67: Impact of Email Marketing on Digital Product Shops: Reviewing Numbers from 55 Weeks of Flash Sales

[00:00:04] You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast. I’m your host, Monica Froese, and if you’re like me, you want to grow a business you love that gives you financial freedom and fits your lifestyle. Every week you’ll get strategy and unfiltered opinions from me and other successful business owners that will inspire you to make big moves in your business. When we work together, we not only grow faster, we also amplify each other’s voices. Are you ready to build your business on your terms? Let’s jump in. Hello friends. Today is going to be a fun episode for me because I am going to be nerding out over numbers. Now before you go and tune me out because you don’t like numbers, I urge you to stick around because one of my superpowers is taking in a lot of data and then simplifying it down into actionable steps. There is a lot you will be able to learn from this episode and apply to your own digital [00:01:00] product shop. I did a massive data dump that covered 55 weeks of sales inside our digital product shop, which for us is the Empowered shop. The timeframe of data I will be sharing with you today runs from March 12th, 2022 through April 3rd, 2023. If you are new around here and don’t know the backstory on why I’ve been talking so much about digital product shops, I want you to hit pause and go listen to episode 57 where I explain the big pivot we made in our business and made the Empowered Shop, the backbone of all of our sales efforts, essentially creating a centralized call to action in our business by creating a cohesive shopping experience for our customers.

[00:01:40] What I’m sharing with you today is essentially the impact of our email marketing on our shop sales. The Empower Shop is not the only way we make money. We have a membership called the Empowered Business Society to larger programs, the Empowered Business Lab and the Digital Shop Experience. Plus, we have several different sales funnels that run [00:02:00] and consistently bring in sales for all of our brands, including Redefining Mom an empowered business on a week to week basis. The central marketing vehicle in our business for our existing audience is marketing campaigns or flash sales that we run to the empowered Shop. Okay. Are we on the same page now about the numbers I will be sharing with you today? I hope so. Buckle up. This is going to get pretty interesting. During these 55 weeks. The Empowered Shop made $195,947. I can directly attribute $88,434 to our email marketing efforts. That means 45% of sales came directly from our email marketing campaigns. During this time, the primary way we got people to our shop was via emails. Initially, I was kind of shocked that only 45% of sales came from emails until I did a little digging. Tracking is simply not perfect.

[00:02:58] We had a saying when I was in corporate [00:03:00] that was junk in junk out. In other words, not a single business on this planet can track everything perfectly because there are a ton of factors at play. In this case, there are two reasons why this number seems so low to me. The first is this data only includes emails where the sole purpose was to sell directly to the shop. It does not include emails where the shop was not the primary focus or any of our funnel or sequence emails that are automated. The second reason is the data is based on UTM parameters, and UTM parameters can break when people use shop pay. So this is because the URL switches to shop pay before switching back to the empowered shop for the purchase confirmation. There is currently no way to see how many people checked out using shop pay in Shopify and personally I think that’s a big fail on Shopify side, but it’s something we have to roll. With that being said, I believe that our email marketing efforts likely led to 75 to 80% of our sales. [00:04:00] But regardless, what I learned from the 45% of sales that did track is very telling and will help us make strategic informed decisions moving forward as we build out our marketing calendar. All right. Let’s break down exactly how we made $88,434 from our emails. Sitting in front of me is this massive spreadsheet that I put together to help dissect what these 55 weeks of sales did for us in our business.

[00:04:30] And I created something I call a roll up tab, which is what I’m going to be reading to you right now. Just to set the stage of what we’re looking at. So as I said, during these 55 weeks, the shop made $195,947. That resulted in 9131 products sold. Okay. Now out of that, emails directly attribute it $88,434, [00:05:00] which equaled 4202 units. So roughly a little bit less than half of the total number of products we sold came from emails. How we came up with this during those 55 weeks, we actually ran 123 unique email marketing campaigns to the shop. That is actually a number that blew my mind a little bit. I didn’t even realize that that’s how many we were running, but that’s what the data is telling me. Out of these 123 unique marketing campaigns that we ran to our email list. On average, each sale made $719. That could be directly attributed to emails. The average number of products sold from those emails were 15, and the average number of sales per email was $315. So the average sale made $719 [00:06:00] directly related to email, but the average sale per email because each campaign had more than one email, was $315. So that is the overall landscape that we’re looking at. Then I went a step further and broke it down by campaign type.

