Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

[00:01:30]
Arlen:
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast everyone. My name is Arlan Robinson and I am your host And today we have a very special guest, Mounir Bouferdou, Who has gone from an international student to a retired semi-pro soccer player and former civil engineer solving real-life architectural problems to an entrepreneur co-founder of The Greenhouse solving eCommerce brands’ digital marketing problems. Before The Greenhouse, Mounir Co-founded 2 eCommerce brands that failed; the third time’s a charm co-founding The Greenhouse while in my last year of college. Over the last 2 years, we had the opportunity to work with more than 30 eCommerce brands on their email and SMS marketing and helped generate about @20M in sales. Welcome to the podcast, Mounir. 

[00:02:18]
Mounir:
Thanks for having me. Arlen. I’m excited to be here.

[00:02:21]
Arlen:
Yes and thank you for joining me. I’m, I’m super excited to have you. You know, as I mentioned in, in the intro, we’re gonna be talking about email marketing and then really how you, you know, you can get explosive growth just like you’ve done with some of your clients. You know, propelling them to, you know, from just a hundred thousand on over to millions of dollars in revenue, which is, uh, you know, not an easy task, but you’re gonna enlighten us on, on how to make that happen via email marketing.

[00:02:44]
But, you know, before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and, you know, specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

[00:02:50]
Mounir:
Absolutely. Well, yeah, that was a great intro by the way. We have, we have a lot here that we can share with the audience and just to help ’em and, and enlighten them in terms of like email marketing for e-com.

[00:03:00]
But yeah, a little bit about myself. My name is Mun. I’m the co-founder and the chief of Operations and Growth here at the Greenhouse. It’s a company dedicated to helping e-commerce brands grow with their email s m s and retention marketing efforts. My expertise in digital marketing has enabled me and my team here at the Greenhouse to work with over 32 e-commerce brands over the last two years resulted in a remarkable 50 millions in sales generated through our specific, you know, email and SMS marketing strategies.

[00:03:26]
My background is a lot unfortunate. It’s not really, it’s not really marketing, but I always had the itch, like they say, My background is engineering. I used to be a civil engineer, but always had the itch to know and learn about e-commerce since I had a lot of friends who were in the industry. So started as just like everybody else, drop shipping, you know, we went through the bubble of drop shipping, acknowledge that it wasn’t really sustainable to to, to grow and build a solid e-comm brand.

[00:03:55]
And then came across book who. Taught me that if you wanted to start a business, you need to start something that you’re passionate about. And then, uh, to that, at that level, I have met my co-founder, Kerry McDonald by then. And then we start thinking about ideas on things that we can do together to, you know, uh, start an e-com company.

[00:04:12]
Because we, at the time, Kerry McDonald have worked with a variety of marketing agencies while she was the director of marketing for a multimillion dollar beauty brand. And kind of like we saw a gap in the market in terms of like performance, customer care, and just, you know, just. Is delivering some really good next level strategies to help these e-commerce brand scales.

[00:04:32]
We’ve decided to start an a clothing brand, a print on demand clothing brand right before Covid. And the only thing that helped us scale the clothing brand, it was called Kings and Queens, was email, uh, email marketing because it was for free. But also we didn’t have enough budget to play in the paid ads game.

[00:04:48]
So we were very focused on content creation, organic content creation, social media. We drove traffic to our site, we captured traffic with our popup optimiz. Skills and then we were able to convert everyone that came into the funnel through good content, use an email, and also like a variety of organic content for social media within that covid, unfortunately, just like every other business have experienced in the past, we had to pivot.

[00:05:11]
We acknowledged. That we have done enough with the clothing brand, we were able to scale it to a certain level. And the only way that we were able to do that was through effective email marketing. So we acknowledged that we really had a good power in our hand and a good knowledge that we can bless other businesses with and help make an impact.

[00:05:28]
So we’ve decided to pivot to the service based industry, and we started the greenhouse. And as soon as we did, I mean, yeah, so the, the success took, took off right there and then, and we were able to work with a variety. Established good brands at this point and we’re able to make some impact. Okay, great.

[00:05:45]
Arlen:
Well that, that’s awesome. Well, first off, thank you for sharing that and it’s quite a journey that you’ve had. And one of the things that I always like to hear is, you know, founders of of companies and brands that have, you know, taken real world experiences that they’ve had and used that wisdom to create, you know, a company to be able to also help other businesses.

