In short
Rethinking Shopify email/SMS marketing by replacing “email blasts” with automated, trigger-based flows and using AI to improve segmentation, campaigns, and ROI. The episode argues that a tiny share of automated emails drives a disproportionate share of revenue, and that retention (not one-time conversion) should be the mindset.
Guest
Rytis Lauris, CEO and co-founder of OmniSend. Background: bootstrapped OmniSend to $50M+ ARR without VC; previously ran a digital marketing agency and earlier startups; started OmniSend around mid/late 2014 with Shopify. OmniSend serves 125,000+ Shopify brands with email, push, and SMS automation.
Key claims
- Less than 2% of emails sent via OmniSend are automations, yet they generate ~40% of revenue (about 20x impact).
- Most stores underuse automations (often only 1–3).
- Email remains essential, but combining with SMS/push increases effectiveness and reduces platform dependency.
- AI can analyze store data and generate improvements (e.g., “where can my campaigns make more money?”).
Notable examples
- Abandoned cart automation (often the default) plus multi-message sequences and branching by behavior.
- Back-in-stock flows that collect interest and email immediately when items return.
- Post-purchase workflows for reviews/UGC/feedback and support handoffs.
- OmniSend AI features: connect to ChatGPT/Claude for recommendations; AI segment builder using natural language prompts.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Success Story of OmniSend
1:45 to 2:56
Discover how Rytis Lauris built OmniSend and its significance in the Shopify ecosystem.
“OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted.”
Rethinking Marketing with Automation
2:56 to 3:21
Understand the essential automations that maximize ROI for Shopify stores.
“One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know.”
Building a Business Without Funding
3:21 to 5:50
Explore the challenges and philosophies behind bootstrapping a startup.
“Our sales, the entire team, customer-centric.”
Lessons from Failed Ventures
5:50 to 8:25
Rytis shares insights from his previous startups before OmniSend.
“Thank you, Jay, for such a kind words, welcoming words.”
The Evolution of Email Marketing
8:25 to 14:00
Discuss the changing landscape of email marketing and its relevance today.
“at the beginning, like what was going back before OmniSend?”
Customer-Funded Growth Philosophy
14:00 to 16:28
Learn about the benefits of being customer-funded and how it shapes business decisions.
“But yeah, we were lucky enough to become profitable soon enough to pay off as it was in the format of convertible notes, convertible bonds.”
The Journey of Bootstrapping
16:29 to 17:48
Discover the journey of a company that grew without initial external funding and the lessons learned.
“And then literally each month we would look at, can we hire a person?”
Advice on Raising Capital
17:49 to 21:58
Gain insights on when and how to raise funds to grow your business effectively.
“Like it's, so now you have control of the company, right?”
Innovative Thinking Through Constraints
23:23 to 28:00
Understand how limited resources can foster creativity and innovation in any business.
“I mean, we're all familiar with AI, but it's how can it be built into our products?”
The Importance of Creative Constraints
28:00 to 29:00
Learn how setting constraints can foster creativity and lead to meaningful improvements.
“And we understand that potentially some of them, or maybe all of them, could need to be thrown away.”
Show all 26 chapters
User Experience Improvements for E-commerce
29:00 to 31:38
Discover how e-commerce teams can benefit from dedicated time for UX enhancements.
“If you think about your Shopify store right now, if you just gave your team, that team might be just you.”
Sharpening the Axe: The Need for Reflection
31:38 to 33:30
Understand the value of taking time to strategize and improve workflows in business.
“we used to do them once a year and we saw so much value that we started doing them twice a year.”
Leveraging AI in Business Processes
33:30 to 35:50
Explore how AI can enhance efficiency and help automate various business tasks.
“So everyone's at different levels of comfortableness with AI and some people are using it already in every process they do.”
AI in Email Marketing
35:50 to 38:19
Learn about the latest AI tools for enhancing email marketing campaigns.
“And I want to make sure we talk about email too, because I feel like we could definitely, even if people just listen and got that as a takeaway, I think that's huge.”
The Relevance of Email in Modern Marketing
40:30 to 42:01
Understand why email marketing is becoming increasingly essential for businesses.
“And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.”
The Importance of Owned Communication Channels
42:01 to 44:28
Learn why owning your communication channels like email and SMS is crucial in marketing.
“Because if like Instagram or Facebook, they change algorithms constantly and one day you're able to reach your audience and another day they ask you to pay money for doing this.”
Common Mistakes in Marketing Automation
44:28 to 46:07
Explore the frequent errors brands make with marketing automation and how to avoid them.
“So too few, I know, I know, too few automations.”
Distinguishing Campaigns from Automations
46:07 to 50:38
Understand the key differences between email campaigns and automated workflows.
“The campaign is being initiated by the marketer, by the person, and it's a blast.”
The Role of Segmentation in Marketing
50:38 to 53:30
Gain insights on how to effectively use segmentation to enhance marketing automation.
“This is a home for you, you know, because you leave money on the table.”
Rethinking E-commerce Marketing Strategies
53:30 to 55:50
Discuss the balance between customer acquisition and retention in e-commerce.
“Each each of business has their own incentives policy.”
Keys to Building Lifelong Customers
55:50 to 56:00
Quality of products and service is crucial for creating lifelong customers.
“We see acquisition departments represent like 80 % of marketing budgets and retention only represent 10 % to 15%.”
Quality and Customer Loyalty
56:00 to 57:26
Understand the key factors that differentiate one-time buyers from loyal customers.
“What do you think separates a one-time buyer brand, brands that just get people that buy one and done, versus brands that create lifelong ongoing customers?”
Underutilized Shopify Tools
57:27 to 57:44
Learn about an underrated Shopify app that can enhance your business.
“Because you know what's going to happen?”
Maximizing Efficiency with AI
57:45 to 58:46
Discover how AI can be leveraged to optimize business operations effectively.
“In this conversation here, I realize I'm probably only using it to 30 % of its capacity, even less because I don't have all the automations.”
1% Win Tip for Shopify
59:36 to 1:00:20
Learn how to enhance your email automations for better customer engagement.
“Now, as you know, at the end of every episode, I like to give a 1 % win tip to help you grow your Shopify business at least 1%.”
Effective Post-Purchase Communication
1:00:21 to 1:04:36
Explore strategies for optimizing post-purchase emails to improve customer retention.
