How to Improve Your Omnichannel Customer Service

well hello good evening and welcome to the ecommerce podcast live recording that's right this evening
uh we are doing a live stream of our podcast recording okay so if you are watching this a big
warm welcome to you uh my name is matt edmondson this is the ecommerce podcast and it's a show all about how to help
you grow your online business now as we do these podcast interviews uh we
i've started to broadcast out the interviews on uh youtube live tonight so that's going
out where you're watching this okay and we literally are going to record the podcast in one
take from beginning to end and so i just wanted to pop in here and say good evening to those of you
join do say hi in the comments be great to know where you're watching from and all that sort of good stuff whatever questions you've got
put them in the comments below and we will get around to them uh but yeah so uh that's that's
basically what's gonna happen i'm gonna play uh in just a few seconds here the intro to the podcast so you're going to see
another intro and this is just basically the podcast recording as it's going on
so hang around for the intro and then we're going to hit it properly so hope that all makes sense i will see you
in i'm just looking for the button here on my controller here it is state-of-the-art technology right so uh
like i say i'm just about to roll the intro for the podcast then we are going to get into the live recording uh with ritus in just a few seconds so
here we go
Welcome
welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for building
your business online [Music]
Show Intro
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson this is a show all about how to grow
your online business and every week i get to talk to amazing people from the world of e-commerce
and i get to ask them all kinds of questions about what they know and more importantly how's it going to
help me run my own e-commerce business right the question we all have uh in the back of our heads
as we listen to the show now today we have a very special guest in and i
i don't know if you've ever heard the phrase omni channel if you've been around e-commerce for a while
you have heard this phrase what does omnichannel mean right it's just one of these words that people throw out it
didn't publish yes i'm into my omni channel systems and you're just like whatever i don't know
what that means right so and should you even care right
especially if you're just starting out in ecommerce should you care about omnichannel stuff does that or
does that sound like something you know that the big boy should do well in today's show we have ritus loris
joining us now eritas is the ceo of omniscent and they specialize
in this whole thing to do with omnichannel marketing and he's going to help us get into this whole
omni channel idea let me tell you he's going to bust some myths wide open and yes explain why we should be using
the tactics he's going to talk about in today's show whether you are just starting out in e-commerce
or whether you've been trading like me you know for for donkey's years right uh so no pressure but i think tonight's
going to be a bit of a master class in e-commerce marketing so do grab your notebooks if you can
you are definitely going to want to take notes uh but if you can't if you're driving if
you're in the car whatever you're doing uh if you're watching the live stream be assured that all of the notes from
today's show will be available as a free download as always on our website just head on over to
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash because this is episode number of the ecommerce podcast so
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash and you can download those free and without cost to you and all of the
links to ritus and everything he's going to talk about tonight we will also put in those show notes so uh have at it go over
now that was a big buildup right so without further ado let's bring on tonight's guest let's
Introducing Rytis
bring on ritus uh and we've we've had to change our technology systems a little bit tonight so i'm
hoping it's all gonna work uh so if i press this button uh yes we can see you ritus hey how you
doing hey matt yeah thanks for being really adaptable and changing our technology
since the last minute it works exactly thanks for persevering
it's good we work in i.t we can make we can make these things work right yeah although sometimes when we have too
many technologies as yeah we will be talking about omnichannel so really sometimes not that easy to you know
mingle different uh technologies tools channels whatever but yeah yeah
as you introduced today we're going to cover a little bit of how different channels could help you run your
e-commerce business so definitely really looking forward to have this conversation with you yeah you and me both thanks for joining
us thanks for joining us now rita listen the first thing that people are going to notice if they're if they're
tuning in is the way you say technology you've got a bit of an accent right so whereabouts in the world are
you right now yeah a bit of accent yeah that's true i believe you're gonna hear more words
with an action not yeah not technology only yeah so i'm lithuanian and yeah i'm
currently based in vilnius lithuania yeah before the covet era you know i was
i was traveling a lot i used to live in london for a while and spending a lot of my time in the
united states as the vast majority of our business is actually in the u.s but we have rnd uh rod center here and um i'm born here
so kind of just for the code i stay stay here and yes vaccine is coming from central
europe lithuania okay now uh this may be my ignorance ritus but
in my head lithuania in winter is going to be a cold place to be is that is that correct
that's correct yeah that's correct it's snowy i mean it's not that bad it's not like super freezing
but yeah that's definitely below zero celsius and the yeah snowy winter so but