[00:06:04]
So, you know, with you creating the clothing brand and getting the lessons learned there, then pivoting. Creating your own agency to create Oh, you know, to help other brands do the same thing. It’s, it’s really awesome. And, you know, I love hearing those types of stories. So, you know, it’s also interesting, we’re talking about email, of course, today because, you know, I don’t know what it is, but it’s like, ev, every few years we, we always get this chatter through blogs and marketers that they, they always are saying, you know, email is dead.

[00:06:30]
Email is dead, email is dead. I heard over, I know you have. Always, it always comes back every, every few years, but it, we know it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s more than live than ever, I think. And you know, you’re definitely gonna let us know a little bit about how that works, but Yeah, I don’t know what kicks that can around, but it’s just always coming up.

[00:06:49]
Mounir:
It’s so funny  say that because I’ve heard it all over the place and it’s, and it’s, and it’s what’s, what’s more funnier is. Only an email and SMS marketing. So we only offer email and SMS marketing. So to me, when I hear that, it’s just like, okay, as as our business model will die, is that what you’re telling me?

[00:07:06]
But no email, email, email is here and it’s going to stay here for forever. And, and, and, and the reason why I say that is that not everyone who. You know, seize your ad on the social media platform will convert from that first interaction. It takes at least seven touch points for every potential lead to make that decision.

[00:07:24]
And convert an email is one of those channels where you have control over those touchpoints. Depends on the action that the lead has taken on your site or after you sent the campaign, or when you segment and you meet ’em at a place within that buying life cycle. And also, not to forget that 40%, like a good solid range for.

[00:07:44]
Marketing for email marketing revenue for every brand is around 40%, so 40 to 30%, you can get to 30 to 40% from your revenue, just from email marketing. That’s, that’s a lot. That’s a good solid number for every single, you know, company and business. And one thing that I’ve seen over the last couple months is that I’ve, I’ve met, I’ve seen brands and I’ve seen accounts who surpass the 40% to the 50 and 60, which is great.

[00:08:08]
Don’t get me wrong. Your email marketing channel is very valuable and you have some really good leads there. However, Don’t really wanna surpass that. And the reason why is that you don’t wanna put all your eggs in that one basket. Why? Because you want, you’re, you’re, you’re going to end up being in a place where you exhaust all the juice out of those leads.

[00:08:25]
And what do you want to do? The name of the game here is to diversify. We wanna diversify the streams of revenue for the business. So we want to count, we wanna focus on paid ads, we wanna focus on organic, we wanna focus on pr, we wanna focus on, you know, events and stuff like that. And not to like, you know, exhaust one channel because down the road you might, that channel might go down and then, Percent of your revenue will go down.

[00:08:45]
So what I say is that, you know, use it, use it, use it in a smart way, but you don’t want to exhaust it. But also the power of email and SMS both together is leveraging that first and second party data. Like, you know, people’s like surveys, data from surveys, popups, and just people’s history to target the right consumer with the right message at the right time.

[00:09:06]
Yeah, you can’t do that with paid ads. You only can do that with email. So you can’t tell me that it’s. 

[00:09:10]
Arlen:
Yeah, not at all. Not at all. And that, that definitely speaks volumes, uh, what you said, and it’s, it’s, you know, it’s gonna continue for sure. It’s not going anyway. Yeah. So if we kind of try to break it all the way down as far as email is concerned, you know, for an e-commerce brand, what I wanna see is can we can let us know, like really what are some of the key elements that you’ve seen of a high converting email campaign, you know, that can really lead to significant, uh, revenue growth?

[00:09:36]
Mounir:
That’s, that’s a really good question. And as far, I would love to, I’ll send you. Presentation afterwards. I’ll, I wish if I was able to like, share that with the, with with the, with the readers. If you don’t mind. I mean, can we share a presentation with the audience? Yeah. If you have a, a download for them, we can definitely include that in the show notes.

[00:09:48]
Arlen:
That, that would be great.

[00:09:51]
Mounir:
Yes, absolutely. And as far as like a, I’d love to share just. This page here. As far as like what? What’s a good converting email campaign? When it comes down to an email campaign, we have three things that are very important. We have subject lines, content, and pull to action. So what we want to do at this level, we want to keep the subject lines very short and enticing.

[00:10:13]
We want to make ’em very personalized at probably the first, the the leads first, first name, and maybe TE test, you know, a different subject lines to see what will work and resonate with your audience. Subject line is the front door we need to. Stand out and very personalized so people can actually get to open the email and as soon as they open the email, here’s where the funk part is, and I say this, everyone wants brands to treat their email marketing channel like a content creation machine, like a social media Place.

