the Barn2Door and MailChimp integration.
Visit www.Barn2Door.com/integrations. And thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.