Ep 536: The Only Browse Abandon Email You’ll Ever Need | AKNF Preview of TWBERP

0:00Jordan Gordon:The only browse abandoned email you'll ever need. It is popular and I recommend breaking your browse abandoned based on three different kind of funnels. People are interested in products that are curated for them, even if it's curated by a machine. Oh, recommendations for me. Oh, these are for me. These are for me. Recently added. Why are recently added emails good? because people like newness. People react very well to newness. The funnel flusher, what is this?

0:40It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric. And today on the D2C podcast, we are previewing a brand new episode from our sister podcast, the world's best retention and email podcast, lovingly known as Tua Burp, hosted by Pilothouse's own Jordan Gordon. This episode is titled the only browse abandoned email you'll ever need. And it's a must listen for retention focused marketers and brand owners who want to maximize every session driven intent signal on their site. If you listen to this, you will learn how to build a single scalable browse abandoned flow that dynamically converts. You'll understand when and why to segment by product or category behavior, and you'll be able to get tactical on product feeds, wait steps and subject lines that actually move more revenue.

1:21Make sure you go to your podcast provider and search TWBERP, T-W-B-E-R-P, wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe for a retention masterclass every week from Jordan Gordon. But for now, please enjoy episode six of the world's best retention email marketing podcasts, the only browse abandoned email you'll ever need. And on with the show.

1:46Jordan Gordon:It's the world's best email retention podcast and I'm your host, Jordan Gordon. We are a member of the DTC Network of Podcasts and the philosophical home of the Pilot House email and customer retention team. If you want to make the sweet nectar of low-cost revenue a large part of your digital ecosystem, follow us on your favorite podcast app today. This time, we will discuss the only browse-abandoned email you'll ever need. Recently, I've been producing a lot of very high-level, sophisticated, strategic content, which is important because email fits into a very large ecosystem. So, you know, if you have not yet watched episode 40, where I brought a lot of important ideas together that we've been discussing, please watch episode 40.

2:32Jordan Gordon:Now, that said, there's still lots of basic stuff about an email program. You know, there's still lots of important table stakes that people still get wrong. So I can't abandon that. So for any fans who are still crossing little bridges as they cross big bridges, here's an episode where we go through some foundational stuff for email marketing. And also, anybody who's kind of new to the pod or just listening in in recent episodes, you can go back to the first, for sure, the first half dozen episodes were very foundational. Just how email works, how opens work, stuff like that. All that being said, let's talk through the only browser abandon you'll ever need.

3:16Jordan Gordon:Let's start from trigger. We'll go all the way to the top. I'll start from trigger. Of course, you trigger on viewed product. That makes it a browser abandon email. But to just add some nuance, you can also make a category abandon email. There is a data point category or catalog viewed. I've noticed, I've just noticed not all Klaviyo accounts have it. So it's present sometimes, it's not present other times. I've never really dug into why. I just know, you know, sometimes you can do this and sometimes not. The view product is better because you can show someone the product that they viewed. But if somebody got to a category and then didn't click on a product, this would allow them to get something specific to that category, you know, whereas the site abandon would generally not be specific to a category.

4:06Jordan Gordon:Although if you do go back and watch our episode on the only site abandoned email you'll ever need, we do talk about ways that you can incorporate category or psychographic segmentation based on tracking what pages someone has visited in your blog or other rich content space. Point being, look, it's going to trigger unviewed product, but consider also taking what you learn here and building yourself a category abandon based on people visiting top categories. It is popular and I recommend breaking your browse abandon and your category abandon if you make it based on three different kind of funnels.

4:50Your number one category, your number two category, and default.

4:54Jordan Gordon:Don't start by breaking down five or six or seven different categories because you don't yet know how much of an uplift you're going to get from your effort. And effort is precious. Time is precious. So if you're going to segment based on category, by what category someone has visited, or psychographic like we discussed on the only cytoband you'll ever need, some episodes ago, if you're going to do that, just do it by two different ones and a default. Now, you don't have to break it down by category. One approach to this is one clean funnel. You will never find yourself annoyed at the technical debt and extra work you have to do by designing a single browser band and float, even if you have multiple categories.

5:48Jordan Gordon:Because we're going to talk about dynamic content. You're going to have dynamic content loaded into the email. So they're going to see messages that make sense for them based on where they were on the site. quick point. When you build your product feeds, recommendation is to use a blend of visit and purchase to make sure that visits that don't result in a purchase like this browser band and that clicked on a product feed good recommendations into the engine. But also purchases carry way more weight than visits. So you do a blend, which means you get the view if someone's only viewed, but you are waiting by purchase.