[00:10:41]
People want to come there. They want to consume a good, relatable content. You want to add value to them. And what I’ve seen over the last couple months is that people kind of like neglect the aspect of marketing and sales. Marketing and sell go together like peanut butter and jelly . And I say that all the time, but unfortunately a lot of marketers nowadays get very desperate.

[00:11:00]
And a lot of brands get really desperate for the sell. They forget the value prop on the, on the transaction. So, and they, you know, you get very desperate for the sell. And you just go and sell and sell and sell. Adding value to people. So when we open the email, now we have this content in front of us, we have this Goodlooking email, or it might not be Goodlooking.

[00:11:19]
So what we wanna do with the content, we want to, yeah, like I mentioned, we wanna show the social, the, the email channel, like a social media platform. But we wanna make the content stand out. We want to have a structure to it. We want to add value to people, but also we don’t want to be very salesy. And when it comes down to content, we want to have a very.

[00:11:35]
Very direct, enticing and short. People don’t have so much time to sit down and read a long newspaper. They want something very straight to the point. And yeah, like they want content that sticks out and very straight to the point. And again, what might work for one brand might not work for a different brand.

[00:11:52]
So we want to test again at this level as well. When it comes down to content, we wanna test a variety of things to see what sticks out, uh, or does, you know, U G C photo outperform a product picture and stuff like that to see what work and whatnot in. Of click through rates when we talk about metrics.

[00:12:08]
And then the most important part, last one at least, is the call to actions. We wanna make those CTAs stand out. We wanna make ’em, you know, easy to visualize. And also we wanna make ’em prominent and easy to find on the email, but we want to use also direction, direct prominent call to actions to help the.

[00:12:25]
Reader or the lead. So take that action. What do you want from them? Do you want ’em to shop now? Do you want ’em to learn more about the product or something like that? But again, at this level as well, testing, testing is what’s going to win. So you want to test a variety of CTAs, different sections, and see what work, see where people click the most, and what resonates with people most, for them to click and go take that action to go to the website.

[00:12:49]
Then again, what I’ve seen over the last couple months, again for the last two years with a lot of marketers, people tend to. Brands, but they never study the brands, right? Everyone wants that shiny object that the other brand has. Everyone wants the feel and the look of Glossier emails. Everyone wants the feel and the look of Manscaped emails, but no one takes the time to study the action that they took to receive that kind of email or to receive that action that they get from the email.

[00:13:13]
So we get stuck with wanting an email that looks really good, but good looking emails alone don’t convert. And that’s what I, what I recommend is that you have. A variety of emails to see what will work for your brand and also like without taking your brand way out of brand and stay, you know, in your limits, making sure that your brand voice is tamped and your brand voice is actually, you know, reflected on the content.

[00:13:38]
Whether it’s the design, whether it’s the copy, and whether it’s the segment that you’re sending it to. Yeah, yeah, 

[00:13:42]
Arlen:
yeah. For for sure. It’s, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a combination of. Things, of course that you mentioned it. It’s not really just one thing. Like you said, a lot of people get caught up on just, you know, the look of it.

[00:13:53]
They spend a lot of time with the graphics, the design of it, and if this, this button is this color and Yeah. You know, those things are are good. You gotta have an attract. Email, but at the same time, it really just depends on what your purpose of it is. Because you know, of course you were saying that the starting off, let’s say you’re going, like you said in that example, you’re going from zero to, you just start up a startup brand, you’re going from zero to a hundred K in revenue.

[00:14:19]
You’re straight out of the gate. You’re starting to get some people to subscribe. You’re starting to build up some social media followers. You know, you gotta build that trust before you, you try to force a product on people’s throats. And so the salesy. Type emails may not be that effective at that time.

[00:14:35]
So you have to have to be very strategic. You know, people really, you know, it always comes down to only purchase from brands that they truly trust and believe that are, you know, an authority behind a specific area and, and they feel that they’re gonna get the right product or the best product for them.

[00:14:50]
So you gotta establish that before really trying to sell ’em. So I think, yeah, those are  really key.

[00:14:55]
Mounir:
That’s a really, and that’s a really good point right there. Trust is, and that’s, that’s, that’s the key word right there. Trust. Yeah. When you’re able to build that trust from day one, would your consumers, they’re more likely to trust your brand Yeah.

[00:15:08]
And become loyalist forever. Yeah. And stay there. Yeah. For, and that’s, that, that’s a really good point that you brought up there, All.

