Why the 30% Email Revenue Rule Is Wrong

[00:05] **Matt Edmundson**: Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast. My name is Matt Edmundson, and it is great as always, as ever, to be with you today. Hope you're having a good day wherever you are in the world. We are going to be talking about all things ecommerce, which is what we do on this show. The clue's in the title, but we're going to talk about how to grow your business online. This is a pet project of mine. A lot of people ask me why do I do the podcast? Honestly, like a lot of you, I I run my own ecommerce business. And so what the podcast enables me to do is to talk to various people from around the world who are either experts in their field or like me, a founder in ecommerce. And I just get to pick their brain for an hour. And I cannot begin to tell you the impact these conversations have had on my own business has been phenomenal over the years, which is why we keep doing it. It's why I love doing it. I love the chance to chat to people. Uh, and grow my own knowledge and we just happen to record it. So, you know, you can get to listen to it as well, which is a wonderful thing. Uh, so welcome to the show. If this is your first time with us, hopefully by the end of it, you'll be in a position to hit the like, subscribe button and all that to make sure you stay connected to the show. Uh, and of course, if you're a regular, welcome back. You are an absolute legend. Um, and love meeting you guys as well, uh, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's in the cohort groups we've got. Um, or just in meetups around the world. It's always fun to meet people who listen to the show. Uh, always surprises me actually how many of you do. So hopefully you get some value out of it as well as me. Um, I know for a fact actually quite a lot of you do. You're very kind in your comments, which is, uh, very good for my ego, which is a beautiful thing. So thank you for sending them through. If you're watching on YouTube, what do you think to our new studio? Uh, we've been in it a couple of weeks now. Um, and I'm loving this thing. I'm on a really comfy seat, which is why you see, if you watch me, I end up doing this thing where I just sort of lean back and fold my arms because I am like settled for the day. Um, and so yeah, I am loving the new studio. Let me tell you, it's, it's great. Um, but yeah, uh, what should I tell you? Oh yes, the website. That's it. Come on, Matt, be a professional. The website ecommercepodcast.net, um, is the place to go to for all things to do with this podcast. So all the notes, links, et cetera, from today's episode will be on there. Uh, all the links and notes from all our past episodes are on there. You can search by topic, um, you can find past episodes, you can plug things into AI. There's a whole lot of stuff going on, uh, with the podcast. You can sign up for the newsletter if you want and get the notes sent to you automatically. You can go straight to the cohort groups, um, and join those if you like, which is— if you're like me, an ecommerce founder, those things are great because you get to talk to fellow ecommerce from around the world. Love those things. Um, real privilege to be a part of those, actually. I think we've got one coming up tomorrow. Uh, so yes, maybe I'll see you in there. Um, but yeah, all of that sort of stuff is featured on the website, ecommercepodcast.net. Like I say, you can just head over there and browse to your heart's content. Um, and of course you can connect with me through the website and I'd love to hear from you. If you are in fact a founder like my good self and you would like to come onto the show, and share your story. We would love to hear from you. You definitely don't need to have made it. Um, you know, we sometimes— people are like, I don't know if I should come on because I've not quite hit the whatever goal it is you have in mind. Um, the thing that I've found with founder stories is they just bless other founders because you just, you hear people like yourself telling their story and you go, actually, I'm not being crazy. I'm not alone in all of this. There is some common sense going on here that I need to be aware of. So Um, if you're up for sharing your story, we would love to hear from you. We genuinely would. Uh, you don't have to have been in ecommerce long. We had the Nordic guys on recently. They've not even started their business yet. I love that conversation. Um, we've had people, you know, with large ecom brands on the show as well and everyone in between. So we would genuinely love to hear from you. Uh, just go to the website ecommercepodcast.net. There's a link which says be a guest. Just fill out that little form. And it would be great to hear from you. Anyway, all of that said, let's get into today's conversation. Uh, Alex, welcome to the show, man. How you doing?

[04:28] **Alex Moulart**: Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm doing great.

[04:31] **Matt Edmundson**: Wonderful. Whereabouts in the world are you?

[04:34] **Alex Moulart**: I'm in London right now.

[04:36] **Matt Edmundson**: In London. You don't sound like you're from London.

[04:38] **Alex Moulart**: No, I'm not from— I've been here for about 4 days, so I need some time to adjust.

[04:44] **Matt Edmundson**: How's the jet lag?

[04:47] **Alex Moulart**: It's okay. I was in France before, so I had some time to adjust.

[04:51] **Matt Edmundson**: Okay.

