Ep 160 Mastering Q4 Email Marketing with Hannah Spicer

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If you have an e-commerce business, Q4, October to December is a key time for you and your brand. There’s a lot of activity and noise in that lead into December with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, promotional sales, all that kind of thing. So the inbox of your customer is going to be a very busy place. And today I’m joined by email marketing specialist, Anna Spicer, and we are going to be chatting about how you can stand out, where your focus should be and how you can reach your customer and your sales targets. Hannah, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me back. I’m pleased to be here. Yes, Hannah, we were saying before, for those of you that are listening, Hannah has done a previous podcast with me, which is episode 135. I’m going to link that in the show notes where we talk a lot about the automations and the flows that you have that you need to get set up for your business and that you should have. And today is definitely a focus more on Q4 and Black Friday and Christmas.

But Hannah, before we get into that, can you give people that don’t know you a bit of an intro? Yeah, for sure. Hello, my name’s Hannah. I’ve worked in email marketing and e-commerce for 20 years now. My background was premium and luxury brands in-house.

So that includes Harvey Nichols and Monica Vineda and Kurt Geiger. And then five years ago, I launched my own consultancy business and I work with premium and luxury brands on optimizing their email marketing and CRM to drive more revenue for their business. Q4 is obviously a key area for e-commerce brands. What are the key elements of that Q4 email marketing campaign that a small business, small to medium sized business should have? Yeah, so obviously Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a massive part of Q4.

And even before that was something that was in play in the UK, this is a peak period for most businesses. And, you know, it can drive anything up to kind of 70% of some businesses’ sales this one period. So it’s really important. The first thing I’ll say about Black Friday is you don’t have to take part. I don’t want everyone to feel pressured that they’ve got to do massive discounts, which are really going to damage their brand and their margin.

It’s a decision that you can make as a business depending on a number of factors of, you know, whether it’s right for you. There are lots of brands, both small and more established, who are taking a stance of actively now saying we’re not taking part because we don’t support this kind of consumerism and promotional time. And doing alternative things like, you know, charity donations and things like that. So, number one, you don’t have to take part in Black Friday. I would still really urge you to be present.

Have a campaign running. It doesn’t have to be a discount. It doesn’t have to reference Black Friday, but please don’t go quiet. This is a really important time for you to be contacting your customers and actively selling to them. So I guess that’s number one.

Number two is you’ve got some options around what you do for Black Friday. So it can be a discount, but it can, as I said, it could be something alternative. It could be for every sale we make, we’re going to donate 10% to a chosen charity. Or it could be we’re launching an exclusive product at this time. It doesn’t have to be a promotion if you don’t want to do that.

I would definitely start by looking at what you did last year and kind of auditing and seeing what worked and what didn’t work. As well as perhaps if you had, you know, looked at and saved what your competitors were doing. Have a look back at that as well to kind of put together a plan about what is going to work for you this year. Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday seems to get a bit longer and a bit bigger. So again, don’t necessarily feel like you’ve got to be drawn into doing something for a whole month.

Like if it’s right for you to do a shorter period for your campaign, then do that. The biggest piece of advice I can give any business, whether you’re doing Black Friday or not, is to email more frequently, have a clear campaign and a plan of action for the whole period of time. And if we just bring that back a little bit before Black Friday and that, you know, prepping for that time period of Q4, how can they go into that area setting themselves up for success? Yeah, great question. I think there’s three main things I’d say.

So one I’ve already touched on, which is reviewing what worked last year and what didn’t and putting together a plan. Two is you want to help kind of build your database and your audience up in the lead up to Black Friday so that when it hits, you’re talking to as many people as possible. So that’s around, you know, having great data capture forms on your site and making sure you’re driving traffic to your website from your other channels. And for example, on your Instagram, making sure that you’re saying to your followers, don’t forget to sign up to my emails, here are the benefits and linking them through to a really easy form from there. So I think the third one is also kind of potentially doing some testing around what works with your audience and what doesn’t and also warming up your audience for peak period.