[00:15:12]
Arlen:
Yeah. For, for sure. And now once you’ve, let’s say, got an initial campaign out, you’ve gotten some subscribers, you’re getting some initial customers, you’re starting to email them information about your products or your, your, the particular industry that you’re in, not necessarily that Sales.

[00:15:30]
Sales. And you’re just trying to educate. And you know, you’re gonna be getting people in from multiple channels. So you may have people coming in, subscribing from your website, you’re gonna get customers getting added to your list. You’re also gonna get probably some leads from your social media channels.

[00:15:44]
And even maybe let’s say you do you take phone calls as well, you could have some, some leads coming in via the phone. So you’re getting these leads coming in from all of these different places. So one of the things that um, you know, we kind of always hear is, Segmentation. How, in your opinion, how important do you feel that segment email segmentation is?

[00:16:01]
How relevant is that in this overall email marketing strategy? And if it is, you know, what are some effective, effective ways to, you know, to se segment your customers to really, you know, get maximum revenue out of these leads?

[00:16:14]
Mounir:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good point. And at this level, when, when you reach that a hundred K level from email or just total revenue segmenting is very important because it allows you to grow.

[00:16:26]
Your list into very specific categories based on demographics, based on behavior, based on interest, based on, you know, age and all of that. So, second thing is really important, like growing from zero to a hundred. You just want to build the foundation at that level. You want to build the foundation. You want to have your main automations, the welcome flow series, the abandoned card, abandoned checkout, the post-purchase emails, including, you know, including customer thank you, letter shipping, information, delivery confirmation, and maybe a survey and all of that.

[00:16:56]
The main challenge at that first phase is to grow the list. We need less to growth heavy, like you mentioned, all the, all the strategies that you mentioned to grow the list. And then you also want to send, you wanna be able to send campaigns because the more you send, the more you’ll build that trust with people and the more you’ll keep people active in the list.

[00:17:14]
As soon as you sort of pass the hundred K level. Now you want to really think about how can we make this. Experience very personalized to every single lead. And what I mean by that is targeting the right lead with the right message at the right time. And if we are talking metrics we’re talking about now, what are the metrics that, you know, segmenting could impact?

[00:17:35]
We’re talking about average order value or a lifetime value, for example. So with segmenting, you wanna prioritize the people who are buying from you. Recently frequent, frequently, and at a high, at a high, at a high monetize, like at a high value, like they spend more with you. So those are your VIPs. Your VIPs are people who purchase recently from you, frequent frequently from you, and spend, uh, certain amount with you.

[00:18:02]
Those are your top, those are your VIPs. And same thing, those people, you want to keep engaged. Those are the ones that you wanna send to 20, like Al, not 24 7. Those are the people that you wanna send to very awfully. And then you always want to clean. You wanna make sure that you’re always cleaning your list from that way.

[00:18:19]
These are people who aren’t engaged, people who, you know, receive the emails over certain amount of receive campaigns or flows or automations over a certain amount of time, but they don’t take any actions. So we want to keep those, you know, we want to keep, keep, keep taking ’em off. This way they don’t impact the performance of the account.

[00:18:36]
Yeah, very, very true.

[00:18:36]
Arlen:
Very true. And, An excellent point because I think a lot of brands, when they launch, launched these e-commerce, excuse me, these EMO marketing campaigns, they get subscribers funneling in from all of these channels. And I think a, a lot of times a brand may think it’s kind of like auto, you gotta, you can run it on autopilot.

[00:18:55]
You’ve gotten these subscribers going, you may have some campaigns going that are educating people. You’ve also gotten some, you know, some product sales emails in there. You’ve gotten this flow going. People are getting, the emails are subscribing and then, You kind of hands off , you know, you kind of get the tendency because, you know, with these, these days everything is automated through these, you know, email automation tools.

[00:19:17]
So you don’t have to do a, a whole lot as far as the, I guess you could say, the logistics of the sending and the subscribing. All that is is done automatically. So I think a lot of times brands have the tendency to, to step back and kind of keep their foot off the gas. But you made a good point where list management is, is really key.

[00:19:34]
You know, getting people that are out of. That aren’t, you know, opening at all. They haven’t opened the last five emails you’ve sent. Obviously, you know, it’s, it’s a bad lead or they’re just not interested. Get them out of there cuz you, it, it can really affect the performance of your list, the performance of your sending, but you know, just your overall stats.

[00:19:49]
You want to have a clean list and you wanna make sure that with that segmentation, as you spoke about your sending the right content to the right people, those people that may have purchased maybe three times from you in the past month or so, they need to get a different email than the people that.