[00:06:17] The first campaign type I want to talk about is our every Friday at 3 p.m. Friday sale. In this data, we had 51 Friday sales that resulted in $30,777 directly related to emails which resulted in 2027 products sold. Now, here’s something that is interesting about our Friday sales. Our Friday sales on average made $603 from email and the average number of sales per Friday email because some Friday sales had 1 to 3 emails sent resulted in $287 and the average number of products [00:07:00] sold per Friday email was 19. Now let’s compare that to what I consider a mid-week flash sale that we ran. For this type of campaign, we ran 32 of them. The total amount of sales I can attribute to emails was $27,223, which means that these mid-week flash sales that we ran actually made us more money from email on the average, which was 851 compared to 603 from our Friday sales. And each individual email made us $353 versus the $287 that we made for Friday emails. But the average number of product sold was just 13. And we’re going to talk about why that would be. But so far, what I’ve learned is that Friday sales made us less money than our midweek flash sales. Now let’s move on to the next type of campaign that I ran data on, [00:08:00] which is what I call our overlay campaigns. These are emails that we sent that didn’t point to any specific product, but instead gave a overlay discount in the shop.

[00:08:12] And usually that meant it was an overlay discount, meaning you could apply it to almost any product in the shop. There’s just a few that we don’t allow coupons on, but usually these discounts are a little deeper than what we would usually offer something like 30% off or 35% or 40%. And a rare case, we did do 140%. So we ran 13 of these types of campaigns and it only resulted in $6,327 in email sales for a total of 297 units sold. Now, the interesting part of this is that these overlay discounts only on average those sales from email made $487. So that’s way lower than what we’ve already talked about. And it only resulted in about ten [00:09:00] products on average sold. I’m going to dive a little bit into what our email statistics were, but I can tell you right now, just looking at this, that it’s interesting because our overlay campaigns got a much higher click through rate from the email, but it resulted in less money. And I have some thoughts on why that is. Okay. The last type of campaign that I want to talk about is what I call our new product campaigns. So any time we were launching something new in the shop that we had never launched before, I broke that into its own category. So in this category, we had 11 total campaigns resulting in $16,400, 588 units sold.

[00:09:45] And this type of campaign made us, on average from email, $1,491 and each individual email made $443. And on average we sold 16 [00:10:00] units per email. So this is very interesting. The first thing that stands out to me is that by far like a runaway train, our new product launches made the most from email on average with that 1491. But that’s not shocking, right? Because people love new stuff. It’s the marketing hype that can go behind new products. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, so here are a few lessons I learned. By looking at this data. The first thing I learned is that on first glance, it looks like our Friday sales are underperforming in comparison to our other flash sales or our new product launches, making on average $603 from email. However, the point of our fire sales is not actually to be the main money earner in our business. The whole point of our Friday sales is to do a few things. One is to create consistency with selling [00:11:00] to our audience and an excitement that goes along with that. When everyone is expecting our Friday emails to come out at 3 p.m. and also the point of our Friday emails to highlight products that we don’t talk about very often because usually they are on the lower price side of what we offer. So our Friday sales are deeply discounted and it’s really to create that excitement to get people over to the shop.

[00:11:25] That in a nutshell, Fridays are meant for consistency. The reason that our flash sales during mid-week usually give us more money on average $851 is because we’re usually putting something that is worth more money on sale. And so that’s where the variance comes in. And they both play an important part in the business. The Friday sales. Create that consistency and it lets us showcase those products that would ordinarily just kind of be in the depths of the shop. And then the flash sales allow us to bring forth [00:12:00] products that are worth more monetarily, but also can produce a bigger transformation inside of people’s businesses. So I believe that there is still a place for both of these types of sales to still continue in our business. Interestingly, these two types of emails had the lowest click through rate on our email list. On average, the click through rate for both of these types of campaigns was actually less than 1%. So that tells me that we could do a better job at making the offer enticing. We might even want to consider segmenting our list. So typically we send these two types of marketing campaigns we send to our entire email list. But when I look at how low our average click through rate is, it tells me that I might want to start sending these types of sales to a segment of our list.