[04:52] **Alex Moulart**: But yeah, London for the next couple of months. I'm based in New York. I probably don't sound American either. Most people can't guess my accent, but I grew up in Germany in a French family, so I have a little bit of a mix.

[05:06] **Matt Edmundson**: So you grew up in Germany, you've got a French family, you've lived in New York, and now you're in London.

[05:13] **Alex Moulart**: Yes.

[05:13] **Matt Edmundson**: Okay. Just as long as I'm keeping up with the global trotter that you are. It's quite an impressive sort of journey, I suppose.

[05:25] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, it's nice. I mean, we also, I have family, you know, in Europe. I live in the US. My fiancée lives in the US and her family is from the UK. So that's why, you know, it's kind of almost, we almost have to do this. Yeah,

[05:41] **Matt Edmundson**: yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Almost Nothing is consistent, but I just think that's amazing. That's brilliant. So welcome to London. We're obviously in the same time zone right now. Liverpool recording, you're in London. So yeah, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you, man. Thanks for coming. For those that don't know about you or what you do or why you're here, why don't you give us the quick elevator pitch into all things Alex, what you're up to, what you're working on. And what we're gonna be talking about.

[06:12] **Alex Moulart**: Sure. So I've, I do email marketing and SMS marketing for DTC ecommerce brands. And in the last year, I've been really interested in, I mean, as you know, the, all the AI stuff has allowed us to completely rethink what we're able to do. And I've been really interested in rethinking some of the assumptions that exist around email and with AI tools, we can build dashboards and we can build a lot more complex answers to complex questions that we previously couldn't build. So I've been really interested in rethinking revenue share, what the actual targets should be, or segmentation. I think we can get a lot more precise. And then also some other things around the user experience we can we can build.

[07:07] **Matt Edmundson**: Okay. Okay. Very good. Um, there's a lot there already. Yeah, I know.

[07:14] **Alex Moulart**: I'm just trying to keep it short. No, no, no. It's great.

[07:16] **Matt Edmundson**: It's an

[07:17] **Alex Moulart**: exciting time.

[07:18] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah, it is. This is— it's an interesting point, isn't it? It is both a frightening time and an exciting time, I think, where, um, AI is concerned. And I think I said it depends what day of the week as to which side of the camp you fall on, right?

[07:31] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah.

[07:31] **Matt Edmundson**: Um, but I'm intrigued, you know, that you've kind of gone down this road with email. So let me start, Alex, with the question I love to ask everybody. You obviously, you know, you work with various clients around the world. What's the— in your eyes, what's the biggest mistake we're all making right now when it comes to email and SMS marketing?

[07:55] **Alex Moulart**: I think one of the biggest ones is the this sort of assumption that email revenue share should always be 30% of total store revenue. I think that's been the main thing that caused me to go down this whole rabbit hole. It was kind of questioning this, why, like, why is 30% the figure we all landed on that we have to match when we all know that, you know, ecommerce businesses, everyone is different, right?

[08:28] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[08:28] **Alex Moulart**: Business is a different situation. The, what you're doing on the paid side is different. And that will impact your revenue share, what you're doing, like how big your list is, how, if you've just started collecting emails 6 months ago for whatever reason, you might be a little bit behind when it comes to email. So then that target doesn't really, it's not really approachable. So I think that's a big one is these generic benchmarks, or when clients ask me like, what should be our click rate? Like what's a good X? Yeah. benchmark to have. I think it's much more interesting to look at past business performance and establishing benchmarks from there, right? So like, this is the benchmark we want to beat, or this is the benchmark we know we can achieve with our business. And therefore, that's what we should aim for. We should try to aim to elevate it.

[09:17] **Matt Edmundson**: So what's been the driver of this 30%? I mean, because I listen to you talk, I can think of 3 or 4 conversations off the top of my head where I've had With various people going email marketing should be like 30, 40% of revenue. And I suppose I, listening to you talk, I don't know why I've got that. I mean, I can talk anecdotally obviously about my own ecommerce brands and what we do internally. And it's not too dissimilar to those figures, but you kind of go, but I mean, I suppose we then come to how I actually measure that, right? But that's, maybe we'll get into that a little bit.

[09:53] **Alex Moulart**: That's a big one.

[09:54] **Matt Edmundson**: But it's an interesting thing, isn't it? And it does just roll off the tongue, this belief, this idea that if I do $10,000 of sales, then $3,000 of that should be directly attributable to my email marketing. And if it's not, my email marketing is underperforming. So where do we get the 30% from?