[00:20:06]
Never purchased from you at all. So it’s absolutely, you know, very, very important that you break down those segments.

[00:20:10]
Mounir:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And, and I wanna touch base on the, on the dead way also, like I will give, I’ll give the audience one of the secret strategies that eight figure brands use with their dead way.

[00:20:21]
Your dead way. People who don’t open your emails, just because they don’t open the emails, it doesn’t mean that maybe, it doesn’t mean that they’re interested. Maybe they’re too busy or maybe you are not heading with the right message. So, however, for that, that. What you want to do, you wanna probably open a double e sb, you wanna open a different email marketing line with a different provider.

[00:20:40]
Okay. And migrate your dead way to way and kind of like, try to nurture them, try to talk to them in a different way and, and kind of like separate that from the main domain. Separate that from the domain account so it doesn’t impact your performance on the main account and try to reengage it dead way in a different way and leverage your testings.

[00:21:00]
That’s, that’s an opportunity to test, to see what. Convince people who are not ready, or how can you convince people who haven’t, you know, engaged with your content? Trust me with that strategy, you’ll be so surprised at how many people turn around to become loyals just from that strategy, Lord. 

[00:21:14]
Arlen:
Wow. Wow.

[00:21:14]
Yeah, that, that’s awesome. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard that strategy before, because I think a lot of times you, you’re naturally thinking that you’ve got this dead way, these people that have not opened any of the emails and past campaigns that you’ve sent. So, you know, naturally you’re like, all right.

[00:21:28]
Just get rid of them to clean the legs. , you know, that’s the, that’s your first thought. But in, in your, what you’re saying is that even though there’s been no performance, no clicks, no opens, you still don’t want to give up on them just yet. So moving them off of your main e s P to another platform and just kind of trying different things, running different tests, different campaigns, different language, just to, to see if you can pull anything out of ’em.

[00:21:53]
Is that really Absolutely. 

[00:21:55]
Mounir:
Just absolutely. Yes, and some of the strategies that have worked in terms of that, and those are some strategies that we use with our current clients and partners here at the Greenhouse. We’ve seen that plain text email campaigns performed really well for the deadweight.

[00:22:09]
Arlen:
Okay, Wow. Interest.

[00:22:11]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times you, you, first off, you would think that some of the HTML emails, the glossy ones, the things that are a little bit more attractive, the colorful ones, you would think those would, you know, perform more, what would better, especially for people that haven’t really touched anything.

[00:22:28]
So yeah, that, that brings up some interesting points. 

[00:22:31]
Mounir:
Yep. And that’s what we talked about at the beginning. I’m sorry for interrupting. That’s what we talked about at the beginning. Testing. Testing is very important. A lot of people talk about testing, but not everyone does testing. No one that you know, major.

[00:22:42]
Brands. Yeah, it’s, it’s hard, and don’t get me wrong, I understand. We understand the pain of actually like managing an email marketing channel, like from, from, you know, the content creation, from the marketing strategy to the marketing calendar, to the content creation, to the copy, to the design, to the deployment, but most importantly to the performance analysis.

[00:23:01]
That’s where those a. Data comes in handy to understand what worked and whatnot and when it comes down to content, yeah, you have to test, you have to see plain test, plain text versus the glossier, you know, the good looking emails and see what performed best and see what people actually like, tend to go towards more.

[00:23:17]
Arlen:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s so true. Now let’s say we’re a brand, we’re at the point where we’ve surpassed the a hundred thousand dollars mark. We’re getting traction with these email campaign. We’ve done the segmentation, we’ve done the personalization, you know, we’re nurturing things, we’re moving out that dead weight.

[00:23:34]
We’re really starting to increase the revenue, getting, you know, leads in from a lot of different channels. What are some other strategies that can really, uh, uh, some additional strategies that can really propel the revenue from these campaigns to, you know, to that, that million dollar mark? And what are some other things that you’ve done or that you’ve seen that have been successful?

[00:23:52]
That’s, 

[00:23:52]
Mounir:
that’s a really good question right there, Arlene. At this level. Now you, you do have the foundation built in already, you know, and then you grow this, probably you grew your email revenue or overall revenue to like a hundred, 500. How do we stay consistent now at this level? Maintenance is the name of the game.

[00:24:09]
How do we maintain the growth and stay consistent, but still growth? So list growth. Is is is major. Like, we can’t stop like growing our list. So if we’re not growing, you know, list our consistent rate, audience fatigue is a real thing. See, so you, you, you all, you don’t, like we mentioned before, you don’t really want to exhaust your list.

