By Lori Barrett
A handful of years ago, while working to forcibly drag an esoteric European brand into the new millennium, I hired an outside marketing consultant to evaluate our digital health. We already had various performance marketing campaigns and a carefully cultivated, robust email list, which we grudgingly emailed approximately monthly with product info, staff updates, promos, and really anything we thought bike nerds like us would like to hear about.
We segmented our lists of approximately 30,000 people. Some segments were simple: "Kona IM participants." Others were more broad: "Bike Shops." The goal was to make the emails relevant and at least vaguely interesting to the recipients. In other words, we were looking at the emails through the very subjective, quasi-irritable lenses of our potential email recipients. Surprisingly, (or not,) each time we'd send an email, we'd get a pretty strong customer response in the form of sales, which was always rewarding. It was exciting to watch the Shopify sales data leap when the emails hit inboxes and a welcome deus ex machina for an end-of-the-month sales goal.
The consultant was a previous digital director of a prominent company that owns several premiere bike brands, (as well as a friend who is still in the bike industry.) His breakdown gave us a detailed analysis of the totality of our digital marketing actions, from email campaigns to performance marketing, to web store setup, and best of all, measurement. The recommendations ranged from high-level ("Create custom segments for website visitors in Google Analytics for use in Google Ads retargeting or exclusion,") to more mundane: "You have good responses to your emails, you should email more frequently." We all groaned. We all hated receiving the vast number of emails we got from seemingly every company we had ever purchased from, seen online, or heard of via carrier pigeon.
But his recommendation proved correct: We increased the cadence of our emails gradually to twice per week and saw a corollary increase in engagement and sales. We had been using the stalwart Constant Contact, a good basic platform which housed our hard-won email lists. We later talked with the good people at Akers Digital (an outdoor/bike industry specific performance marketing company) about various other email marketing services and what they could offer, some of which was frankly shocking. Who knew email marketing campaigns had access to so much of our personalized data?
While it's easy to go deep on this subject, in the interest of keeping the concepts applicable to our favorite IBDs, I figured I'd do a brief comparison of two simpler email marketing platforms, then one quick exploration of one of the most powerful services for small to medium sized e-commerce businesses, in case anyone out there is looking to scale.
And let's be clear: don't be overwhelmed! Email marketing can be as simple as setting up a monthly calendar reminder on the shop calendar to send an email talking about ... whatever exciting news you have on the shop horizon! XYZ Bikes, back in stock! Helmet promo, buy a helmet get a free sticker! Spring Tune Up Special! Don't get so bogged down in the below information that you end up paralyzed by it. Your customers want to know the exciting stuff going on at your shop. Build a list. Email them monthly with content they might find helpful, based on what you know about who you're emailing. You're already doing the hard work of doing the things, (bringing in exciting new product, hiring new mechanics, etc.), now you can tell them about it!
Two platforms, alike in dignity: Mailchimp and Constant Contact
There are other email marketing programs available of course, including HubSpot. Email marketing tools are integrated with many POS systems including Lightspeed, Workstand, CitrusLime, Ascend and others. Today I'm focusing on the tools I am most familiar with from working on the supplier side, but you can weigh other options using the same factors I use to compare Mailchimp and Constant Contact. I've broken it down into five main factors to consider when choosing an email marketing platform. As an aside, both ones we'll compare also have integrated SMS (text) features, which a lot of customers really like. But that's a conversation for another day.
- Ease of use: how digitally savvy do you need to be to get started?
- Automations and segmentations: simple follow ups from site visits/email inquiries and how those lists can be broken down, e.g. tags and lists vs. customer behavior.
- Integrations: will it work with your e-commerce site? Your Lightspeed CRM? Analytics?
- Pricing: how does the price fit your needs? Are you paying for data you don't need, or are you missing out on data that could drive your sales?
- Analytics and reporting: are you paying for the right amount of data? Meaning, data that you can use and to refine campaigns.
Ease of use:
Constant Contact is known for its very user-friendly interface. There are lots of templates and drag/drop editing makes it a turnkey email marketing option.
Mailchimp has good templates as well, but contains more features, which can be confusing if you're just starting out. It has a slightly longer learning curve if you're a technophobe.
Automation and segmentation:
Constant Contact can do welcome emails and simple drip campaigns (automated emails triggered by specific customer action over time), and segmentation is primarily through lists and tags.
Mailchimp has more features in regard to behavior-based triggers like opens, clicks or purchases, as well as more flexible segmentation rules, which can help with growth and customer targeting.
Integrations:
Constant Contact is great for small businesses that want to use email marketing in conjunction with a basic Shopify site or as a stand-alone effort, but has far fewer data integration options.
Mailchimp has fairly extensive data integration options with stronger connections to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, e-commerce platforms and performance marketing campaigns.
Pricing:
Constant Contact has a free trial and a lower price for small lists, generally those below 500 contacts.
Mailchimp has a free trial, but costs go up as your email contact list grows.
Analytics and reporting:
Constant Contact has straightforward reporting that can tell you about basics like open and click rates. High level, but great to start.
Mailchimp has more comprehensive reports on clicks and engagement, and offers better data optimization over time. Of course, the bigger package you buy with Mailchimp, the more you unlock its potential, which is somewhat annoying.
And then there's one option not alike in dignity ... Klaviyo. Klaviyo is significantly more expensive than the above options, but if you can use its power to increase sales, then it's money well spent.
In short, Klaviyo is often considered the top choice for e-commerce businesses because it's built around customer actions, syncing customer behavior and order data, in real time. It integrates deeply with various shopping platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento. Practically speaking, Klaviyo ties customer data (think browsing history, past purchases or abandoned carts) directly to marketing actions, and via predictive and AI-driven features. It can use that data to forecast customer behavior, like customer lifetime value or next expected purchase (and then recommend that item).
One other interesting feature is that Klaviyo customer segments are made up of customer actions and revenue rather than a user-assigned category. When our company was using Klaviyo, we ended up with automatic segments, for example: customers who bought in the last 90 days. This kept our email lists from getting stale (and therefore marked as spam.) And most mind-boggling to me: Our digital team used data from the Klaviyo platform to create lookalike audiences for running paid search campaigns on a variety of platforms: Google Ads, Meta, Tiktok and beyond. Lookalike audiences are modeled after customers with similar behaviors, interests, and demographics as your existing best customers. Think income-level and beyond. It's eerie, but it works in serving ads to customers who want to see them.
So in summary, if you're a one-person show and doing email campaigns makes you feel grumpy, it may be best to keep it simple with those monthly emails to remind customers that you're their bike's best friend.
But if you have a little power in staffing and have someone keen on technology, Mailchimp may take slightly more onboarding, but once set up can provide more powerful tools to grow your business.
And if you're planning to go hard into the e-commerce realm, Klaviyo's additional behavioral tracking is next level, connecting all data points between a customer's browsing, to purchases, to emails opened and links clicked. Combined with predictive AI, this enables them to identify what action will keep the customer most engaged and likely to stay involved with your business. And while it's beyond the scope of this article, there are even more features and integrations that can be leveraged to amplify performance marketing campaigns and simplify things like pro deal programs or VIP segments.
If all this sounds a bit creepy, you're not wrong. But remember, at the end of the day, we're here helping people have fun on their bikes and get away from their data-driven doppelgangers. And like it or not, the current marketplace requires meeting customers where they already are, offering them what they are already thinking they need and showing them how our shops/widgets/services can help them get the most out of their time outside.