[10:18] **Alex Moulart**: I think it's just kind of a nice round figure that has established itself. And that's been, I think it's a figure that's also high enough that if I'm going to go into your account and audit, there's a high chance that a lot of brands won't be at 30%. Yeah. So then I can say, you're not at 30%, you should be. And let me help you with that. And yeah, I think it's, and also it's a round figure. It is achievable. And yeah, that's the thing. But then there's another conversation which you touched on, which is how do we measure it, right? And I think that's where also, I don't know from your perspective, but I feel like some business owners when I talk to them, they know that email's important, but they don't really believe the figures they're seeing. So they're aiming for 30%, but at the same time, they kind of have this feeling that they're not actually getting 30% from their emails.

[11:16] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[11:17] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah. Do you feel like that sometimes as well, or?

[11:19] **Matt Edmundson**: Oh yeah, because I mean, the bottom line, Alex, you know, when you talk to people like me, where are we getting this figure from? Uh, where, I mean, we use Klaviyo, um, and I'm sort of platform agnostic. We've just kind of stayed with Klaviyo. Uh, I, I, it's not like I'm saying use that amongst something like Omnisend or whatever, but I, I am aware that whatever platform we have been on, whether it's been Omnisend or Klaviyo or back in the early days with Mailchimp or even our own e-com uh, email platform in the very early days. You, you get these reports, right? Um, and the reports tell you how much revenue came from that email. And so you go, right, well, that's what they've said. Um, I don't for one minute believe it's true because—

[12:09] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah.

[12:09] **Matt Edmundson**: Uh, it's not that I'm— I think Klaviyo is trying to lie to me, but I think that it's like everybody, Google, Facebook, everybody's going to do the biggest attribution they possibly can to make them look as best as they possibly can. But whilst I don't believe it, I don't really question it. And so I— it's an interesting one, isn't it? I, I just kind of go with it in, in many ways. Um, and I suppose in the back of my head, whilst I, I don't think it's accurate, I, I have this belief that, rightly or wrongly, that if they're measuring it in a sort of fixed way, the, the final figure doesn't really make too much difference as long as they use that same form of measurement for every single email. So then I can see the trends, like, are we generating more income or less? Um,

[12:57] **Alex Moulart**: exactly.

[12:57] **Matt Edmundson**: If they change the algorithm halfway through and don't tell me, and we've got a jump in email and I'm congratulating the marketing team, and it's just how they've attributed it differently, then that's a different question. Sorry, this is a really long answer. Uh, but yes, um, I, I, I think, I, I think I've settled on the 30% just because, or the numbers that we get, because that's just what Klaviyo tells us. And we probably don't know how, maybe I don't know how is the wrong phrase. We've not really invested the time and energy required to get a really accurate figure. Would that be fair?

[13:32] **Alex Moulart**: So yeah, that, that does. And I think that touches on the core issue, which is you kind of know that directionally you can see what's happening. And that I think everyone believes that, right? If we see that our email revenue is going up, we might not believe the exact figure that we're seeing, but we believe that it is actually going up from wherever, you know, it was low before, it's higher now. That's good. Hmm. But that's why also the 30% figure becomes difficult because if it's a directional input, like if it's a directional signal, then I think looking at these hard figures doesn't really, it loses some of its relevance.

[14:13] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense, I suppose. You know, you could say, well, I suppose you almost get lazy. So we've hit 30%, therefore email marketing as good as it can be. And you say you stop trying to improve it maybe, or you sort of focus on other things. But then of course, you know, you could improve it from 30% to 50%, but if your overall revenue falls by 30%, it becomes a moot point, right? You've got a bigger problem to deal with.

[14:42] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, yeah. And I just built this sort of forecasting engine that I was really interested in, which is— and it's supposed to give you the actual figure you should focus on. And I was just looking at one of my clients, which is a very consistent— like, as far as email goes, we are emailing very, very consistently for them. Even the segmentation is quite consistent and the metrics are too, but the revenue share really kind of goes up and down quite a bit depending on different things that happen. And some of it is just how much they start spending on the top of funnel. Yeah. So if they suddenly start spending a lot more, the revenue share will actually go down because email adjusts, but it adjusts more slowly. And so then there are also some months like at the beginning of the year where they're a little bit They're kind of lower months for them. And then our revenue share goes up because then email is catching up in that. So I think if we looked at it from this lens, through this lens of we need to hit 30% no matter what, all the time, we would kind of try to fight this natural cycle. And I think we would burn out, you know, some of our high value segments that just don't really want to buy in those months. Yeah. And so we would lose some future revenue we could get from them. And yeah, we also might get deliverability issues that we don't need to have because we're just trying at all costs to get to that 30%. Yeah,

[16:13] **Matt Edmundson**: I love that. I think it's a really powerful point. And I think the idea then of 30%, if we don't hold that as tightly, maybe as we've been holding it over the years, What are maybe metrics that we need to look at in conjunction with it, or perhaps instead of?