“And you heard the stat in the show that 2 % of all emails sent through OmniSend drive over 40 % of all revenue driven by OmniSend.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00What if I told you less than 2 % of your emails could be responsible for over 40 % of your revenue? That's not a typo. That's the power of automation. And it's just one of the wild insights you're about to hear from my guest today. In this episode of the Shopify 1 % podcast, I sit down with Rytis Lauris. He's the CEO and co-founder of one of the most loved tools in the entire Shopify ecosystem, OmniSend. He bootstrapped his way to over$50 million in ARR, annual recurring revenue, without raising one single dime of VC funding. You know how he did it? He built something Shopify merchants absolutely loved that made them money, and then his customers funded it.
0:43He did it the right way. In fact, he did pitch it back to investors back in 2014, but they told him email was dead. Imagine that, right? Well, fast forward today, OmniSend powers email, push, and SMS automation for over 125 ,000 of the largest brands on Shopify. And it truly is one of the most loved and highest rated tools in the entire ecosystem. In this episode, we cover the three must have automations that drive the highest ROI for Shopify stores. And just a little hint, almost every store I know only uses one of these. Why relying on email blasts is killing your revenue and what to replace them with and a dead simple way to use AI to instantly improve your marketing, even if you don't know where to start.
1:28Oh, and the retention mindset shift that separates one-time buyers from repeat loyal customers. This was a fantastic episode. I think this episode will be a wake-up call to finally fix your email flows, to rethink retention, and maybe even fall in love with your tech stack again. Let's dive in. OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you and the insights are legit good.
2:04And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there. or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now, they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo and on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills.
2:40If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed. It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us.
3:21Links in the show notes too.
3:45Our sales, the entire team, customer-centric. Our salaries will be paid by Ben. I love Ben.
3:51Rytis Lauris:With over a decade of experience in digital marketing, e-commerce, and bootstrapping startups, Redis has successfully grown OmniSend to$50 million ARR without any outside investment. His mission is simple, to challenge the notion that great marketing must be costly. If we take a population of billions of people, they are super outliers. Here's another way to think about it. I heard someone say this once. If you want to do something innovative, restrict resources, restrict time, and restrict money. Go on your own path, making your own mistakes, and the point of the success will come. I think it boils down to this.
4:33Reedus, it's so good to have you on the show. First of all, before we start, I would personally like to thank you because this is the first time you're coming on our show. as the first sponsor of the Shopify 1 % podcast. And I just want to give a bit of background to listeners. I know sometimes we mention this in the show notes and actually a lot of our listeners use OmniSend. I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago and they told me they installed it because they heard it on the show and they loved it. So I've used OmniSend for, I don't even know how long, probably seven years. So I manage a few stores, some family members.
5:11We use OmniSend on all of them. And when we decided that we wanted to have a few sponsors on the show, not a ton, but hand pick a few. OmniSend was the first phone call I made because the way I wanted to approach it was I wanted to only allow sponsors of products I use. That's just kind of a personal thing, but it, you know, it didn't, it's not necessarily about money for the sponsorship that helps pay for all of the hosting and everything else. But it's products that I believe in. And so OmniSend is one of my favorite email and SMS tools. And so it's such an honor to have you on the show. Thank you for being here.
5:49Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Jay, for such a kind words, welcoming words. And as well as like, you know, welcoming us, inviting us to become a sponsor. And of course, as we know each other for quite many years. So, you know, since we were beginning early days on Shopify, Bold was an inspiration for us as well. That's okay. We can do, we can build things. And OmniSend was really, really early days. early day startup and yeah so really thank you for your kind words and really great great to you it's fun it's people like you i think make the ecosystem of partners better and for those that don't know you know so bold we've started building with shopify in 2012 when did omni sign officially lost 14 2014 yeah so actually yeah shopify was probably second or third the integration we made.
6:39So it was like, yeah, mid-2014 or end of 2014 when we started with Shopify. So both of us are over 10 years in the space. And if you're listening right now and you just started building on Shopify in the last two years, you have no idea what it was like 12 years ago. It was a very, very different space, just from number of merchants to what was even possible to do on Shopify. So, Rydus and I have both seen a lot. And anyways, it's been - Big Shopify unite events, which I miss them, to be honest. Not sure about you. So, additions for developers, this new event. But I kind of miss most of those massive unite events and different kind of representatives and merchants alongside gathering together, talking about all things Shopify, about e-commerce in general.
7:32Yeah. I think this is kind of one of the, I understand COVID kind of, they tried to make it virtual, but that's what they missed from early days. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And hopefully that comes back because that was definitely a good thing. So there's a lot that we can get into on this show. You, you know, you're the CEO, founder and CEO of OmniSend, which is like my preferred email and SMS solution by far for Shopify. high. So I definitely want to pick your brain on, you know, some marketing and email and SMS strategies. But just because I know that almost all of our listeners are also founders, they're also started companies.
8:11I want to dig into a little bit into your story. I think it's pretty inspirational and you've grown an amazing company. So I want to talk a bit about that and then definitely pick your brain a little bit on some advice for some of our listeners. So can we start at the beginning, like what was going back before OmniSend? Tell me the story of how OmniSend came to be. So maybe we'll not start like super early days, but OmniSend is my third startup attempt. I failed twice prior to OmniSend and it was a spinoff as well from digital marketing agencies. So after the second failure, I got back to more traditional kind of business.
8:49So basically used to run a digital marketing agency, building websites, online stores, Facebook apps, it used to be. That's right. Super, super popular. They used to have like different applications on Facebook, et cetera. And some running some marketing campaigns on behalf of customers as well. It was not even the core of our business, but that's how we spotted the opportunity of email marketing back in the days for those who sell online, for online merchants specifically. And yeah, So kind of like, you know, and I started my first business being 20. Okay. I did not start. I was invited to join.
9:23And I was a smaller co-founder. We were two, but just the person I knew from my secondary school just gave me a call. I said, look, I have an idea. What do you think about, you know, starting a business? I said, okay, let's do it. It sounds fun. I'm going to be, you know, businessman, business owner. Yeah. Make business cards. Yeah. So, you know, many, many lessons learned since then. But that's a nice journey. I truly believe that, you know, it's... There are those success stories that, you know, someone starts a very successful company being 18, but those are super weird. I mean, we hear about them so much, but if we take the population of billions of people, it's like they are super outliers.
10:12but I believe like just you know in going your own path making your own mistakes learning your lessons and there's a point the success will come well you've certainly seen success I feel with OmniSend and I know you don't share everything but some some numbers you've shared publicly that I know you're okay with and so you've bootstrapped OmniSend first of all which for those listening means you didn't raise money, which almost everyone these days has an idea, builds a little proof of concept, and then goes out and tries to raise a few million dollars to build the idea. You built it all without raising any money, and you've grown on OmniSend to 50 million ARR, annual recurring revenue, which I don't know for sure, but that's for sure in the top 1%, I bet that's in the top 0.01 % of Shopify apps that are doing, I guarantee that's in the top 0.1%.