So if you’re doing any kind of segmentation at the moment where you’re only talking to your most engaged subscribers, Black Friday is a time where you’re going to want to reach out to everybody on your database, but you need to start to kind of warm up your deliverability and your audience so that you don’t come across problems during that peak time. So those are the three main actions I’d get done in kind of September and October. So you’re ready to hit the ground running. What are the most important metrics then to track during Q4 to gauge that email marketing success? Are they the same as they would be in a standard time frame?

Yes and no. I’d say click rate is still your most important metric because it’s a reflection of who’s opened and clicked your email. So who’s been engaged and interested enough to take that action. What becomes more important during Black Friday are your deliverability metrics. So those are your unsubscribe rate, your bounce rate and your spam report rate.

So the kind of least sexy ones. Because there’s more competition and there’s more noise at this time of year and people are reaching out to their wider list, this is when you’ve really got to keep a closer eye on those rates to make sure that you’re not going into spam folders or getting marked in any other way where you’re not going to get into the inboxes of your customers. On the segmentation side, what would you encourage people to look at there? What kind of segmentation of their audience would they normally have? Yeah, so I think the first thing is to say is segmentation sounds quite scary and daunting and I think if you’ve got a database of under 5,000 subscribers, I wouldn’t even think about it.

I don’t think you necessarily need to worry about it unless you’re really struggling with your open and click rates and it looks like there’s a problem. The first thing I would start segmenting by is that email engagement. So you could create a segment of your most engaged subscribers which could be anyone who’s opened or clicked an email in the last 30 or 60 days. Again, it will differ depending on your database size. That’s the best place to start because those are the people who you know are most interested in your emails that you’re sending and you’re going to get the highest open and click rate with them.

So email engagement first and then the other thing that you can look to second is their kind of website and shopping behaviour. So you could then look at people who have been active on your website, have looked at a product or have bought from you as another kind of segment to think about tackling next. I’m just thinking back to when I used to work on the shop floor in retail and there’d be customers that we would see and we’d only see them at sale time. They’d only come in at sale time. Would you have them as a different bucket, a different segment or not?

If you can identify them, yes. So some businesses will be able to do that looking at average order value, right? So it might be that their average order value is 30% less than your average order value. And yes, you’re right. There tends to be that in every business where you’ve got your sales segment.

It might be that you want to talk to those people first or that you want to hit those people more frequently during your Black Friday period. And it might be that actually you don’t necessarily bother with those people so much when you’ve got your kind of new season or new price messages. So yeah, those are a few ways that you can segment those out. And you mentioned earlier on that it is a really busy time for people’s inboxes. How can you ensure that you stand out and get read?

Part of it is coming back to warming up your audience so that they are already receiving and engaging and interested in with your communications. I think don’t underestimate how strong that kind of reputation is. If you see a brand that you know you always love their emails and it lands in your inbox, you will instantly go to it and open it. So that’s one piece. It’s to make sure that you’re sending engaging emails in the lead up.

I think also thinking about having really engaging subject lines and thinking about when you’re sending your emails as well. So trying to think about your audience and their day and when they’re most likely to actually have the time to open and click and engage with your email. As an example, lots of brands send first thing in the morning at 6 or 7am. They’ll often get into the inbox and they’re kind of there first thing in the morning, which is a positive, but actually people don’t necessarily click and shop at 7am in the morning. They just kind of clear their inbox and get on with their day.

So sometimes it’s better to send later, whether it’s 11am or 7pm, when actually people have got a bit more browsing time. So thinking about the timing, thinking about your subject lines and lots of the best practice rules that apply to subject lines any other time of the year apply now as well. So short and sweet, keeping them under six words, using your preview text as an extension of what you’re saying, using verbs and kind of telling the customer what you want them to do, asking them questions. Definitely if you’ve got a promotion, including that percentage off in the subject line or the preview text to kind of call that out, thinking about using emojis and seeing if that works with the audience. So those kind of typical ways of helping your email stand out will work here too.

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Head to runway2results. com to get the journey started and prepare your business for takeoff. It is a very short period of time, if we’re talking still about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I know that time period has gotten longer for retailers and it’s now not just focused on that weekend, but is there such a thing as too much, you know, what should the frequency be? What do you suggest? Yeah, it’s a big question.