[16:34] **Alex Moulart**: Well, I think revenue share is still very important. It's just, I really think that every brand should calculate their own benchmarks, um, and based on their past performance. And this is where AI tools come in, at least for me, um, they come in very handy because I'm not a developer. So I might have the framework in my mind or kind of know what I wanna see, but it would be very hard for me to build that. And now we can very easily build these dashboards.

[17:01] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[17:02] **Alex Moulart**: And calculate, you know, past, like whatever we want to do. There's the Klaviyo MCP, Omnisend MCP as well. But also you can just use API connections and just build your own dashboards. And so you don't need to rely on these figures that don't really, aren't really relevant to your business. And you can kind of see, okay, this is our big season is coming up. So our targets should be adjusted to our biggest season, regardless of whether other brands, even other brands in our industry have a big season now or not. Yeah, like this is our reality.

[17:36] **Matt Edmundson**: Okay, so I, so you, you're seasonally adjusting your revenue share target, probably based on past performance, I'm guessing, right? So yeah. You're looking at what we did last Q4 against this Q4, for example.

[17:51] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, so this is kind of— it becomes less powerful for smaller brands because the more data you have, the more accurate you can make these forecasts and these benchmarks. But I think even for smaller brands, you can have a good directional input of what you should aim for. And it's not about necessarily discarding the metrics that we're used to measuring. It's just about measuring them in a different way, in a way that's more relevant to, to our business reality.

[18:18] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah, yeah, no, great, fascinating. So what else are you looking at? Are you just looking at revenue share on your email, or are you looking— because there's a lot of talk now about things like you should measure not necessarily open rate because that's a waste of time now, um, click-through rates a bit more interesting, um, revenue per email sent is Or email recipient is maybe a little bit more interesting. What are some of the metrics that you're tracking?

[18:48] **Alex Moulart**: I think click rate, like you said, is very good for engagement. Also, click rate is good because even for smaller brands, you'll have more data on clicks rather than if you rely on conversion rate, especially with higher ticket items, you might not be able to use that as an evaluator. So click rate is very good. And it's pretty reliable. And then, yeah, I like conversion rate because at the end of the day, that's what it's about. And yeah, revenue per recipient. So these are kind of the core ones. Conversion rate and revenue per recipient are quality indicators. And then depending on the problem, I'll look at different things, right? So you can also look at how many emails went out, how many people we reached if you're diagnosing a revenue problem. or flow problem, you can first start checking if the flows even went out to enough people, because that would explain the problem. And then if it's not a volume problem, it could be a quality problem. So depending on what we're trying to look for, there are a lot of metrics that are interesting, but I'd say there are 4 key groups. So there's engagement metrics, open and click rate. Like you said, open rate is not the most reliable one, but it's a good directional indicator. Click rate is what I typically use. And then quality for revenue, conversion rate and revenue per recipient. And then the negative metrics are the third group. So those I don't typically use that much because they tend to stay quite stable unless you're really warming up a domain or something. It's gonna be unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and— Yeah. Spam complaint rate. So these 4, I don't really, I just kind of keep an eye on them. Right. But unless there's a spike, they don't really, they shouldn't trouble us too much. And the 4th group is just revenue, right? Just email revenue, email revenue share out of total. And then you can do campaign revenue share, flow revenue share, just kind of, if you see a drop in revenue, you have to just go chasing for where it's coming from.

[20:56] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[20:56] **Alex Moulart**: So those— sorry, it's a long answer, but it's, um— No,

[21:00] **Matt Edmundson**: it's a good answer.

[21:01] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah,

[21:01] **Matt Edmundson**: it's detailed. Okay.

[21:02] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, yeah, it's— I think this, this is kind of— these 4 groups are the biggest ones that you need to understand what's going on in your email.

[21:10] **Matt Edmundson**: That's really good. Um, and I, as you were talking then, the thing that, um, I'm thinking, oh, this is a good idea. I don't know if we— if I— maybe the marketing, marketing team know. Um, but like the the effectiveness of flow campaigns. Like, what's the percentage of revenue share from different flows that we've got set up? Is that consistent? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Um, what are the rates like on those flows? That would be a really interesting exercise to do. Um, yeah, because I know the overall stats, but the individual flow stats, I, I don't know

[21:45] **Alex Moulart**: exactly. And it's— that's really hard actually with flows, because for campaigns you can kind of look at them as one big group.