you know the more snow you get the better you feel because at least you have some
some you know white space outside and yes it's a bit brighter comparing to
british winter sometimes when it's yeah all cloudy and rainy so that's enough it's absolutely not that
bad i would say no no not at all it's um i i was talking to somebody other day about this you
know in the the the winter that we've had in england and you know i'm brought we're in liverpool right so uh such is the wonder of technology
you're beaming in from lithuania i'm sitting in liverpool and this is going out to a worldwide audience like it's just
incredible but uh all that said we um we had uh
two weekends ago we had our snow for the for the year it seems we had a what i would call a light dusting of the
ground it came and two days later it had gone uh we had like half an hour for the kids
to get out on the sledges you know that was about it so i'm i'm slightly envious of your snow
i'm not gonna lie cool you know there are always upsides of everything so
yeah it's just your perception towards the situation you are currently having so that's very true
very true now ritus um you say you've done a lot of traveling you've got a lot of clients over in the states in the uk you've been
How Rytis got into Omnichannel
living over here what is your story i mean how did you get into uh omniscent how did you get into this
whole email marketing type thing that you're in now so all i understand the
as a tool is just a spin-off from digital marketing agencies so back in the days i used to run digital marketing
agency as like you know developing everything digital for the customers and basically selling human
hours and creativity uh and and some of our customers were selling
online and the product which currently is omniscient was launched seven years ago
uh like very first version which is was very basic at that time but yeah we've launched seven years ago and
we saw that okay those who do sell online they have unique opportunity to better market to their customers
the reason for that is because we have way more data of their customers behavior and they
from the very first first touch point very last touch point all the way to conversion
b they are digital the entire journey is digital and therefore you really can
analyze your customers behavior and build better segments better automations based on their
customers behavior not on profile data not on demographic data which which is not always the case to to
build the best solution so that's where we kind of saw the opportunity and
back in those days there were no kind of like focus in email space that was only email
at that time and launched email service provider specializing on e-commerce and since then we have never changed
this we from email went to omnichannel adding text messages adding push notifications
even facebook messenger which we duplicated after some time because it didn't uh
prove itself as an effective channel for e-commerce merchants yeah but uh but yeah would never change
uh i believe in e-commerce and uh the focus as we provide uh the service and we empower e-commerce
merchants to to really uh work better better communicate with their customers yeah so how long has it taken
How long has it taken Rytis to get to where he is now
for you to sort of get from where you were to where you are now how long have you been playing around with this
yeah so seven years so initial kind of yeah seven years initial a couple of years was really really as i
believe for any business uh although it was a spin-off and we had already running business so we had a
team we had developers which really helped a lot to to launch the first version but
uh in order to but really as i believe for any business and especially those who are just thinking
or maybe just launching their online stores it's about just you know understanding your customer and that's what
we learned ourselves uh as well for initial two years we had quite a
good traction but the churn was massive and we didn't really understood at that time like
fully what actually are the needs of our customers online merchants and only i would say after a couple of
years of experimenting a lot talking to your customers a lot and reading their reviews and all those
things getting a feedback accumulating it and we start understanding where we can
create the value for our customers and then like i would say two years of experimentation and then come
five years will be kind of proper running a business which is which is uh i would say a decent business already tens of thousands of
online stores are using this globally uh as you have already mentioned the vast majority
of of our customers are coming from the united states and canada uh uk is a very important market for us
as well australia and then it's long tail we at least have one customer from
countries globally so it's really really worldwide and anyone who does sell
online and who does understand english and is comfortable using english interfaces we our tools in english so uh so we can
can utilize us doesn't matter which platform we are using with like shopify with bigcommerce with
woocommerce we have really seamless integration so just click um click and to install and click click
this connect so you've made it super easy then for people to use the system yeah exactly exactly it's very very easy to start
using and our goal is really to bring to like small and medium level uh online
merchants so i mean small indian size online merchants like super easy to start using
and benefiting solution but robust enough once you grow to really utilize more and
more of the tool so we have a lot of pre-built uh pre-built best practices even like templates even with a copy and
some default images which you can start using just straight away with a one dongle click if you are willing of
course you can segment you can you can run way more sophisticated campaigns with animations
and then combine different channels as well so that's the idea and we'll continue going this path you know just