[00:24:29]
Mm-hmm. So you always want to bring new, fresh leads into the pipeline and get ’em to go through the whole funnel. So at that level, what we wanna focus on is the overall KPIs and the overall metrics that can, that can take, you know, performance to a next level. So, you know, Average order values with upsell, so including some upsells and cross-sell automations, include some loyalty and referral programs to, to, to again, bring in more people to the funnel and help people to not only purchase once, but purchase 2, 3, 4, and five and six and seven times.

[00:25:00]
Yeah. And I know something that was really important is the sunset flow as well. So when people get on the sunset floor, they need to be suppressed on a monthly basis, so, you know, to, to just keep that li list fresh without doing the work manually. So keeping, you know, the list. It only the white people on the main account so we can perform perfectly.

[00:25:18]
Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff.

[00:25:19]
Arlen:
Good stuff. Yeah. That, that really makes sense. You know, if, if, if you reach those certain levels, like you were saying, the, the, the main thing is that consistency and you’ve gotta still continue to build peop build that list, get people more people in it and not only nurture what you have but then continue to to, to grow it.

[00:25:38]
Yeah. Cuz I think, you know, it’s just like with any email marketing campaign, you know, when something is successful. Revenues, the revenues have grown up. You can have the tendency to pull off the gas a little bit and to say, okay, it’s good, it’s performing well. I don’t need to touch it. You know? But that’s not the case cuz like you said, absolutely not.

[00:25:56]
If you, if you step off the gas, that’s when you know people are gonna, could, you can get that list fatigue as you mentioned, and people can, you know, start opting out and that’s what you don’t want. So, yeah, very. Points Now, Munir, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see if you could share, you know, just a, a small example, a case study of a, a particular brand that you’ve either worked with or that you’re familiar with in general that has taken that revenue from a hundred K to a million using these strategies, and what specific things did they do that you could highlight in particular?

[00:26:24]
Mounir:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Without, without mentioning the name of the brand, one of the brands that we worked with, Our long lasting, actually, like client, one of the brands that trusts us from the beginning and gave us the opportunity to bless them with our knowledge and bless them with our ca capabilities to help them scale because we, uh, marketing is not only just marketing textbook.

[00:26:45]
You need to really get on the deeps of an e-comm brand. You need to get on the deeps of the business to understand how the channels, how all the channels work together to pump the blood into that Shopify store. So, you know, it’s, it’s. Important to understand how a position, you know, relates to conversions, relates to, you know, retention with email and s m s.

[00:27:06]
And as soon as you understand the landscape and the ecosystem and how does it work, you’ll know easily like how to make these channels talk to each other in a most perfect way. So when we start working with this brand, they had a major. Mm, they had a major, major challenges. Not only one major challenge, they had major challenges and some of the things that free out a lot of brands is sending cadence.

[00:27:29]
So at the level where they, when, when, where we met them, they were generating about 50 K from email revenue, which will make two 20% of their total revenue at the time, 20 to 30. So they were around, I think 150 K total. And one of the things that Major League found is descending cadence. So at that level, you wanna.

[00:27:48]
More emails, more content to different people and try to see what will work and whatnot. Again, from one angle and kind of like diversify the, the, the, you know, the diversify the angles of content to see what people will resonate with. And as soon as we started, as soon as we increased descending can cadence for the campaigns, and we kind of like also revamped their foundation, they built their email foundation.

[00:28:11]
And when I say the foundation, I mean the automation is their welcome flows, their abandoned card, their abandoned checkout, and their post-purchase business. Company has been in business for five, I think, or seven years. Mm-hmm. , and the main question we asked was, when was the last time did you guys update your automations?

[00:28:29]
They said, never since they built them from the first day. And that’s one of the things that a lot of e-commerce brands can see some impact from. These automations aren’t built, set it up once and forget it. Yeah, you need to revamp it all the time. You need to every quarter. They’re not as, not as bad as the campaigns, but you need to revamp your automations almost every quarter because you’ll have enough enough.

[00:28:49]
To actually back up your strategy for next quarter, for example. So first thing first, we took all the data from their automations. We invented their foundation. We invented their welcome series. We event their post Us and also their abandoned car and checkout. And out of nowhere we were able to get ’em to a hundred k up in the cadence, descending cadence for the campaigns that added another 50 k to, to, to, to the pipeline.

[00:29:12]
So we were able to like scale ’em from fif within three. Of doing all of those strategies, we’re able to three times the, three times the return on investment from what they have they’ve been doing, not the return on investment, I’m sure, I’m sorry. The revenue that they were doing. And at that level, now that we’re going to 150 K, you’re thinking to yourself, okay, like 150 K, that’s a solid number.