It’s actually the most common question I get from my clients, regardless of the time of year, is how often should I be sending? There isn’t one easy answer for everybody, unfortunately. From my experience, smaller to medium businesses tend to err on the side of caution and think, I don’t want to bombard my customers, I don’t want to send too much. So I will just say that, you know, big businesses will be sending more than once a day. They will be sending two or three times a day potentially in this period.

So please don’t feel like what you’re doing is too much. You do want to email more frequently in this period. Remember that not everybody is going to open and click every single email as well. The way to measure it is to look at your open and click unsubscribe rates. OK, so I would definitely aim during your kind of key campaign period to try and send, if not every day, every other day, because we have got this kind of limited time to try and get your customers’ attention.

But if you start seeing really poor metrics in terms of opens and clicks and unsubscribes, pull back who you’re sending to and make sure it’s your most engaged subscribers. The other thing is, please, if you’re not going in early, because again, as we said, the time period is extending and some people will be starting much earlier on in the month. If you’re not going in early, please kind of consider letting your audience know what your plan is. So don’t just go quiet because people do start to kind of hold back their spending and wait to see what everybody’s doing. So if you’re not taking part, again, that is totally fine.

Let your subscribers know and say, we don’t do Black Friday because of XYZ. Instead we’ll be bringing you our usual brilliant updates or instead we’re donating to X charity. Let people know what you’re doing because customers do, some customers do kind of plan their activities and start saving products and plan their shopping. That’s just something to bear in mind. But you really just need to keep an eye on your metrics and if everything is looking good, the answer is to send more frequently.

And for that time, and I suppose maybe actually coming up to Christmas as well, should your abandoned basket number of emails that you have set up in your flows change? I don’t necessarily change the flows at this time. I just make sure that everything is optimised and in place and what happens is the traffic that goes through all of your flows peaks hugely. So abandoned cart is a great example of that. You’re going to have way more people coming onto your site, way more people starting to check out and therefore that flow, those emails are going to go to a much bigger audience and the revenue on all of those flows should peak alongside with the revenue from the campaigns that you’re sending.

So yeah, we’ve talked a lot about campaigns up until now, but yes, you also need to kind of audit and make sure that your flows are in place, they’re working optimally and they’re ready for that kind of peak traffic that’s going to be on your website. And doing that, like you say, kind of that September, early October time to make sure that you are ready to go. And how can people target after Black Friday and maybe either do a mop up with their emails or a mop up with their customers from an email marketing point of view? Yeah, so there’s ways you can do that across your flows and your campaigns. One really smart campaign idea that I always recommend is when your official promotion period is over, so that might be at the end of Cyber Monday, you do what’s called a sweep up campaign.

So that’s creating a segment of people, of anyone who visited your website during your promotion period, but they didn’t place an order. And you can then say, just for you, we’ve extended the deal for 24 hours, here’s a unique code that you can use, we’d hate for you to miss out. So it feels really kind of targeted and special. So that’s a campaign idea. And if that’s quite a big segment and you want to make that more engaged with, you can make it only people that actually viewed a product or added to bag and make it a bit more targeted.

The other thing you can do is obviously talk to these people in your post purchase flow. So that’s another flow where you’re going to get much more traffic through after this kind of peak period and thinking about how you continue to nurture that audience and cross sell to them down the line and give them content and advice and inspiration and get them to come back and shop with you another time. So then on the lead up to Christmas, how far in advance would you be sending Christmas type emails? Yeah, great question. I think from kind of early November onwards, and obviously, again, this will depend if you’re discounting and you have a separate Black Friday campaign or not, but you want to drive as many full price sales as you can throughout that period.

It may be depending on the product types that you can go even earlier. So if you’ve got, you know, gifting products, people are obviously shopping earlier than that as well. So I would start from kind of mid-October unless you have Halloween content. That’s the only thing you kind of need to get out the way. That’s not relevant for every business.