6:26Jordan Gordon:If somebody actually purchases something, product feed, blend. Product feed, blend. Okay, understood. So if you just do one clean funnel and you don't break it up by what category someone's purchased or what, you know, content pages people have most recently viewed, you're still going to get them the merchandising that is relevant for them. What you won't get is talking about that specific category, which can be like overcoming objections for that category in the marketing. What are the most common objections from buyers? Okay, let's overcome those. Well, you kind of want to do that on a category-specific basis usually, unless you're like a single-skew business.

7:11Jordan Gordon:You can also talk about manufacturing and materials. I mean, if you've got a whole lot of categories, getting really into manufacturing materials is difficult with one clean funnel. So one clean funnel is like maybe good for businesses that have so many categories you wouldn't possibly even think about breaking it down because it's just too much. Or you just, you're limited in time and you're limited in scope and you want to just get the best results you possibly can. You're going to get like the uplift from breaking things down by a few categories will be slight, right? I mean, you will get an uplift generally, but it won't be fireworks because so much of it is just getting in the inbox with the product they clicked on and some good recommendations and the dynamic content will cover so much, will accomplish so much of the lift.

7:59Okay, so we're triggering off a viewed product,

8:02Jordan Gordon:maybe category if we're also doing a category abandon. We are segmenting by the category someone clicked on has clicked on this category, yes, no, has clicked on this category, yes, no, right? So we can kind of do that category segmentation. Recommend you do category one, category two, and default at first. And then we reach our wait step. How long do we wait? Actually, you probably put the wait step before the logic I just described, but whatever. Here's the recommendation. Although you should watch your results. I mean, always watch your results, but you should watch your results and make sure that, uh, that your, your base reacts well to this amount of inboxing.

8:41Jordan Gordon:First one goes 20 minutes. Second, first email goes after 20 minutes. Second email goes after eight hours. Why 20 minutes and eight hours? Because that way you get them when they're in the same session sitting down or on the train or whatever. And you get them like, um, later that day, or if it was at night, you get them when they wake up. So you just, you just really, really hugging that intent by getting these two to go on the same day. I mean, if you're only doing two browser-abandoned emails, maybe not, right? But if you're going to do more than two, then do two really tight up front, and then follow up with another one a day or two later.

9:21Jordan Gordon:You have to watch your smart sending, okay? So I'm not going to go through all the different scenarios where this can screw things up, but obviously, if you're smart sending, is more than eight hours, and you send your second email in eight hours, it's not going to go. So smart sending is, it's a universal setting in Klaviyo settings. By the way, obviously we're talking about Klaviyo here. We're a Klaviyo first agency, and it's a product with mass market appeal. But all of this philosophy works with other systems. In fact, I built all this stuff in other systems before I use Klaviyo. So you can do all this stuff in any system.

10:00Jordan Gordon:I just talk through Klaviyo in shorthand. Okay, so we've triggered it. We've routed to the appropriate content category, if appropriate, based on product category. We have given people a chance to convert and then they open the email, right? Actually, we should start with subject line. Of course, the classic is caught you looking, right? Or you've got great taste. I think it's fine to split test against that. Maybe it gets used all the time because it's a winner. I'm pretty deep in email, so I see it in my eyes roll, but you know, I'm deep in email. So I'll acknowledge that it's worth testing you've got good taste, but we can probably do better.

10:45Jordan Gordon:And so in here, we're going to discuss the dynamic content, the dynamic value that's embedded in the email, I would consider calling out that value. So this is foundational when it comes to recommendations, trending, new to site, bestsellers, emails, perfect for you where you pair recommendations. Foundational to that is the reason those are popularized in multiple email systems is because As they work, all the research has been done. The science is settled, right? People are interested in products that are curated for them, even if it's curated by a machine. Oh, recommendations for me. Oh, these are for me.

11:32Jordan Gordon:These are for me. What's every landing page do? We've said it so many times. What's a landing page? Where am I? What do you want me to do? What's in it for me? So calling out for them what's in it for you in a subject line, that's what every subject line is. If every subject line is what's in it for me, you're going to do great, right? So we haven't gotten to the section with the different dynamic content, but let's just stick with recommendations because recommendations is classic in a browser band and email because you know they clicked on a product so you can make a recommendation for them.

12:07Jordan Gordon:You could say, you know, the product you missed plus recommended for you. I know that's kind of wordy, but don't be afraid of that. Don't be afraid of calling out recommended for you in the subject line. Because someone's going to go, oh, recommendations. Oh, these are going to be good. This isn't going to be random stuff. What are you doing when you call out the fact that there is curated content for them in that message? You're saying, this isn't going to be a rando campaign. You're going to see stuff in here that you like. And you know what? It's going to get opens. And if you've followed the pod, you will know that when you optimize your subject line, the largest uplift is actually on page conversion.