[21:51] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[21:51] **Alex Moulart**: where you're looking at all the campaigns and they're controlled by the same levers, right? They're controlled by segmentation, your frequency, and to some extent the creative. And with flows, you might have one that completely crashes while all the other ones are doing fine. So then with flows, you really kind of have to figure out which flow is causing the problem or which group of flows and then dig deeper into that one.

[22:16] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[22:17] **Alex Moulart**: So yeah, flows are a little bit tricky.

[22:18] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, fascinating. So what are some of the things then that you, working with your clients, you've, you mentioned obviously having a much deeper understanding of the 30% revenue share idea, what, what actually that means. Um, you also Mentioned, if my notes are correct, that I took at the start here, segmentation. So what mistakes are we making where segmentation's concerned?

[22:51] **Alex Moulart**: It's not necessarily mistakes, it's just I think we can be more precise. And this is something that I'm trying to derive from this forecasting engine I built, which it's still not accurate enough. But the idea in my head is that we shouldn't be, like the way I segment is I'll take timeframes, right? So I'll use a click timeframe or a site activity timeframe, and I keep these separate because the timeframes are typically different for different signals. And then if I feel like we wanna be more aggressive or we can afford, like we can be more aggressive, then I will just increase the timeframe. But typically what people do is we'll, you know, we'll just have these 30% intervals. So we'll have 30%, 60%, 90%. 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and you can go as far as a year or 2 years for some metrics, like for placed orders. But this is also a little bit arbitrary, right? Yeah. So my idea is, is there a specific day, maybe it's 42 days, that really makes sense for this metric that it is a purchase signal or is an intent signal and past that day, It's not anymore. So I think with these more precise tools, we can actually become more precise and cut down on waste and churn and just, yeah, just become more effective with our targeting.

[24:16] **Matt Edmundson**: So what are some of the findings then? I mean, I appreciate you said you've not got complete data, but what are some of the findings maybe that have surprised you looking at this area of segmentation?

[24:28] **Alex Moulart**: Oh yeah, I think One of the biggest things that surprised me is that for non-purchasers, so people who just joined our list and haven't made their first order, the first 30 days are really the most important indicator of whether they'll make a purchase or not. So the majority of people who end up making a purchase do it in the first 30 days, at least on the sample of brands that I looked at. And I hadn't used profile age as a key metric in my segmentation before. I hadn't just created segments of people who joined. It was mainly based on activity.

[25:07] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[25:08] **Alex Moulart**: Which these are still good signals, especially for past purchasers, repeat orders. That's a different conversation. You can predict those better with purchase behaviour, but for non-purchases, it's kind of hard to predict when they're going to purchase. And the main thing is when they join. So it seems that there's this sort of shiny object syndrome when people discover a new brand, and they are most excited when they just discovered the brand. So that window is just more important than I thought it was. And that was, I think, the main finding so far from this on the segmentation side specifically.

[25:46] **Matt Edmundson**: That's interesting. Because like you, I wouldn't have— I suppose common sense would have told me that someone that signs up to the list, what you do with them in the first few weeks is more important than what you do in the last, you know, 6 months of the year or whatever, just because it's fresh in their heads. But it's interesting that's what the data pulls out. You've almost got 30 days, um, to try and do something with them. And when— I don't know if this came out through your data, that the first 30 days, is it a case of I've actually got to get the sale in the first 30 days, or is it more a case of I've got to get them engaged in some way in the 30 days, whether that's, I don't know, downloading something, contacting customer service, coming back to the website? Um, or is it a case of actually, no, what the data shows is if they've not purchased within 30 days, you, you, you may as well take them off the list. Not quite like that, but you know what I mean?

[26:42] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, it's not quite like that, but I think the first 30 days are really where purchases happen. So I think it would be the first thing you mentioned, which is we have 30 days to really get them to make a purchase. And so we should be more aggressive in that time. And we probably can afford to be more aggressive in that time because they're actually excited about the brand.

[27:00] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[27:00] **Alex Moulart**: Or most excited in that time. And so then later on, if we can get people to click and be active on the site, We'll still get purchases. So we don't want to clean them just yet. But we should probably relax the how aggressive we are with them. But it's going to become more of a marathon at that point of just building a relationship with that person until they're ready to buy.