To start talking about kind of Christmassy and festive things from that time onwards. Yeah, that gives you plenty of time to get the most out of the season. And then in terms of segmentation, then again, from a Christmas and a gift point of view, what are the things that you look at for that? I think this is another peak time where you still want to talk to as many of your subscribers as possible, but you can bring in additional segments. So it could be anyone that’s shopped with you in that Christmas period last year, for example, because again, some people only come back at those key times.

With some businesses, they have different product sets at those times as well. So that would be an additional segment that you could reach out to, which is anyone that shopped with you for Christmas last year. And what do you think are some of the common mistakes you’ve seen brands do in that run-up to Christmas? I think not having a clear content plan and a clear promotion plan and kind of scrabbling around and knowing that they should be sending more emails but not really knowing what. So it doesn’t feel like coherent, engaging emails.

It’s kind of just pulled together, which I think comes across in the email and the engagement in itself. So having that plan in advance is so important. Not having those flows that are optimised and they’ve been tested and they’re all in place at a time. I can’t express how much flows can save you so much time and energy once they’re done initially. They should be driving 50% of your email revenue and then the other 50% is what you’re doing with your campaign.

So that’s a massive chunk that you can drive without doing anything on a day-to-day basis. So there’s so much value in making sure you’ve got those flows in place. And I think the other thing is to really think about when it comes closer to Christmas to just be very clear on your delivery deadlines so when customers can still order with you to make sure they get their gifts in time. I think people are really conscious and worried about that, especially with previous issues around Royal Mail and things like that. It’s really hard for them to trust and obviously it’s a really important time that they get their orders in a timely manner.

So be really clear on your delivery deadlines and repeatedly put those across your website, your product detail page, your emails, your checkout. Make sure people know and as they’re nearing, drive that sense of urgency to say, don’t miss out if you want these in time for Christmas. That’s another really key one. And I would say as well probably in some way or in your emails, have a very clear process on your returns and don’t worry if it’s not right or you know what I mean, something obviously the delivery times is really key but something about how easy it is to return an item if it’s not right. Yeah, very true.

And are there any examples of great holiday campaigns or emails that you remember seeing or that you’ve done for clients that have had great results that you could share? Oh gosh, I think Bowdoin always do a brilliant job with their content. I think it’s around, I think any brand that really puts themselves in their customer’s shoes and shows that they understand where they are at that time of year. So for Bowdoin, it’s not necessarily as gift led, it’s more about have you got all the outfits that you need for the festive season and that might be a range of things from like going for walks with family or hosting guests or going to parties or New Year’s Eve. Like it’s really kind of thinking about where your customer is at that time of year and how you can help solve their problems.

And I think with brands where it’s more gift led, it is still those gift guides or categories if you like but making them a bit more thoughtful and interesting. So rather than gifts under £10, it might, you know, I always look at things like gifts for the man who has everything or gifts for the woman who loves gadgets or those kind of slightly more inventive and creative because that is a problem that everybody has at that time of year. We’re like, we’re trying to think things that we’ve bought for people for years and years and years and we need something fresh. So I think those kind of inspirational content led campaigns can work really well. Yeah and so it’s not all just price focused like you say for under a certain price, it’s a bit more lifestyle or personal to that person they’re buying the gift for.

And what about then for after Christmas then as well? How do you do that kind of sweep? Because you will have people that maybe have never shopped your site before, bought from you before, you know, you have a lot more maybe eyes on your brand. How can you do a bit of a sweep up after that time? Yeah, so a lot of people go into sale straight after Christmas as well.

So it’s a busy time, right? It’s Black Friday, then it’s full price Christmas and then a lot of people still have January sales. Some of them still launch them on Boxing Day. Two things to touch on before that is don’t forget that if you offer e-vouchers on your website, that’s always something that you can send in the run up after your delivery deadline has passed. If people are still panicking, that’s a last minute thing that they can order which solves the problem.