[00:12:59] So [00:13:00] basically that means we always track the actions people are taking on our email list, what they’re clicking on, what they’re interested in, and if we bucketize people a little bit better, we probably could get our eyeballs more people to click through because the more hyper specific our audiences that we’re sending our emails to, the more people who will actually see the emails. That’s just the way email marketing works. So I think what we’re going to do moving forward, one of my lessons learned is start bucketizing people for each of those sales. Now the type of campaign that performed the worst was by far our overlay sales. Again, we had 13 of those and on average they produced $487. But the interesting part is this type of sale had over a 2% click through rate from email. So it’s very interesting because the click through is almost double, but the sales are pretty much cut in half. And why would that be? Now I thought about this and [00:14:00] what really occurs to me is that when you don’t give someone a specific call to action, basically you lose money. So I’m going to give you an example. I did a 40% off sale for my husband’s 40th birthday in September. That was the deepest discount I think we offered in throughout the entire year. And it was only good on his 40th birthday. So for one day, and I believe it was a Thursday, however, even though we were offering this amazing discount that we usually don’t offer, we weren’t highlighting any specific products.

[00:14:32] So initially when I read this data, I was like, Oh, we’re just going to stop running marketing campaigns that are just for overlay discounts. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, no, these types of marketing campaigns essentially get us these high click through rates. So people are interested. But what we’re missing is giving them suggestions on what they should be purchasing. So we have over 100 products in our shop. So when you just send someone [00:15:00] to the shop and say, Hey, go use this 40% off coupon, they’ll click through and they’re interested, but then they don’t know what to do. Once they get to your shop, they’re like, Well, what product should I be considering? So I will still run these types of email marketing campaigns, but I’m going to be more specific on what products they should be buying. And the way I’m going to do that is I’m going to look at our top performing products in the shop and we’re going to highlight those products in those emails to give people a direction on what they should be buying. Now, the new product launches by far outperformed everything $1,491 on average from email we made on those products. And so what I’m going to be looking at when it comes to that is which products out of those 11 campaigns performed the best and how can we create more of those types of products to serve our audience? Those emails also had over 2% click through rate.

[00:15:58] So the overlay marketing [00:16:00] campaigns and our new product launches by far got the most attention. However, the new product launches drastically outperformed. So to sum it up, the main lessons I took away from reading the data like this is one I’m going to continue to run free sales every Friday at 3 p.m. and I’m going to continue to have them focus on our lower priced products that would ordinarily get lost and really not ever resurface unless someone was digging into the depths of our shop. However, I’m probably going to start sending those free emails and those flash sale emails to a hyper specific audience on my email list to try to get more of the right eyeballs on those types of sales instead of ditching our overlay marketing campaigns. With those deeper discounts. I am going to still test those moving forward, but I’m going to be hyper specific on the types of products that they should consider buying with that [00:17:00] discount. So it gives them some direction. And the last thing I’m going to do is continue to launch new products in our shop. However, I am going to be very specific on the types of products we’re launching based on which type of new products perform the best during this time period.

[00:17:18] Now, the next way I looked at this was by month. So I pulled how much money the shop made every single month, compared it to how much of that money came directly from email and then the percentage of what that was. And there were three standout months when I did this. The first was May of 2022. The shop made $20,695. 13,179 can be attributed to email, which was 63.68% the second month that performed very well for emails was August of 2022 $27,158 and shop sales $15,473 came [00:18:00] directly from email, which is 56.97%. And then October of 2022 we made $15,670 in the shop and $9,417 came from email, which was 60.09%. Let me explain to you why those months particularly I could attribute more sales to emails and what we did differently and how we can recreate that moving forward. In May of 2022, we launched our Quick Win workshop on how to sell digital products using Shopify. It was the first quick win workshop that we launched using the shop instead of an individual sales page. So we created an actual product listing inside of our shop. Usually we would send people to a dedicated sales page for something like that, but we were testing it out. Well, it ended up going really well and that was our second top performing quick win workshop of all time and that is why [00:19:00] may perform very well.

[00:19:01] We also launched our Thrive Cart templates. Now our Thrive cart templates also quickly got indexed on Google Search, so it performs very well for us with Google Search. But the overall theme for May of 2022 were 63% of our sales came from emails. We had to knock it out of the park product launches in August of 2022, where we had 60% of our sales come from emails. We ran a month long marketing campaign called Summer Jamboree. So basically we had a whole theme in August, and during that theme we launched new products. We launched our digital product planning spreadsheet, which is, I believe, our top performing spreadsheet in the shop. So again, there’s a theme here that new product launch email marketing campaigns do really well. We also decided to try something new that month where we marked down an entire collection of our tool boxes. So we [00:20:00] have 13 themed tool boxes in our shop and we have a collection page basically where you can see all 13 of those tool boxes. And instead of running a Friday sale where we said, Hey, this one product is on sale, instead we said this entire collection is on sale. And that did really well. We also did something kind of interesting where we took a workshop that I had done in the past. I believe we did it in 2021 before we really had any shop strategy at all, and we reintroduced it to our audience with a new name called Painless Pre-selling, and that we introduced, I believe, $37, and it did super well.