11:16And then if you said what companies are doing that level of revenue that are bootstrapped, I don't know of another one. I can't think, I know, you know, like judge me and some of these others are, you know, they're, they're in that same category and, but their numbers are quite a bit less. They're extremely successful. And I know PJ well, but I mean, what you've done is absolutely incredible. Of course. So tell me, why did you decide to bootstrap? Why didn't you raise the money? I tried. Well, we tried. I'm a co-founder. We are two founders. So we tried to raise. And then this is kind of a story that I'm vocal about.
11:56But back in the days, once we launched like 11 years ago, yeah, Omnisan, and start fundraising. Everybody was, you're going to do what? Email? Come on. I sometimes felt like I'm pitching a leather shoes and trying to convince investors to convince innovation, you know, I'm going to be making an email marketing solution. Something similar as like MailChimp back in the days. So did they think like email was done? It was like, who needs another email solution? This was 11 years ago. It was like super like conversational commerce was a big buzzword back in the days. And like chats, et cetera. So yeah, people will be, you know, advertised and retained through chats, Messenger, WhatsApp, whatever else is in the market, et cetera.
12:47And conversation commerce, people will stop going to websites to browse online stores. They will just ask a product, et cetera. And that's okay. I mean, this is how the true innovation happens, you know, but we kind of like believe that, okay, those who sell online email is highly effective channel and this will remain and that then remain the same because this is the inbox, actually you as a consumer, you're in the full control of the inbox. So you subscribe to, let's see, bold newsletters, et cetera. And of course, nobody reads each and every one newsletter, but just, you know, the subject lines, the contacts around you.
13:24If you are super busy today, you just ignore, but maybe the next, you will see stuff after one week, you will open and you will engage and you will purchase, et cetera. So we kind of strongly believed and okay, we failed in fundraising. So, okay, like we raised a little bit from early like business angels. So we have no institution. Friends and family. Yeah, exactly. It's free Fs, yeah. Fools, friends, and family. So you're fools. I love that. Or maybe friends, family, and fools, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we raised, you know, in this category, all three Fs. But yeah, we were lucky enough to become profitable soon enough to pay off as it was in the format of convertible notes, convertible bonds.
14:08And we just basically paid back as a debt of interest. That's it. Yeah, so that was kind of like organic decision. And after that, we just felt in love with bootstrapping and not fundraising. And furthermore, internally we call it being customer funded. That's the term that I love more than bootstrapping because our customers, they pay us month over month and each month we make a decision and they pay us in advance for one month. So each month they make a decision if they believe that Tomlinson is going to create value in the upcoming month and pay their bills off basically. Some of our customers sometimes lose this trust and then they churn.
14:47so it really kind of you know makes ourselves the entire team engineers marketers support people etc just really really to be customer centric and focus on customer needs because we all understand that you know our salaries will be paid by the customers who today make a decision if they still believe in omniset if we still create value for them so this is how we you know fund our growth as well you're basically validating product and validating what you're building every step of the way versus raising 10 million dollars we see some slight product market fit in this one area and now we're going all in and then it doesn't work and like i can't hear that every single day with some startups but you month by month were validating what you were building otherwise you would have micro pivots right like you're not sending the plane across the globe it's every month adjusting i love it in my car you know those yeah yeah yeah so this is kind of a mindset and then you know after some years i really felt in love with this mindset with this concept and continue doing this and as it's stated in your background you know just trying to to be one percent better every day it's not that much per day but it really compounds per per year per 10 years etc so this is kind of like you know our philosophy and now that the fact that we are customer funded it's even probably the first maybe the second statement in our values and culture so it's now really embedded into the entire philosophy and the mindset of the entire Omnis and crew that's so good I respect that so much we just add bold we were very similar we did end up eventually raising money in 2019 but from 2012 we part of it was because we're in the middle of the prairies in Canada there is not a lot of investment there's there's fools and friends and family but that's it there's not the large BC community and so we didn't even think about raising money we just thought okay how can we you know work at our jobs as long as possible, build this idea, get the idea going.
17:08And then literally each month we would look at, can we hire a person? No. Okay. Next month. Okay. Yeah. We can hire a person work for a couple of months. Oh, we can hire two people now. And it was, so we would always say we hired behind growth where a lot of people hire in front of growth. And we grew the company that way for seven years to 2019. I think we were around 200 people and it without raising a penny. And And then we started getting investors knocking on our door, wanting to fuel what we were doing. And the reason we said yes was we viewed it as not using the money to start a fire, but using it to fuel the fire.
17:47Right. And so because we had kind of figured out what's working, but I have a ton of respect for that. And it's amazing. Like it's, so now you have control of the company, right? Like you can, you can, you're not. It's good and bad. sometimes it's good to have some external pressure. Well, you know, and you for sure, and you can have, do you have an advisory board? No, no formalized. No, no. Okay. Yeah. The thing, the thing that I love the most is, is just, okay, so there's no formal board, but just I do peer to peer conversations and there is a group of peers. Some of them are from, from e-commerce, some of them are from other industries, but tech industries, mainly startups.
18:28And some of them like we larger than we which is always great so kind of different people and have like routine meetings and they just you know challenge each other a little bit and then this is this is how how we learn as well and this is how how i get inspirations for yeah self like okay come on we did this it worked for them okay shall we try something like this as well but sometimes you have doubts so so this is kind of my unofficial board and we never gathered together but those conversations those meetings well and that kind of checks a lot of the boxes that a board does i mean there's some other things as far as like governance and other stuff but like actual holding you accountable and challenging ideas and challenging strategies and stuff so as long as you as long as that's getting done in some way i think that's that's that's all that matters right like that's it works yeah so for anyone listening right now who is considering raising money to grow their business?
19:27Do you have any advice for, I was going to say early stage founders, but at any stage with probably their e-commerce store. So our listeners are merchants. Any advice for them? My advice would be, you know, go as far as you can or as far as you like and without external funding. And exactly to what you said about Bald, you know, that at some point you start getting investors knocking at your doors. And then you can raise more or less on your terms. Because while you are new, while you're just starting and there's no still clear proof of product market fit, et cetera, you go and you raise on their terms.