12:49It's actually revenue procession.

12:51Jordan Gordon:Revenue procession is what goes up the most when you optimize your subject line. Seems crazy because it's subject line. You got to open it, then click, click through the email, then purchase on the site. You got to even add cart. How is it that revenue procession is what goes up the most? Well, there's a few things going on there. One, the benefit has time to compound down the funnel. to your creating something in someone's mind. And then if you do your, if you write your copy properly, you're playing on that the whole way and building on this concept. And what's the concept we're building? Why this thing's right for you.

13:25Jordan Gordon:They're called value propositions for a reason. So we are building on that from the subject line to the asset. And then often to a banner on top of the category page. If you're driving to a category page, you put a banner up there for your seasonal launch or whatever it is that you're doing. And through building on that, the final endpoint, the revenue procession, is what went up the most, right? It went up more than just the open rate. So calling out the what's in it for me is huge for the subject line. And caught you looking, I mean, how about something more like, and I recognize and I acknowledge every time I write these subject lines on the fly, they're not great, because you really got to sit down and do it, but it's like, yeah, keep shopping.

14:09Jordan Gordon:Plus recommended for you. You can do a plus sign. Or you can break it down and, you know, the product name that you left behind, and then in the pre-header text, you could say, plus recommended for you, right? Anyway, point being, subject line, let's at least test something better than caught you looking. Let's at least test. Let's at least try to beat that. And if you want to think about where to start beating that, start beating it by spelling out what's in it for them, because that's what they're, that's what they care about. They care about what's in it for them. And further, dynamic value, dynamic content, the things that we dynamically load are tested and proven to appeal to consumer psychology, right?

15:05Jordan Gordon:Recently added. Why are recently added emails good? Because people like newness. People react very well to newness. So, oh, there's dynamic content that loads newness, right? There's no like super old products. There's, you know, hey, it's a super old products email. Oh, products that have been on the site for years. Oh, I got to open this one. The dynamic value is tested and proven to work. So call out the dynamic value in the email, in the subject line, in some way or another. Okay, so subject line done. Then what do we see in the email? First of all, my goodness, okay? You know like more than half of the people who open the email, well more than half, do not scroll down.

15:56Right?

15:56Jordan Gordon:So, so much of the action is in the hero or basically above the fold. So much of the action. Now we talk about making email shoppable landing pages. Who's that for? Well, that's for the third that do scroll down, right? The third, I mean, do you want to just like walk away from the third that scroll down and just show them like garbage? No, you got to keep entertaining them, right? So, you know, we do make emails that are shoppable landing pages, but let's acknowledge that most of the action is above the fold. That is where most of the action is. It's above the fold. So I know I've said it before, but so let's say it again.

16:41Why put a hero shot on your browse abandoned email

16:46Jordan Gordon:when the value to them is the thing they clicked on? They clicked on that product. You've got crazy, heavy data that through the process of product discovery, they really found that product interesting. They interacted with it. They showed intent. Why wouldn't you lead with that? Why would you lead with some random picture of some dude? You know what I mean? here's a dude with a product from my site, right? I've got, you know, 15 products or I've got 30 products. Here's a picture of a dude with the hero product from my site. Now, is this the hero product? Is that what they clicked on? Maybe not.

17:34Jordan Gordon:Is that the product that's below this hero shot? Maybe not, right? So someone's going to open it up, say, oh, that's, there's the other thing that I didn't, I'm not interested in that other thing. And they click back and you just wasted it. You just wasted it. So if you're a fashion brand and you have amazing on-model shots, you know, and your imagery is fantastic, sure, okay, lead with a hero. But if you are not like some kind of fashion or design brand with the best imagery out there, lead with the product. It's what they wanted. Okay? So, probably we've skipped the HeroShot. And then next you show Recently Viewed Product.

18:29Jordan Gordon:It's a feature inside of Klaviyo. And many systems just show the Recently Viewed Product. It's the most recent event in the Viewed Product event. Sorry, it's the most recent product in the Viewed Product event. Now, if you have a multi-stage abandoned flow, a browse abandoned flow, and especially if it's a longer flow, if you get sneaky and you start making it like a continuation, you can go back and watch the episode on continuation. I forget which one it was. 26. I forget. But you can go watch the episode on continuation. Don't understand what I'm talking about. If you start getting this longer Googleger flow, you can always put in some logic on future emails and say, has clicked on three products or has viewed product three times.