[27:22] **Matt Edmundson**: So how would you, if I can just dig here a little bit, because I'm intrigued, right? So obviously, we've got an email list, I can see when people signed up because it records that date. And I can cross-populate that with purchases from the website so I can see who signed up and who's not purchased yet. And I can obviously track that for my own website at the moment. I suppose I could create a benchmark, couldn't I? Like once someone signed up to the email, the average purchase time is say 28 days. This would be a really interesting metric in terms of new customer acquisition. going forward to track, to say, actually, let's track this time to purchase from signup. And if we can decrease that timeframe, as well as obviously increase the amount of people that sort of hit that signup button, that in itself becomes quite an interesting marketing strategy, isn't it, for your new customer acquisition?

[28:25] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, definitely. And I always try, you know, once we go to that 3 emails a week mark, which we try to do, I think that's when you start wanting to have different groups. 'Cause you're gonna have a group of your customers that, or subscribers that aren't that interested. And so they will churn at higher rates or just it'll go to their promotions folder if you send them all like every email. But then you have a smaller group that can really get 3 emails a week and be happy with it. And so I think it would be something if you're already doing that, it would just be a matter of including that segment explicitly in the high-frequency group.

[29:03] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[29:04] **Alex Moulart**: So I don't, you know, depending on what strategy you're doing, it could be pretty easy to include those findings. But yeah, if you're not doing that, yeah, it could definitely be something that you wanna do where you wanna send people in their first 30 days more emails. And I mean, I said 30 days, you know, again, it's, I don't want it to, I don't wanna spread more generic benchmarks. I think it's like you said, you should make your own. But usually I think that it's good to focus on that first timeframe right after they sign up where there's this sort of newness factor.

[29:39] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah. Yeah, I'd say, I suppose 30 days is easy, isn't it, to try and figure out, but you're right. I mean, create your own benchmarks. You said there, sorry, just rewinding slightly, you said We try to get up to the 3 emails a week mark. That's one of the things that you're actively trying to do. Explain what you mean by that.

[30:00] **Alex Moulart**: It's based on engagement and list size. So I try to, with my clients, I think 3 emails a week is a good sending frequency. And past that, I think you either need to have a very small audience that is extremely interested, Or you just have several sub-audiences and sub-strategies. So then you don't send 4 emails to the same group of people, you're sending 3 emails, or, you know, if you wanna send one that has a male version, a female version, for example, that would be 5 emails in a week. But then, you know, from a recipient perspective, I only get 3.

[30:41] **Matt Edmundson**: Right.

[30:41] **Alex Moulart**: I think after that it becomes, That's when I've seen brands send more than that. It's become an issue where they're kind of chasing that revenue share goal and they're ending up in more and more promotions folders. So then their campaign, their reported campaign revenue starts going down slowly. And so as a reaction, a lot of time they start sending even more emails and it kind of just increases that spiral. And so that's why I think 3 is where you can keep it safe and still be aggressive. Yeah. And after that, you have to be careful and you have to segment a lot more.

[31:16] **Matt Edmundson**: Okay, so, and again, I'm assuming this is something that each brand needs to test, isn't it? Whether 3 is optimal for them.

[31:26] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah.

[31:26] **Matt Edmundson**: How do you, how do you do that though? How do I know that 3 is a good number for me or whether 2 is a good number? Whether I should send on a Tuesday and Friday or a Monday and a Thursday or a Monday, Wednesday, Saturday? What's your sort of strategy there?

[31:42] **Alex Moulart**: That's actually quite hard, right? Because that's, how do you test if you're sending 2 emails a week? How do you know if you would have made more money by sending 3 emails a week? The first, actually the second part of your question is much easier to answer because for the weekdays, what I like to do is just look at flows because flows go out in regular intervals. Whereas campaigns, you might just feel like Tuesdays and Fridays are the biggest days for you. And so if then you send all your campaigns on Tuesdays and Fridays, you'll have a lot more data for them. So then it might not be super accurate, but flows go out throughout the week consistently. So if you take the last 3 years of data you have on your flows, you might see some spikes on some days and then you can use that for your campaign insights. So that's how I would do the weekday.

[32:30] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[32:32] **Alex Moulart**: But the, yeah, the frequency is quite hard because I think the only way to really do that accurately is a holdout test. So, or not a holdout test, but just test an A/B test. You test 2 weeks, 2 emails per week on one audience and 3 emails per week on the other. And then you see what happens. And that's, I think a lot of ecommerce business owners, I mean, that's a lot of commitment because you might have to run that for a while.