20:10And you basically spend so much time trying to convince someone that you are doing a good product, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can really go further on your own foot, like fund yourself from free apps, et cetera, that would really, really put you in a better position for two reasons. One is just because you can, if you will make a decision to fundraise, you will do it on way better terms. And the second thing, I still believe it really unleashes your creativity. the constant shortage and i think you've kind of had the same feeling especially in those initial years 70 years when you bootstrapped so that constant shortage of resources really helps you to think way more creatively to act way more creatively and you know the fact that you you raise 10 or 50 or 100 million, it's very, very tricky because you feel,
21:12Rytis Lauris:I never felt it, just my theoretical way of thinking, or what I saw from friends and colleagues who raised, it kind of like makes a misperception that, okay, the resources are unlimited now. It's still very limited. And it's so easy to burn tens of millions so fast without even like putting the company to the next level. So I think it's kind of very, very, very tricky, tricky, tricky part here. And you have to be really ready to do this. I mean, if it really fuels up and if you succeed and then that's great, but there are a lot of situations then that raising would be not the best what happened to any company.
21:58Yeah. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility. Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products.
22:42Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything. A bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store. Now, I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes.
23:22here's here's another way to think about i heard someone say this once if you want to do something innovative restrict resources restrict time and restrict money exactly if you have too much resources too much time and too much money nothing innovative ever happens but you know it always blows me away in a couple weeks we do uh our our hackathons we call them innovator die at bold so we give like everyone a nice it used to be three days this one we're actually doing a full week and we're doing it all down do you lock everyone down or do we used to work days well we used to do it in the office and people would bring like cots and air mattresses and stay overnight and we had people going by with like drink carts full of like food and pizza and red bull and not everyone stayed overnight but a lot of people did we never like forced anyone to like but they did it willingly because it was it was fun and and there's always the theme this particular theme is our whole company is taking a week off to investigate AI.
24:23I mean, we're all familiar with AI, but it's how can it be built into our products? How can we use it in our processes? How can we use it in our roles? How can we leverage AI with partners? Just like everything encompassing. And so the whole company is taking it. I mean, it's one of the, we always have a theme for these hackathons, but this one covers every single role. Like people on our HR team can be using AI for screening, applicants and doing research on, you know, applicants and whatever. So like, but it's always blows my mind. My point was whenever we do these hackathons, it blows my mind what gets done in three or four days.
25:00You know, you have prior to that, we have large teams and we have standups and meetings and review processes. And sometimes I look at something that got built and I'm like, Oh man, that, that took like a month. That's crazy. But you do it. And then when you're, when you have these hackathons, it's like you have less time, less resources. It's like, how can we do a minimal viable version of whatever we're building? We meet after and we go through every project. Well, they're presented at a town hall. Everyone presents what they built. And then after we meet and we go through and we say like, which ones do we want to ship or like put a team on and actually build out it?
25:36It blows my mind how many of them are like, wow, this is like 50 % of the way there. It's basically done. It needs some, you know, the UX and UI to be fixed up a little bit. But yeah, it's amazing. I think that point you said is really important that it's really easy to think that money is going to solve that next stage of growth. I've so many times seen the exact same thing and I couldn't agree more that less time, less money and less resources actually makes you be more creative and more innovative. And to what you said, yeah. So you have those hackathons. We have days. So let's say we used to have like last year we had like usability days.
26:15So kind of in all the engineers, all the product teams, they gave one day, just no other tasks, no like routine stuff. But you have to solve as many as possible usability improvements, tasks, et cetera. So they're kind of like, that's what you say, they're crazy, like just ship like, you know, tens of. Oh, I love that theme, usability. So like anything that people using OmniSend, like - User templates, improvements, sometime very minor, some bad animation, maybe more clear error definitions, which kind of no dead end states, basically kind of remove all the dead end states. Totally. Because it's not happening and just, you know, all of us in our products, we have, unfortunately, it was kind of like an error accord.
27:04Yeah. Yeah, maybe not the main ones, but still there are some edge cases. But, you know, if all combine all of those edge cases, there are quite a lot of them, you know. And yeah, so just like some very clear examples here. But so we used to have now, now we've kind of, we improved it and we shifted a little bit. So now we have AI days. And to what you say, we just have one single day, but you have to do something with AI. And it's all like organization related, like to the customers or to ourselves as well. Both works and both are acceptable for this. So just to improve your work, to improve your routine or to improve the customer's experience.
27:47Alongside what we are currently going through, we have like six weeks sprint, half of our product organization. They have a lot of like just some constraints, but a lot of freedom in that box. and basically to ship AI features for customers. And we understand that potentially some of them, or maybe all of them, could need to be thrown away. But that's okay. That's what we accept. They're learnings. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. What you say, just limiting resources. So those are people. This is a time constraint. And then be creative. I mean, we remove all the other tasks from your, all the other headaches.
28:28Okay. minimize sometimes it's impossible to remove everything for six weeks you can do it for one day or maybe five days but but yeah but just you know limits or everything else and just you know very clear constraints go create something you know someone might be listening to this right now and thinking wow this doesn't apply to me i run an e-commerce store i'm not a tech company but I would actually challenge everyone listening that this can apply to any company. Exactly. Exactly. If you think about your Shopify store right now, if you just gave your team, that team might be just you. That team might be 10 people.
29:11That team might be 20, whatever. But if you gave your team, hey, we're going to give everyone two days to improve, to pick a project you want to work on. There's always these things hanging in the back of your head. It's like, you know, we've been meaning to add a form on our website to collect testimonials, video testimonials to use as UGC content. And I just got to build up the page. I'm like, or some passion project like that. Take two days and call it user experience improvements or, you know, pick a theme. I think that is super relevant for e-commerce merchants. It's not just for tech companies.
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29:49No, no, no. And you know what happened after we started having those usability days. So basically engineering, like product and engineering teams attended those. But other departments, other teams start making their own days. And they only improved their way of work. So basically they took their, it's like HR, administration, marketing. They just take their process, do what you said. Yeah. And because all of us, like people, we get into routine and we get stuck in the routine. And sometimes you have to make a little decision that, okay, this is my conscious decision that next Friday, whatever happens, I will not.
30:31Okay, maybe if there is some kind of super, super extraordinary fire, I will react. Otherwise, I will not do the routine stuff. I clean my calendar. and to what you say, just because all of us, all business owners, all marketers, all managers, we always have more ideas than time and resources to implement. If it's an opposite, maybe you should quit your job, I would say, maybe find new challenges. But if it's not, so the backlog in your mind is always there. So just make a pause, dedicate time, and make improvements. And yeah, thematic, it really helps. Just set the feet. It really helps. Not, you know, because then you have 100 ideas.