19:20Jordan Gordon:And if someone has viewed product three times, you can show them recent three products. You can have an email. It's like products you've recently viewed. And this is getting closer to Amazon inspired product discovery. Okay, they didn't convert on their first pass through. That round of intent is expired. We need to draw them back in to the catalog. Oh, here's products you've viewed, and that's going to let them self-select which part of your catalog they want to re-enter into. So, point being, don't walk away from the idea of a recently viewed product. On a future subsequent message, when someone has just shown intent, you want to just show them the product they clicked on.

20:06Jordan Gordon:Don't confuse them, right? Get them back where they were. If you show them multiple products, you're going to get the paradox of choice. They're going to be thinking, well, which part of the catalog do I want to enter? And actually, that just measurably kills conversion. It's known. It's known. But after that round of intent has expired, which realistically is like a week, you can start kicking in recently viewed products and show three products right there. You have a rule. Has viewed three products? Oh, they have viewed three products? Okay, yes. Then show them three products and they can click.

20:42Jordan Gordon:Okay. After the recently viewed product or products, you've got some options. So one is just keep the shopping going. Okay. And this is valuable very large catalogs. So you have the recently viewed product, and directly below that, you have dynamic merchandising. And the dynamic merchandising that we will discuss is recommendations, trending, recently added, best sellers, and perfect together. Perfect together is two different recommendations restricted to two different categories, like necklace and earring, with one recommendation each. So you get a recommended earring and a recommended necklace and they'll think it looks perfect together because they're recommended, right?

21:33Jordan Gordon:But not every curation is going to be perfect, but what we're looking at doing, what are we doing here? We're automating our work. We don't want to email every single person who's been on the site manually. Hey, you were on the site, right? We're finding ways to automatically bring people back in through product discovery. So recommended together, Super cool. So those are the five kinds of dynamic merchandising that we're discussing here. Okay, which dynamic merchandising belongs in Browse Abandon? Recommended and Trending. We keep Best Sellers and New to Site for Site Abandon. Why? Well, they didn't click on a product, so we can't necessarily make a good recommendation.

22:21Jordan Gordon:They didn't get into the catalog. right? We don't, and since we don't know that about them, we can just show bestsellers. Like, we don't know if they've ever been in the catalog. They might have never been in the catalog. Show bestsellers. Bestsellers always work. Someone's been down, they've been through the products, they've seen your catalog. You don't need to leave with bestsellers, you can leave with recommendations. Also, for site abandon, you would do new to site, they didn't get in the catalog. You don't know how long it was since they saw the catalog, so that's where you show them something new.

22:51Jordan Gordon:And trending, trending is like the best selling products in the last three days. That is social proof. So when someone's actually been in a product, they were considering that product, they were looking at that product, we want to now show them what, you know, what people like you are shopping right now. And we might have gotten these kinds of emails from different tech giants before. It's like, yeah, what people just like you are shopping right now? You've got to wordsmith it. Sorry. That's trending. So we will show recommendations and trending in Browse Abandon. And also, if you're going to do a third message, perfect together, right?

23:36Jordan Gordon:Which I just broke down. That's the kind of dynamic content, the dynamic products that we show at this layer of the purchase funnel. We can restrict these in our data feeds by category, by catalog. And, I mean, if you're breaking things up by two different catalogs in default, like we discussed above, you're going to want to make specific data feeds for these different funnels, because you don't want to show recommendations for products that aren't in that feature set. If you've got the skateboard and the rollerblades, you want to have the skateboard email that's all about the skateboard show recommended skateboards, not recommended rollerblades, right?

24:24Jordan Gordon:So go in and restrict those. Okay, so like we said, we can go from the recently viewed right into the dynamic merchandising and it's like a shopping extravaganza. And then after that, we can go to some content. But let's just keep in mind, we actually could have put this content above the dynamic merchandising. What works best? You got a test, right? So yeah, you can just try both. It's such an easy test, just swapping this around. An important point. If you're going to show more products below the fold, have a little bit of the next product appear. So someone sees, oh, there's more products. It'll get them to, you know, it'll get them thumbing down a bit so they can see the other products.

25:09Jordan Gordon:It just triggers the scroll. All right, so whether or not you lead with, you follow with the dynamic merchandising or you follow with the content, here's some content you could put in there. And now we've reached more art than science. There are so many things you can do in here. Let's just talk about it again. Overcome main objections. What are the number one objections for that product line? Okay, let's just explain them away. Manufacturing, materials, ingredients, right? Talk about what's inside the product and how it's made. So do some brand marketing. Just talk about your brand. Take this second to, you They've gone through all this stuff.