[33:02] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[33:03] **Alex Moulart**: Before you get statistically significant results. And so I think that's where a lot of, like, it would be hard to do that. If you're really committed to finding the optimal point, that's what I would do. But that's also, I'm interested in exploring how far we can go with experiments that are data-driven. Because we're not scientists, right? We're marketers. So we're not trying to find— it's— we're not trying to find the truth, right? We're just trying to maximise revenue. And so if the cost of running an experiment is higher than the revenue we could get from it, we might want to discard that revenue, that experiment, even if it's interesting. Yeah. But yeah, I think this, you'd have to do an A/B test there and run it for a while.

[33:52] **Matt Edmundson**: So yeah, I agree. I love your comment about the cost versus the benefits. How are you then, so you mentioned Klaviyo's MCP. So I've got my Klaviyo or Omnisend and they've all got their MCPs. What things, Should I be looking at asking or getting AI to analyse and look at, um, whether help— so maybe let me just take a step back. For those that don't know what an MCP is, um, let's just explain that. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, I think. Um, it's basically a connector between your AI that you're subscribed to, in my case Claude, Um, and your piece of software, in my case Klaviyo. And so what an MCP does is it sort of bridges the gap between Claude and Klaviyo. So my Claude can interact with the data from Klaviyo directly, generate its own reports, analyse that data, and feed that data back. Um, so that's what an MCP is. So when we're talking about that, that's, that's what it is. I don't want to assume. knowledge here. But what things can I think about where Claude is concerned that are going to help me, at least in the first instance, to sort of get started with this, Alex?

[35:16] **Alex Moulart**: First of all, I think what I like to do is create a separation between the AI and the data. So if you're going to build a reporting tool, which is what I'm getting at, because I think that's one of the best uses because you can customized reporting tools to your needs. I would always build it as some sort of dashboard that runs scripts and maybe auto-updates every month. So then you don't have to go in every time and ask it.

[35:45] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[35:45] **Alex Moulart**: And also, you know, AIs are notorious for hallucinating. And specifically, they hallucinate in a way that is specifically designed to make you think it looks real. So it's also very hard to find these mistakes somehow sometimes. And that's why I like to create that barrier. So you can have AI build the script, but then the script is just code. It just, and code can obviously do math very consistently. So yeah, I think that's a super important thing I'd like, I would do. Or, you know, just an example, if you're a subscription brand, for example, what is very important is excluding renewal revenue from reporting. And if you were just using the MCP, you will have to ask it and check every single time you ask a question if it's actually excluded the renewal revenue. And if you just build a script where it's excluded, it's identified and excluded in the code, then you don't have to worry about that. Hmm. And then as far as what to build, I would just, depending on what your target is, right? If you're looking at, well, first of all, actually I would just pick a couple of KPIs that are your core KPIs and look at them split by campaigns and flows over years, right? Instead of, 'cause a lot of the revenue, like Klaviyo's reporting suite is pretty good, but what I found it lacking in is big timeframes. It's, yeah, like, you know, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, get it really seeing year over year how your data is doing 'cause you have seasonal effects. And so I've built some charts where, Not only can I see 12 months, but I also see below that, how are we doing year over year? So I think that's where you can increase the amount of information you get. Yeah. But yeah, so then for me, what I'm trying to see is, can we actually turn this into more actionable insights, right? Because I've compiled a lot of information

[37:50] **Matt Edmundson**: and

[37:52] **Alex Moulart**: Some of it I think can be perceived as noise because it's just, there's a lot of stuff.

[37:56] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[37:56] **Alex Moulart**: And so for me, the first actionable thing I'm working on is, well, first of all, we have the benchmarks and you can, it's quite easy I think to build your own benchmarks based on past performance. It's just an average. So then you can build those. I would recommend everyone do that to just to fit their business reality more. But then what I'd be really interested in is how How reliably can we make segments based on that data? So use past performance data to build segments that are more accurate and fit our business reality more. And then the third thing, actually, you mentioned that on another episode where you said you had a Claude script that was auditing your flows to see if something was broken. And I think that's a super interesting idea as far as flows go, just having something that— Yeah. almost audits them on a regular basis and sends you an alert if something's wrong.

[38:50] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah. Yeah. Now we've had good traction actually by doing that.

[38:55] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah.

[38:55] **Matt Edmundson**: That's really interesting. My brain's buzzing right now.

[39:00] **Alex Moulart**: It's a lot.

[39:01] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah. No, I mean, it's all good, right? It's all stuff to think about and think through because you have these tools at your disposal now.

[39:09] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah.

[39:10] **Matt Edmundson**: And I suppose it's just having the confidence to use them and also knowing where to start, right? And so, and I think you've given us some really good places to start from, uh, Alex. Um, but I'm also aware that, uh, the clock is ticking on. These things have a life of their own. So before we get too deep into the episode and have to end it, let me do a few things, if I may. Number one, what's your question for me? This is where I ask my guests, i.e., you, uh, for a question which I will go away and answer on social media. And the question I've I say to every guest that comes on the show, this is just a bit of fun. The question can be about anything. And so, yeah, what's your question for me, Alex?