31:18Sometimes it's very difficult to pick which one. But you think about the theme, narrow down to 10 ideas. You challenge, I score, let's say, them or whatever, other methodology to prioritize. Pick one that you can implement in one or two days. And, you know, it compound if you make it as a habit once per month. In 12 months, the change will be massive. we used to do them once a year and we saw so much value that we started doing them twice a year. Now we do them three times a year. And it's, it's funny that some companies, like I talked to friends that they work at like bigger or corporations and stuff.
31:55They're like, I could never convince my company to take three days off to let everyone do whatever they want to do. There's, that would be such a waste of time. And it's like, well, no, we see it as the opposite. It's not a waste. It's actually our most, one of the most valuable times of the year. So I think it boils down to this. We're all, we're all out there chopping down trees with an ax and we're, we're chopping and we're chopping and we're chopping and we're working so hard. And sometimes you got to take an hour and stop chopping and sharpen the ax. Exactly. And then you cut down trees twice as fast and we all have to do that.
32:32And maybe if there's one takeaway listeners get from this is you're chopping hard. You're working on your story. You're answering emails. You're packing boxes. You're answering phone calls. What can you do to take a day or two and sharpen the axe and improve some processes to speed things up? Maybe that's something with AI, like customer support for your marketing. Especially with AI. Yeah. Especially with AI. I can bet there is so much space for improvements. Yeah. Chopping, I have another analogy, which is exactly the same meaning, but, you know, turning the squared wheel, basically. And, yeah, it's very hard to turn the square wheel, but I have no time to stop and to make myself a circle wheel, you know.
33:16I love that analogy. That's great. I'm super busy, you know. I'm super busy, but just don't have the right tool to work efficiently. And it's better to stop, to pause, to do that. Yeah. So, completely agree with what you're saying. And here's one tip I'll give people. So everyone's at different levels of comfortableness with AI and some people are using it already in every process they do. Some people are just using it for kind of edge cases here and there. When we told our company that we're going to have this week-long hackathon on AI, a number of people said, well, I already use ChatGPT. I ask it questions all the time.
33:54I don't know what am I going to do, right? I said, well, ask AI. And so one person was one of our executive assistants and she does use chat GPT every day. And I said, we'll type into chat GPT, just say, I'm an executive assistant. This is the company I work for. This is my role. How could I leverage AI to better do my job, be more efficient? And it came out with a whole list of ideas of like, you can use AI to reprioritize calendars, to shuffle meetings based on priority rank, to create, you know, action items from meeting notes, assign it in Trello or whatever you use. And then we looked at it like, holy cow, there's a lot.
34:32So for those listening, if you ask AI what you can use AI for, I know that sounds very meta, but literally go to chat GPT and say, this is my store. This is my URL. This is what I sell. This is the market I'm in. These are the channels I'm selling in. I have ads on Instagram, Facebook. I sell through Amazon and Pinterest or whatever else. Like this is what I'm doing. How could I leverage AI to improve some of these processes? And it'll give you back seven to 10 great ideas. So you don't even have to, the beauty of AI is you don't even have to come up with the ideas. Let it do it all. And then take one of those ideas and then go back to it and say, this is a great idea.
35:11Can you give me a breakout of the tools I would use and the steps to take to implement this? And it'll create a plan for you. And so on top of that, to what you just said, you know, you can ask to analyze your competitors. What do they do right? Yes. And no doubt that they will, JGBT, Gemini, whatever tool to use, cloud. It will come with ideas. Yeah, ideas. Okay. And you will see maybe we don't do this, maybe we don't do that, et cetera. You should not take everything, but you can handpick. Use HI then to prioritize. Yeah. Matt, we could go on AI. My mind is going in a hundred different places right now.
35:52And I want to make sure we talk about email too, because I feel like we could definitely, even if people just listen and got that as a takeaway, I think that's huge. you know on the competitor front we sometimes say here's five competitors analyze their website based on this type of marketing principle principle and create copy that that counteracts and addresses their selling points to position us in a certain way we want to be positioned as premium we want to be positioned as cost effective we want to be positioned as and it comes up with that like the sky's the limit and ai comes to email as well so just like we launched a couple of weeks ago, et cetera, like AI segment builder, which is really great.
36:36We have like a subject line builder. We have preheader. We have the copyrights assistant widget within the email editor. Now we just launched, yeah, which is like a couple of weeks ago, maybe a segment builder, which probably is kind of the most powerful, what we currently have in the tool. And I love it because usually like marketers, we struggle a little bit with - Tell me what a segment is for those listening. For example, you know, segment of those customers who have email and phone number and bought in the past three months. So, I mean, you kind of for many years, you can build such segment, but it was, you know, and or all the logic that marketers have to come with, etc.
37:21Now you just, you know, write a prompt. You just write the prompt. filter me those who have not bought in the past six months, but spend at least 100 bucks. Oh, that's awesome. I actually haven't seen that. Is that live? Yeah, it's live. Yeah. Oh, okay. Because I've created a lot of segments, but I have them all pre-saved, like customers who've purchased more than once or haven't purchased in the last... Oh, you can create them in human language, just try to prompt, as I said, and it will come with the rules of course there's always with a yeah you have to review it challenge it sometimes it hallucinates yeah but yeah so this is yeah we did not communicate it very much yet it's still better but it's life yeah so you can go build it try it use it so you know it's coming to email as well and i have no doubts good old school email will be valid will be relevant and will be very effective in the coming five ten years but how we use email marketing how do we do email marketing the way will change for sure because we can get more and more assistance from AI.
38:24And this is how we think about like the AI directional phenomenon in general that, you know, we can help as a creator, we can help as a strategist, come up with insights, recommendations, et cetera, but still the marketer is the boss. He or she makes decisions, AI recommends, Omnisend recommends, Omnisend AI recommends, but you as a marketer make the final decision. You can improve everything, You can edit something. You can disagree and ask us to come with new suggestions or designs or copyright, etc. But this is kind of like, you know, the vision that we are going. Interesting. At the top of the show I mentioned, OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude.
39:08And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with. Plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Cloud Chat, GPT straight to your OmniSend account. Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.
39:43My favorite part though, is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice, but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months, or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0.
40:18If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. You know, I want to go back to something you said earlier when you were trying to raise money 11 years ago. People said email. What? isn't that solved you know email's dead everything now is on social social media it seems like now email is more relevant than ever i every single day i'm seeing some influencer on social media or linkedin or whatever launching a newsletter everyone has a newsletter right like that's that's the sexy thing to do now is to have a newsletter and and become a i mean that's part of your personal brand like i have a i have a newsletter i i think Because this is how you own true relationship with customers.