So don’t forget to promote those. The other thing is sending on Christmas Day. So this is a debate I have with lots of clients and peers which is like should you send an email on Christmas Day? I personally think you should and I’ve seen it work really well and I don’t mean the happy Christmas from us email that doesn’t have a call to action. I think sometimes they can work if you have other things to say like I think Scamp and Dude sent a beautiful one last year which was this year we have raised, we’ve sent this many super scarves to people going through cancer treatment and we’ve achieved these, we’ve opened two new stores and that had a bit more engaging content and a reason but a flat Merry Christmas from us I think could be an Instagram post.

I would actually encourage you to remember that people are actually shopping online on Christmas Day so that you know it’s in the afternoon they might be bored of talking to their families or they’ve been given money for Christmas. So don’t pull back from saying are you browsing this afternoon, got some money to spend and think about Christmas Day as well. After Christmas it’s mainly a kind of key sale period and then I think it’s about looking towards the New Year and it’s that kind of content around fresh starts, New Year’s resolutions it’s a really peak time for kind of health and wellness and beauty brands to launch campaigns around that and for people who are new to you you want to try and introduce them to your full price products right so that could be our iconic pieces, our best sellers, our evergreen products that kind of content can work really well too. And have you noticed any emerging trends that you’ve seen that would work really well for holiday and for that Christmas period? Is there anything different or new that’s happening that you’ve seen?

I think the two things I’m seeing more of is one and this is across most industries which is brands starting to use AI to help them save some time. Obviously you’ve got to kind of use it in a way that works for you so now I don’t think it should be kind of all of your email copy is created by AI but lots of the email tools including Clasio do have a lot of time saving parts in there now that can be done by AI and supported with them like creating segments, creating flows etc. So thinking about how that can potentially save you time. The other thing is more brands in the UK are starting to use SMS as part of their marketing and that’s really impactful at times of sales as well because those kind of key, timely messages and reaching out to certain segments and also potentially having like an abandoned car SMS they all work really well too. So if you already have it set up definitely make sure that’s part of your plan for the period.

If you don’t it could be something that you want to put on your roadmap for next year. Is it an easy thing to set up from the SMS? It is. I mean I think there’s two main players in the UK so one is Attentive and also Clavio offer SMS as well. I think if you’re using Clavio for email it’s a no-brainer to kind of go with them and set it up in your account.

It’s fairly easy to set up. The first barrier is you have to build up some opted in mobile numbers so you might have loads of email subscribers but you haven’t yet asked them for their mobile numbers for SMS so that’s got to happen first. You need to build up an audience and then when you use it, it is more expensive but the engagement and the response is very high so it’s definitely worth investigating further. So is that something then you would be advising clients that haven’t got it to be looking at the September, October time to then be able to execute it around Christmas? I don’t know.

I think it’s a bit of a rush. I mean if you’ve got everything else in place and you’ve got time to look at it you could get it up and running but I think for most it’s thinking about it for 2024 spending that first quarter building up your database and really focus on getting some subscribers and then it can be part of your plans for the rest of that year. Well, thank you so much Hannah again for all of your wisdom and insight. Hannah, where can people find you and how can they work with you? Yeah, my pleasure.

Thank you for having me back. So I’m on Instagram at Hannah Spicer underscore consulting and I share lots of tips and advice on that which are hopefully really helpful and then my website is hspicerconsulting. com. And if you’re not on Hannah’s email list you definitely need to get yourself on it because you share. I love getting your emails every week even though I’m not a product business but I love what you share and your take on things but you share a lot of great examples of what other brands are doing and how that could be applied or why you think it’s a good thing or not a good thing.

They’re very insightful so thank you for sending those. Oh, thank you. Yes, thank you. You can sign up to those from my website. Appreciate that.

And I’ll be back again next week with another great guest and Hannah’s details and how you can find her will all be in the show notes as well. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Start Scale Succeed. If you’ve enjoyed today I would love for you to leave a review and I will see you again next week. If you’d like to hear more from me, your host Nicole Higgins you can follow me on Instagram at The Buying and Retail Coach check out my website www. thebuyingandretailcoach.

com or find me on LinkedIn. All the links are below in the show notes and don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, The Step for lots of helpful tips and advice.

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