[39:52] **Alex Moulart**: My question is, as an ecommerce business owner, all this stuff we talked about, what would it take for you to find that useful rather than, you know, too much information, knowing that you have a bunch of other things you have to deal with? Because I'm, you know, I'm on the email side, so I have all the time in the world to dig into email-specific things. But what I want to do is help ecommerce brands, you know, improve their revenue without confusing them. So what, like, is it something that is kind of a double question? Is it something that you find useful? And what would it take for you to find it an improvement of what you're doing now? Yeah.

[40:36] **Matt Edmundson**: Basically. Fantastic. Love that question. Very deep. You got 2 for the price of one, but that's okay. We like that. We do like that. Alex, listen, for those that might want to reach out to you, find out more about what you're doing, maybe find out more about how you're using AI and the dashboards that you're creating, maybe piggyback those a little bit. What's the best way to connect with you?

[40:55] **Alex Moulart**: So on my website, alexmoulart.marketing. So alexmoulart.marketing. You can find a contact form if you have any questions. You can send me an email and it'll go straight to my inbox. And I'm uploading more things now that I've completed the dashboard building. I will share a lot more on my website. So I'll do that over the next couple weeks and on YouTube as well. But all that will be linked

[41:29] **Matt Edmundson**: Fantastic. We will of course link to Alex's website in the show notes, uh, which, you know, you'll be getting along for free with the transcript if you are subscribed to the newsletter. Um, with the show notes, uh, they'll be in the show notes on your podcast app. Or if you're watching on YouTube, it'll be in the description. If you're on the website, just go find the blog post. If you use our AI system, just ask AI. I mean, there's so many ways to get a hold of Alex. I'm sure he would love to hear from you, even if you just reach out and say, hey, thanks for sharing that. That really helped me unlock a few things in my business. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. So yeah, make sure you do. But Alex, listen, man, thanks for coming on the show. Before we close out though, I like to do this thing called saving the best till last. And this is where I want you to sort of just take the microphone for a few minutes and just, you know, give us your best advice, like on where we start. So, you know, you've come across many clients, um, over the years doing what you're doing. You know, you talk to people like me all the time. I guess the question is, there's so much, as you said, so much data. Where's the best place to start?

[42:40] **Alex Moulart**: Um, I think the best place to start is kind of What do you want to, like, what, what is bothering you, right? Like, what do you feel like you're missing? Because I'm, I think in this age of AI, I've been surprised many times how much stuff we can actually build with AI. Like, I, you know, I'd think, oh, this is not going to work. And then it just works very easily.

[43:03] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah.

[43:03] **Alex Moulart**: You know, and so if I can be cheesy, I'd say, if you can dream it, you can do it. And I would start there and just kind of think, what do I actually want to see? Because chances are you can just build that exact thing with very little compromise. Um, in, you know, your AI dashboard or in some local tool if you want to host it. But yeah, I wouldn't let, you know, your understanding of what technical limitations exist right now limit you from building, building something you really think about because the— there's a crazy amount of possibility.

[43:36] **Matt Edmundson**: Yeah, love that, love that. Alex, listen, man, thank you for coming on the show. Always love to talk about email marketing. Always love to get a little bit nerdy.

[43:48] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[43:50] **Matt Edmundson**: This was good fun. No, it's great. I really enjoyed it. And I enjoy the rest of your travels. You know, you're in London for a few months. Who knows where the next stop is? But yeah, thank you, man. Genuinely appreciated it.

[44:03] **Alex Moulart**: Yeah, thanks, mate. It's been great.

[44:04] **Matt Edmundson**: Wonderful. Well, there you go. Another great episode of the eCommerce Podcast all wrapped up. Love that. I hope you've got lots of notes like I have. There's a few things that we didn't actually get around to, which are in my notes still, but you know, maybe next time. Uh, but yeah, lots of questions. If you do have questions, just reach out to Alex. I'm sure he'd love to answer them for you. Um, as I said at the start of the show, everything about the podcast is on the website, ecommercepodcast.net. Make sure you check it out. Make sure you check out the cohort groups and all of those sort of things. They are free to join. Um, uh, but just offering the same value. So we'd love to see you in them. Um, but that's it from me for this week. Uh, that's it from Alex. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a phenomenal week wherever you are in the world, but I'll see you next time. Bye for now. Bye for now.