41:16Otherwise, it's not you who owns the relationship. It's social media platforms. It's Amazon. So a lot of merchants sell both on their D2C stores as well as on Amazon or Walmart, etc. But this is the main difference. Once you have a relationship with customers, you can truly retain them. Otherwise, for platforms, you pay again and again to retain your customers. and it's very, basically, those platforms, they do not retain your customers. They reacquire them again and again. And acquisition is always way more expensive than retention. So that happens the same with like creator's economy, with influencers, just why email is so sexy.
41:57Because this is how you start building true relationship with customers and you're not dependent on algorithms. Because if like Instagram or Facebook, they change algorithms constantly and one day you're able to reach your audience and another day they ask you to pay money for doing this. Well, that happened. What happened? We all built our Facebook pages and got people like our Facebook page and then all of a sudden your posts were only showing to 1 % of people who followed your page and you had to pay to boost the posts to actually get them in front of audiences. And so the same thing could happen with any other platform right now.
42:35Like it feels like on, on TikTok and Instagram, like even YouTube, it feels like if you create a good viral post, you don't have to pay for it. The algorithm picks it up. But trust me, like that can very much happen that organic reach gets throttled and only paid reach reaches a certain amount. So email SMS are, you own it. It's so important. Exactly. Push notifications as well. We have those three channels, push notifications, really underrated. And then they work really well. And then like the metrics we see, like those who use the conversion rates are super high. Just the usage, the engagement is super high.
43:20Just the usage is very low. So that's probably kind of a thing like email. Email is great. It will remain. But once you augment email with other channels, like SMS, push notifications, we're considering maybe we had WhatsApp back in the days. We had the Messenger. We duplicated those channels. They were not effective enough back in the days. But now it seems like WhatsApp is coming back more and more. And we started hearing requests from our merchants, from our customers that they would like to have, especially kind of in some geographical areas, even kind of in the States, which is main market for us.
43:58It's becoming more and more popular, et cetera. So, yeah, so, you know, augmenting email with other channels really increases the efficiency of communication. Basically, kind of the main goal, the main target is to retain customers, to communicate with them, and again and again, to bring your message in front of their eyes. So more channels you combine on single workflows, on single campaigns, on single automations, the more effective your communication is. Yeah. When you look at brands today using email, SMS, push, what are some of the things that a lot of brands, even big brands that you look at that they're getting wrong, that you still look at them and like simple fundamental things maybe, but what are some things that is commonly got wrong?
44:47Yeah, yeah. So too few, I know, I know, too few automations. Because usually kind of even, even, even like established brands, they launch two, three automations. Those work really effectively. Abundant cart is the default, some post-purchase maybe, et cetera. But that's it. And they basically set this part and they forget it. And they run campaigns. They run campaigns. So campaigns are important, but you know, like last year, we generate automated messages, emails, SMS, push notifications. They generated around 40 % of revenue for our customers, of orders for our customers. And it contained only 2 % of the traffic we send out.
45:31Wow. So the relevancy of those automated messages for your customers, for the shoppers is just insane. So way fewer messages you are sending towards your customers, but they are way more relevant than the click rates, engagement rates, conversion rates are like way, way, way high in comparison to campaigns. So I want to get this clear for people. So a campaign is a one-off email blast that you send. You have a sale or a promotion, a spring sale or something. An automation is a series of emails based on the trigger base. but then it can be 10 emails that get automated and then depending also on what's done that go down different automation paths correct correct yeah so yeah so yeah so thanks for clarifying maybe just do no that's fine i know the term automations but just yeah to explain for everyone and where the distinction is so automation workflow is basically yes automation is it's like the trigger initiates.
46:34The campaign is being initiated by the marketer, by the person, and it's a blast. And the automation, automated campaign, automated email SMS is being initiated by the trigger, by the company. So basically we identify that Jay put some products into the shopping cart or just browse some products even prior to putting it into a cart and we identify this and that triggers a campaign. Okay, let's send the product reminder for Jay after 12 hours, 24 hours, two days, et cetera. If he reads, that's okay. Let's push, maybe make it more frequent. If he ignores, maybe let's send SMS. Maybe let's send other products that look alike or maybe fits together.
47:17And if you are in search of, let's pick some random refrigerator, for example. Maybe there's a wide variety of refrigerators that you could purchase, yes? So you can recommend other products as well. etc. And there could be like one message, which I always recommend put more messages on the same sequence, on the same workflow. Yeah, not a single reminder, but three reminders, five reminders. And there could be different workflows. So then getting back to your original question, like what is being underused? So usually merchants we set up, okay, there's an abundant cart automation workflow, maybe it was welcome automation workflow, but there's so many of them.
47:58Let's let's say for example back in stock you know all of those who sell online and you sometimes have situations that you're out of stock leave those products on your web page but instead of just you know sold out message put the widget it's in case of omnisand let's say it's all automated we'll put the widget and the product is sold out we collect email addresses we have a segment whenever the product is back in stock, which is named just basic as this, there's a trigger. We send emails immediately. And this is kind of like super efficient workflow because you basically invite those who showed that they're interested in this specific product, you invite them, come back and purchase because they have such a clear interest.
48:44Yeah. This other example is like all the post-purchase communication, which it does usually does not convert straight away, but it shows that you care about customers. So all you can convert it like collecting UGC content, collecting reviews, getting feedback. Are you happy? We just shipped it. Did you receive a parcel? Was it good? Are you happy with a product? Are you happy with a delivery service? If something is wrong, ideally it could be pushed to your support center. oh we saw that we're not satisfied with the product so what went wrong ENPS service etc so you know those are really really great opportunities to re-engage with your customers again and again and yeah so you know those customers who do it well they have 10 automations in place wow and I just want to get that stat right you said less than 2 % of the emails sent through OmniSend are an automation So like the majority of people are using OmniSend.
49:46They're just sending a campaign, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Independence Day sale, whatever. They're just doing blasts. Yes. Only 2 % of the email sent are automation, but they make up 40 % of the revenue generated. Correct. What is the math? That's 20x. Correct. 20x revenue. you i mean if there's one takeaway for a listener is set up your freaking automations because that's insane yeah and not just one like not just i mean i actually am thinking right now of some of the stores that i work with we're guilty we have we have an abandoned cart email that goes out i think two but that's it there isn't anything else and i don't we're not triggering and we might be triggering sms but we're not triggering push so i got to go back and tune these up a bit here because that's...
50:37Exactly, exactly, Jay. This is a home for you, you know, because you leave money on the table. You leave money on the table, all those automations. And yeah, Abundant Card is the most popular. So all of those automations, you know, they add extra revenue and you just set up and forget, you know, the same as Abundant Card generates revenue. So it's very important to do that. So then how does segmentation tie into that? So automation, I get that. Now segmentation, you can obviously send campaigns to different segments and you can build automations with different messages based off segment as well too.