[00:29:31]
How can we, you know, how can we scale above that? Well, taking into consideration that their average order value at the time was around maybe 150 or you know, $200. We’re starting thinking about strategies. How can we get ’em. 600. So the 500 average order value? Yeah. What, so we start looking into the business as a whole and what they sell, and we start kind of like building strategies around combination for products, what products could match each other and set ’em up on combos or set ’em up on a upsell, kind of like automation if you buy or cross sell automations.

[00:30:04]
And we started seeing success with that. As soon as we got to that level to 150 K per month, pure email revenue, then we start thinking about now how can we increase the average order value? Add the referral programs, add the upsells and cross-sell automations, and just let it do the work. Right. And then you optimize every, you know, every quarter you optimize your results because that’s where, that’s where the trick is.

[00:30:24]
Yeah. Performance analysis. Yeah. Performance analysis. Performance analysis. Performance analysis. One more time. And I think that has been the main. Seller to all these companies because they have a hard time analyzing the data. Not only that, they have a hard time analyzing it. There’s so much going on in their business that they’re trying to just stay afloat.

[00:30:43]
Yep. And you know, coming in with that strategy and with that mindset that everything that gets measured get to grow. If we measure weekly, we will have better months. If we measure monthly, we’ll have better quarters. And if we measure quarterly, we’ll have great years. Mm-hmm. . And that’s the mindset that we take into it.

[00:30:59]
And that’s how we make an impact within all these brands. 

[00:31:02]
Arlen:
Great. Great. That’s good stuff, and thank you for sharing that, that testimonial. Yeah, that’s, that’s really impressive. Like you said, from, you know, just a few months of just following those main, you know, testaments and, and guidelines with that, you guys have said it’s, uh, you know, they were able to see that, that growth.

[00:31:17]
So it’s, it, it can be done, you know, it, it, it takes a lot of attention, like you said, is kind of the main thing to it. The tracking of the performance and then, and then being able to be pivot quickly, which, you know, unfortunately a lot of brands don’t do that quick enough, as you mentioned, when they. You guys, they hadn’t changed their automation since they’re the inception of them

[00:31:37]
And so, yeah. You know, and I can relate to that as a, a business owner and managing our different marketing campaigns, it’s a lot of times you, those types of things, you don’t re, you don’t naturally revisit that often. You just kind of let it go. But yeah, you gotta keep your, you gotta keep your eyes on it and then, you know, it does take a little bit of work.

[00:31:55]
It takes testing, you know, content creation. You gotta get your writers involved, your marketing people. But these days I, I think there’s a. Out there that make that content creation a little bit better. You know, we’ve got these AI tools, the, the chat GPTs of the world have, have definitely given there marketers a, a leg up.

[00:32:12]
Mounir:
I, I, I would say . I, I knew, I knew you were gonna go there. I was like, I, I was like, I knew it. I knew it. The AI is out here. I knew how we was gonna go there. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a really good point that you grow up actually with the artificial in intelligence softwares that we have nowadays and the wave, the, the no bubble, it’s. very fascinating to see what humans were able to achieve with the new technology and how, you know, it could definitely impact positively on every, you know, business and every industry. However, I still believe that the foundation to this businesses is major and AI wouldn’t be able to solve it. So when, what I mean by that is that the foundation to every business, product, development, marketing, operat, Cells.

[00:32:59]
If you don’t have all of these kind of like departments and channels mastered, if you don’t really understand how these things work together, uh, the AI will be useless. Mm-hmm. , like, you know, just get it on the AI until it’s all write you like a copy for a post or a copy for a campaign or something. If you don’t really have that foundation built in place, the AI will be useless.

[00:33:22]
But I, I still believe. Felt it’s a strong tool that we can leverage Yeah. You know, to to, to our advantage and get a lot of like, good results from Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:31]
Arlen:
For sure. For sure. And I, I totally agree. You know, you, you’ve gotta core focus on those core, you know, tenants of your, your, your product, you know, the, your marketing and, and your customer interaction, your customer experience.

[00:33:45]
There’s no, no, AI can solve, you know, absolutely. Do that for you, . Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. It has to be just used as, as a tool. And even when you. As a tool, one of the things that I’ve seen, you know, interacting with it myself and seeing other people interact with it is, you know, you, you can’t just feed it prompts, let it return content and then just get it out there.

