Strategies for Writing eCommerce Emails (E113)

Joanna WiebeFounder of Copyhackers Bio: The original conversion copywriter and founder of Copyhackers, Joanna Wiebe teaches a world of digital marketers in SaaS and eCommerce how to get the yes using li’l ol’ words. Sponsors: Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – eCommerce Automation Links: CopyhackersCopyhackers Twitter Transcript: Charles (00:00): In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talked with Joanna Wiebe about how to write e-commerce emails. This is the business of e-commerce. Episode one 13. Charles (00:15): Welcome to the business of eCommerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Polaski, and I'm here today with Joanna Wiebe. Joanna is the original conversion copywriter and founder of copy hackers. She teaches a world of digital marketers in both SAS and eCommerce. How to get to yes, using little old words. I just started the show today to talk about what are the best practices for sending e-commerce emails. So, Hey Joanna, how are you doing today? Doing good. I love the topic of writing e-commerce emails, right? I've heard you speak in person a few times, so hear you have some experience writing emails. So what do you guys do? So what do you guys do at copy hackers? Joanna (01:01): Yeah, sure. So, well, there's two sides of the Copyhackers business. One is the, basically the front of it, which is free and paid content. So we have a very active blog and video tutorials that we do. On helping, our real mission is to help entrepreneurs, whether that's like a startup founder or somebody who's running their own small service business, like a freelancer basically get their word out there. So there's a lot of people who [inaudible] want to write better copy because they understand copies or online sales person, but it can be a very murky sort of thing to figure out. So our job is to help people that you're out how to do that. And we did that with free and paid content. But the way that we make up the free and paid content is we work with not only in our own business on optimizing copy, but with clients as well. On, on doing the things we're talking about right now. So testing emails that actually convert in this current world. Not just old ideas for email, but what's new, what's happening, what used to work that doesn't seem to work anymore, things like that. So we have the two sides, the training business, which is free and paid, and then the agency side. Charles (02:16): Got it. Okay. So you guys focus mainly on the transactional email side of the promotion legal side. Joanna (02:23): So mostly like just coming up with a better email strategy for people, which largely focuses on segmentation first, but also like where are these communications coming from? What are they saying? What should they be saying? Most people we find, you know, there's a lot of emails in play, like transactional emails, but the transactional email was set up by the person who set up the tool in the first place. So they tend to like, Oh, I'll just write something quickly for a transactional email, which is a fine starting point. But there's a lot you can do with a transactional email, just like there's lots of, you know, promotional emails. So yeah, lots room to optimize in there for both, for everything, including outside of eCommerce. You know, the SAS world has triggered emails galore based on what you do or don't do. So there's a whole world, let's stop to the right for now. Charles (03:12): Yeah. It's one of those things where I feel like even the water has got a little muddy, right? Where even transactional emails still have a little promotional content in them. So it's something you can almost do both together. I've kind of found, Joanna (03:24): Yeah, there's room in transactional emails. Of course there's like rules with these