51:12Like I feel like that's a multiplier. So if you're doing automations and layering and segmentations, how do these work together? So for example, let's say automation. Yeah, the one you have, abundant cart. So you can put the segment on top of it and you can combine both of two. If the cart has been abandoned by the first time buyer, the offer is A. If the card is being abandoned by the repeated buyer, the offer is B. If the card is being abandoned by the best buyer, who knows it spends a lot with you already, maybe you can offer C. And maybe you can provide either a bigger discount or maybe no discount because you are pretty sure the one will still purchase just because you know that he or she is purchasing from you.
51:59And maybe the first time buyer, you can come with a more aggressive, let's say, discount offer. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is there any data that you know off the top of your head? If it's someone who's never bought from you before who abandons, should you offer them a steeper discount than someone who has? Or is there any data around that? I mean, it doesn't sound like, you know, good for your old customers, but usually that's what happens, you know. Right. It's a risk too because they might use a different email address and then they say, they find out, hey, how come I'm not getting...
52:33Because a lot of people do try to game the abandoned Cardino. Yeah, of course. But usually people, especially like they don't game that much. And this is kind of to what you say, we keep hearing it from our customers. But maybe I want to be more on the safe side. What if someone games my system? But usually just very, very few people who try to do that and let them game. I mean. 100%. 100%. So pride about themselves. Oh, I found a loophole. That's okay, but you still purchase from me. Meanwhile, they're giving away 10 % to everyone who signs up for their email, but they don't want to give a 10 % for an abandoned cart email because they say, oh, someone might just be gaming the abandoned cart, like adding it to the cart and then waiting an hour.
53:19Give them the 10 % because you're giving them the 10 % discount just for signing up to your newsletter. Mine as well, right? No, I agree 100%. People get too hung up on that. It's, yes, there will be a percentage. I don't know what it is. 10 % of people might game it. It depends on your margin. Who cares? Yeah. Yeah. It depends on your margin. It depends on what overall incentives. It could be just very straightforward. It's just discount. It could be like free shipping. It could be some additional values. And it depends on your business. Each each of business has their own incentives policy. And, you know, sometimes there are super like slim margins businesses.
53:55So you cannot be too aggressive with straightforward discounts, but maybe you can have some add-ons or bundles. Exactly. Reedus, I want to get into our quick fire around here because it's funny. I don't even think I got through half the questions I had for you, but that's okay. We talked about super valuable stuff and I'm just going to have to have you back on at some point because I feel like there's a lot more that we can get into with email marketing, using SMS together push. but I know we're close to time and you're on the other side of the globe and you've got a family to get to. So I don't want to take too much of your time but you're actually the first person we're doing this with.
54:36We've got four podcasts in the next two days and we're starting this. We're asking everyone these quick fire questions and it's going to be fun. We're going to then later turn them into videos where we have each person answering and we'll use them for other stuff but you're actually the first one. And so you're the guinea pig. So you can't possibly screw up. Perfect. Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, read us. What is one book you'd recommend every e-commerce founder read? Every founder in general. Hard thing about hard things. Oh, I love that. Ben Horowitz. Yeah, so good. Ben Horowitz, yeah. The best book about business ever.
55:11Yeah. What's a recent automation flow you think every store should try? Back in stock. The one we touched. The one, yes. Super effective. What is a sacred cow in e-commerce you think merchants need to rethink or challenge? So I think it's just kind of to put more emphasis on retention. I still kind of feel that there is too much emphasis on acquiring. Acquisitions. Again and again and again. And we just, like we as a marketer, there's always too much resources or just reacquiring sometimes customers instead of we would retain them. Yeah, yeah. Agree 100%. It's interesting. I could talk about this.
55:49I agree with you. We see acquisition departments represent like 80 % of marketing budgets and retention only represent 10 % to 15%. But the effect on revenue is disproportionate to that. So it's a lot. Our eyes way, way, way, way high on. Yes. Yeah. What do you think separates a one-time buyer brand, brands that just get people that buy one and done, versus brands that create lifelong ongoing customers? What separates them? Quality. Just one word, quality. Quality of the products you sell, the service that surrounds the product, the experience, the quality of experience on your website, delivery, et cetera, et cetera.
56:30So I think that's the main distinction, quality. I like that. What's one underrated Shopify app you think more merchants should be using? Any of bold apps, I would say, probably. Any, any of those. Any bold, I love it. I'm not sure they are truly underrated, but everybody should be using, for sure. I appreciate that. Thank you. The second last question. If a merchant had only one hour per week to work on their business, where should they spend it? You know, posturing and like learning how to use AI tools to help run their business more efficiently and basically, you know, scale them up as persons.
57:06You know, that says a lot about you that you didn't say they should be working on email. You are an honest, caring person who's not self-promoting your product, I would have thought you would have said they should be spending an hour on their email automations. But you know what? That is a very, if you spent an hour a week working on AI, that would be good too. I have no doubts. AI would recommend you that you should do a lot of your email. Because you know what's going to happen? They're going to go and exactly. They're going to ask AI what they should do. And it's going to say they should work on automations.
57:35So last question. What's one e-commerce metric you think more brands should care about and obsess over, but they don't? funny enough but i still think that lifetime value is not always the metric that marketers or even owners are obsessed about yeah yeah love it all such great answers on all them read us first of all we're at the end of the show here but i just want to tell listeners that we have an offer with omni send so if anyone listening wants to try omni send which i honestly can't recommend it enough. I'm not even using it. In this conversation here, I realize I'm probably only using it to 30 % of its capacity, even less because I don't have all the automations.
58:19Well, I do have them set up, but not as much as I should. And it is for a lot of the stores I run the number one driver of revenue and it's free revenue. Like we look at what we spend on Facebook and Google ads every month versus what we spend on OmniSend and it's maybe one 1 ,000th the price. So it's so valuable. Redis has put together an offer for anyone to get 30 % off for three months, not just one month for three months. And the link for that is in the show notes and or you can just go to OmniSend and you can use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0. I highly recommend it. And Redis, where do you like to send people to connect with you or to learn more about you and Omnisend?
59:06So our website, so Omnisend.com or you can ask Chad Gbt or Jim and I about Omnisend if you want to learn but they will still finally direct you to our website and personally myself, I mainly use LinkedIn. LinkedIn. It's my primary social media network, social network, social media channel. Yeah, so invite us to connect there with the stories on LinkedIn. Are you okay if I put your LinkedIn profile in the comments for people to connect? Okay, I will. Thanks, Jay. Reedus, thank you so much. This has been a ton of fun. I learned stuff. I know our listeners did too. I really appreciate the time. Thanks for inviting.