[00:34:06]
Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s not perfect and at this point, and so yeah, you, you, you can use it to supplement what you’re doing to give you good ideas. It’s great for brainstorming, it’s great for, you know, generating some quick topics, if you will, as well, and then helping you kind of narrow some things down and coming up with.

[00:34:24]
Framework, a plan maybe. So yeah, I think it’s, it’s great for that. But yeah, it definitely isn’t a replacement for, you know, doing the due diligence and then kind of following everything that we talked about, you know, on this, on this podcast. But absolutely. Yeah, it was interesting to hear your, your take on it, and I’m glad you’re able to, to give that.

[00:34:39]
But I, I totally agree with you for, well, well, Monier, it’s been awesome talking to you. I’ve definitely learned a lot here on this podcast. I know our listeners and viewers have as well. So thank you for joining. Today. Lastly, before we do let you go, I always like to switch gears here so our, our listeners can get to know you a little bit better than our viewers.

[00:34:55]
Uh, best Far. Yes, sir. If you don’t mind sharing a closing fun fact that you think we’d be interested to know. 

[00:35:01]
Mounir:
Oh, this is  awesome. No, thank you for having me, Arlen. This this has been great. I mean, um, what else we got? So, yeah, I mean, the greenhouse has growing really fast and furious. I mean, what can I touch, touch, touch base on our, our mission is to help e-commerce.

[00:35:15]
We, we are really, we love the industry and. We step away from traditional marketing. I think there’s so much that we can do with what we have currently, but also like understanding the landscape of the, a whole system, ecosystem of E-com. I think we have some new ideas, uh, to the industry we’re working on, uh, new startup that’s going to make an impact heavily, heavily, heavily on the e-com.

[00:35:41]
On the e-com. Just, we just want to help, we just want to help brands and we think we have a lot of good ideas that we can bless a lot of brands with, especially. These tough times now around recession and all the things that the word are going is going through. What else? Our, you know, we have a cool team.

[00:35:56]
We have, we have a very solid, talented, creative team and also like marketing team. And not all take, we can, I don’t think we’ll be where we are without our team. Our team is our most solid and valuable asset. And, uh, Carrie McDonald and myself, the co-founders wouldn’t be where we are without our team. I think they do the majority of the work.

[00:36:15]
We, on the backend, behind the stage to be able for us to like, make all this success come through. And I never got the opportunity to, you know, give ’em a shout out from a platform, but I think today is the best day to let ’em know that we do appreciate them. And yeah, if you have, if you have some, some, some good employees, you gotta take care of them, you know?

[00:36:32]
For sure. Uh, what else other. And we’re enjoying Florida. We’re loving in Miami. Yeah. This is, uh, this has been, this is, this has been fun. Yeah. It’s, it’s been, it’s been great to connect with you, Arlene. Thank you for, you know, giving us the platform to connect and, and add some value. We’re looking forward to, you know, what’s next.

[00:36:49]
All right. Well, that’s awesome. 

[00:36:50]
Arlen:
Well, yeah, thank you for sharing that and that it’s awesome to hear you give that shout out to your team. And I totally agree. You know, the, the business, the founders that are the front of. Is, you know, of course, you know, lead the way, but it’s, if it’s not for the team on the back end that’s, you know, lighting the fire in those engines, then that’s, uh, you know, you’re not gonna go anywhere.

[00:37:08]
So, uh, you gotta have a solid team and you gotta, you gotta treat ’em well. So, uh, that, that, that’s good to see that you’re, you’re, you’re able to acknowledge.

[00:37:14]
Mounir:
Absolutely. So that’s awesome.

[00:37:15]
Arlen:
Well, uh, you know, thanks for sharing that. Lastly, before we do let you go, if any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about, you know, all things though marketing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

[00:37:25]
Mounir:
Yeah, absolutely, man. Like, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn at Munir Ferdo, M o u n i r b o u F E R D O U I’m sorry, I have to do, I think it’s a complicated Moroccan slash French name. Or just reach out to me at munir grow with greenhouse.com or you can find, find us in. Grams grow with Greenhouse or he can find me on Instagram as monier with eight Rs at the end.

[00:37:49]
Yeah, reach out to me. I’ll be more than happy to help and add value. 

[00:37:52]
Arlen:
Right. That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. I definitely encourage people to connect with you. We’ll have the link to your sites in our show notes as well, or people can reach out. And thank you again today, Mounir for joining us on the E-Commerce Marketing Podcast.

[00:38:03]
Mounir:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Arlen. 

Podcast Guest Info

Mounir Bouferdou
Co-Founder of The Greenhouse