[00:20:45] At the end of the Summer Jamboree in August of 2022, we did a, I believe, a 72 hour everything that we talked about throughout Summer Jamboree, every sale that we had throughout Summer Jamboree, we did a blowout [00:21:00] sale and that ended up making. So basically we we brought back the sales that we ran for that entire month and that ended up making just under $2,000. So what I learned from August of 2022 is when you theme your marketing campaign and you have a theme throughout the month, it can produce a lot of momentum and give you a lot of different reasons and ways that you can email your list. And the final month I’m going to talk about is October 20th, 22, where 60% of our sales came from emails. This was interesting because basically at the spur of the moment, like not planned wasn’t on our marketing calendar. I decided to email about our ads that scale course and this is going to tell you the power of segmentation and why I think that’s going to be a bigger part of my strategy moving forward. So basically, I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday. I was looking at our numbers and I said we need to do something to kick start our sales. Like probably I was thinking our numbers are down.

[00:21:58] What are we going to do to [00:22:00] to turn the tide? And I segment it about 13,000 people on our email list that I would consider hot leads for something like our ads at Scale course. And I emailed them and I only sent, I believe, two emails and those two emails made $5,000. So there that’s the power of segmenting your email list. I tested it out and it worked really well. We also launched Surprise, a new series of products, our email swipe copy template. So we get asked all the time by our students, Do you have email swipe copy for X, y, Z type of campaign, new product launches, affiliates, whatever it might be. And we didn’t, but we got asked about it so much that we decided we decided to launch email swipe copy template. So looking at the data for these three months, the theme is very clear. When we launch new products in our shop, we have our best [00:23:00] performing sales months in the shop and the best performing emails also came from those months. So essentially a big part of our strategy moving forward will definitely be to consider how to strategically place our new product launches because that creates the most momentum in our shop. Now, what I just shared with you really just scratches the surface from what I learned from going through this exercise. As you can imagine, I have a very elaborate spreadsheet that breaks down the data and slices it in tons of different ways.

[00:23:35] And I’ve learned. A ton of lessons going through this exercise. And what I’m going to do is I am going to be offering exclusively for people who join our digital shop experience, that is our program that teaches how to create and launch a digital product shop. I am going to be offering a deep dive into my spreadsheet [00:24:00] and the template that I use to pull all of this data down with instructions on how to do it yourself. You’re going to be able to add that on to the digital shop experience. So if you’re interested in learning more about the 55 weeks of flash sales that I ran in my business and how to launch your own digital product shop, I highly encourage you to join us the week of June 5th for our free event called the Digital Shop Accelerator. The Digital Shop Accelerator is a combination of short, impactful audio drops and an interactive live training. Plus, we’ve added on a pop up Facebook group so you can network with your fellow digital product creators, me and my team. It’s going to be so much fun. You can go and sign up at Digital Shop experience.com/training. We’ll also put that link in the show notes. Now during this week long free event, we’re going to be diving into things like how to make the mindset shift from free to paid, how to be a content creator and then become an e-commerce [00:25:00] shop owner who provides their value through selling because selling is serving.

[00:25:05] We’ll learn the real power of having a centralized call to action in your business, which of course is your shop and the transformation that you will see when you make that shift in your business. I’ll show you how one low price product through a fire sale can easily turn into a multi hundred dollar sale in your business. And then we’ll have a live interactive demonstration on how you can leverage all of your hard work that you’ve created and poured into over the years at scale using a digital product shop. So if you’re in head on over to digital shop experience.com/training and sign up and don’t forget to tune in next week for another episode with one of my students in the Digital Shop experience where she’s going to show you how when she launched her shop, it pretty much changed her entire life. So don’t forget to tune in. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Empowered Business podcast. [00:26:00] I just launched a brand new subscribers only podcast called Monica Soapbox. It’s a nice supplement to what I share with you each week here. Monica Soapbox is more laid back where you’ll get unscripted behind the scenes updates on my business and the industry. Head on over to Empowered business.com/soapbox to sign up. See you here again next week.