59:46What an absolutely fantastic episode. Now, as you know, at the end of every episode, I like to give a 1 % win tip to help you grow your Shopify business at least 1%. Because, well, if this is your first time listening to this show, if you grow something 1 % every day for a year, at the end of a year, you'll have grown it 3 ,700 % because 1 % compounded over a year grows 37x. It's insane, but that's the math. That's how it works. So the goal is to improve your store 1 % a day with these tips. So today's tip, of course, is going to be about email because that was what the show was about. And you heard the stat in the show that 2 % of all emails sent through OmniSend drive over 40 % of all revenue driven by OmniSend.
1:00:36And that 2 % is automations. So the 1 % win today is improve your automations. I mean, if you don't have automations, add them. Of course, a very simple one to do is a post-purchase automation or a welcome flow automation. But the tip I'm gonna give today is add three or four emails to your post-purchase automation. And the reason I say your post-purchase is the number one opened email on the internet is an order confirmation email. It's crazy, but it's true. But yet most brands just have a very vanilla order confirmation email. It's just the default one that Shopify sends. Maybe they styled it a little bit.
1:01:14But of course, that's missing a huge opportunity if you don't add details about your company and potentially offers or information or building trust or building authority in the space that you're in. And so there's been studies done that when someone places an order, the second they click checkout, like to complete an order, there's, it's like kind of the peak excitement of the whole buying journey. There's endorphins released, there's a dopamine hit right at that exact moment. But what happens is usually that's it. There's an order confirmation page, an order confirmation email goes out and that's it.
1:01:49you could probably send three emails within the next hour or two and that customer is not going to get upset. You could send an email right the second they place that order. You could probably send another email 30 minutes later, another email an hour later. Like that's when they're excited. So send them an email telling them how about your company and how your products are made and how you ethically source the material and give them information about what to expect if they ordered some type of health thing or some product that's going to improve their life in some way. Continue to educate them on it.
1:02:25Yes, they just purchased it on your site and you'd think they would know it, but you have to continually educate customers on the value of your products. I mean, go and subscribe to like Athletic Greens and you'll see that you're always educated on the importance of all the vitamins and nutrients that come from other greens. Like they know that as soon as you stop that that's not the front of mind is when you don't perceive the value in the product and when you might cancel or you might not order again or you might not refer a friend. So add like three or four emails to your post-purchase automation flow and I would recommend three in the first day.
1:03:05Sounds crazy but A, you're grooming those customers to expect emails so you're actually going to get less unsubscribes. If you just email one order confirmation email when it goes out and then another one two weeks later, you're going to get unsubscribes. You're going to get spam abuse reports. But if you place an order and you email them the first hour, like right away, half hour, hour, you're warming them up to how you like to communicate. You're a communicator. So go ahead and just add three emails to your post-purchase automation, ideally a couple within the first hour, and that's your 1 % win.
1:03:41And if you want to take it one step further to make this one a 2%, segment your automation. So with OmniSend, you can send different emails to first-time buyers versus someone who's purchased in the past. And you can, if they've purchased in the past, make them feel like VIPs, make them feel special. Put something in your email and saying, oh my goodness, we know this is not your first order and you've ordered before. Thank you so much. In fact, we wanted to give you a little something and maybe a link to an ebook or join our community. You can segment, depending who's buying, different automations.
1:04:17That's one of the beauties of OmniSend and why I love it so much and why I personally chose them to be a sponsor of this show is how powerful you can make these automations. So that's it. I've talked long enough about this, but go out, add some automations, segment them as the bonus tip, and you will improve at least 1%. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you're enjoying this show, you're getting anything out of it, I would love a five-star review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. We're really trying to help stores grow their business and reviews help this show get recognized.
1:04:50And it's just good for everyone. It's good karma for you too, I think, I believe. Give us a review. You'll probably get a Google review on your store. I'm guessing. Who knows? I mean, if you believe in karma. Anyways, thanks so much, everyone. We'll see you on the next episode.
From the publisher
What if I told you that raising millions might be the worst thing you could do for your Shopify business? In this episode, I sit down with Rytis Lauris, CEO and co-founder of Omnisend, to talk about how he grew one of the top-performing Shopify apps to $50M ARR without a dime in VC funding. Yep, bootstrapped. We dive into the real impact of email and SMS marketing, why automations are still wildly underused (even by the big brands), and how AI is shaking up the ecommerce game.
Here's a stat that should blow your mind: automations make up only 2% of email volume but drive 40% of revenue. If you're running a Shopify store and still blasting emails like it's 2015, this episode is your wake-up call.
Key Take-aways- Why bootstrapping may give your Shopify store a strategic advantage over raising VC
- How Omnisend scaled to $50M ARR by being customer funded
- The automation blind spot: 2% of emails generate 40% of revenue
- Smart segmentation strategies that increase conversions without increasing effort
- The compounding power of small, creative improvements over time
- How to use AI in your ecommerce business starting today
- Why retention is more powerful than acquisition for long-term Shopify growth
- Ideas to spark innovation in your store with limited time, budget, or team
Omnisend - I personally use Omnisend for every Shopify store I manage! I’ve tried them all and Omnisend is hands down the easiest way to set up email and sms automations and campaigns, leverage segmentation to personalize them, and A/B test everything to optimize conversion. The push notifications and gamified email collection tools are just the icing on the cake 🤌
(plus most report paying about half the price of Klaviyo 🤫)
🚨Listeners (YOU) get an exclusive 30% OFF for 3 MONTHS: https://shopify1percent.com/omnisend
Bold Commerce - Maximize your Shopify sales with Bold's suite of powerful apps. From AI Upselling, to powerful Subscriptions, Memberships, and VIP Pricing tools, Bold has everything you need to Maximize your Shopify revenue!
Try Bold apps for free here: shopify1percent.com/bold
Resources & Links Mentioned in the Show- Rytis Lauris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rytisl/
- Omnisend Email & SMS Marketing: https://www.omnisend.com
- Omnisend 30% Off for 3 Months: Use code JAY30 at checkout or go to https://www.omnisend.com and enter JAY30
- Hard Thing About Hard Things (Book by Ben Horowitz): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062273205
- Judge.me Reviews App: https://judge.me
- Gorgias Helpdesk: https://www.gorgias.com
- Bold Commerce Apps: https://www.boldcommerce.com/shopify
- Shopify Plus Info: https://www.shopify.com/plus