really empowering to what you said in the intro is only channel just for like big guys or is it for
everyone yeah so that's our mission is really to bring those uh capabilities of like marketing
uh of from big guys to to the mask for anyone yeah mainstream yeah i think so that's
that's really the uh so you called it omniscient um
What does Omnichannel mean
and for those who are listening that have heard this phrase omni channel um but really don't know what it means
what what does omnichannel mean and what does it mean for an e-commerce business so i would provide two different
definitions here one is like which is original definition of omnichannel is really
the one the ability for your customers for shoppers to buy at any channel they are
preferring anyway i mean in store uh on your online store maybe on social
media maybe via text messaging just you know chat chat conversation or maybe once uh
contacting your support on phone where they can complete so this is the omni channel but the
your customer your buyer could purchase the product they are willing to purchase anywhere and at the same time at the
same time they can return anywhere like purchasing online but uh returning to your physical store
if you have one so this is omnichannel like original uh phrase of of commerce in general and we
strongly believe like fundamentally that if you're running store now that's definitely what you have to be looking
at and uh i i was kind of estimating that like
months ago i was still estimating like seven to months that seven to ten years it will become a
default how we imagine there will be no e-commerce or online commerce there will be just
commerce retail i don't know which word will describe it but it will be on the channel
and uh what happened kovit i believe accelerated that a lot and we see among our customers that
those who were kind of just traditional brick and mortar businesses stores they really start going online and those
who have who have just you know online presence they're looking for other solutions how people can
return famous how people can fit things if it's clothing and maybe not that comfortable to to buy
without fitting and all those things so really creating experience rooms and showrooms and all those things
yeah so that's original definition and uh what is on channel marketing which is
kind of uh you know a copy from the original definition so if there is an opportunity for our
customers to purchase to return to experience our products any at any channels we prefer doing that
so marketing should be following this trend and we as the marketers as our merchants we have to offer them the best
channels they prefer their most preferred channels for us to communicate with them
okay so our customers should be capable in choosing if it's email if it's text messages it's push
notification any heavy channels could be like added in the future whatever appears
i've mentioned we do we've tried out like whatsapp we've tried out facebook messenger those
channels didn't work but i have no doubts there will be other channels in the future so basically the freedom for our
customers to choose the most preferred channels for the brand to communicate with a customer okay
so that's great yeah i think that's a really helpful definition that actually omni-channel marketing
Why Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp didnt work
is about communicating to your customers in uh in the channel which they prefer
whether that's email sms push notifications i'm intrigued why um why you say that
facebook messenger and whatsapp didn't really work i i don't know if you've sort of got any insight into that
yeah so uh mainly because because of the cambridge analytica scandal i would say
probably that they screwed everybody up yeah yeah we
screwed and after that like really uh facebook which whatsapp is being owned by facebook is
really became like super suspicious about everything and then super aware of everything and
they kind of limited a lot but basically to run promotional campaigns and proactively
uh outreach to your customers you have like hours window at set that's it so it's still okay for support
let's say and for upsells across sales once the customer initiates the conversation
but not the way around but you as a brand have a message to to deliver you cannot do that basically
it's so limited only uh hours after the opt-in opt-in is valid so nothing in comparison
to other channels which is valid until they practically uh opt out or
yeah that's great that's such a good point and i think it's probably just worth emphasizing that again with facebook and with
whatsapp um it's great for customer service if you've got a chat going on isn't it
and you've got that instant chat but that's where a customer contacts you and what you're saying is you according to
facebook facebook's rules you have hours a -hour window to communicate back to
that person and so it's if they contact you on a customer service basis you can use it
but in terms of you marketing to them or communicating to them the chances are great that they've not
they've not contacted you in the last hours so then facebook messenger and whatsapp
are not necessarily great channels because they don't allow you to do those broadcast messages anymore they used to at some
point didn't they in the past but they they've stopped that service now correct correct yeah we used to do that
and it was kind of like uh we we we seemed it like as a really effective
potential effective channel like back in the days before they kind of restricted a lot and introduced this
time time window hours and all those things yeah so they used to but as i said and i'm i
was not kidding about cambridge analytic guy yeah they
as they say they were quite rightly under the microscope that's brilliant listen if you are watching the live
stream you just tuned in we have special guest tonight ritus lawrence and we're talking about all things omni channel marketing we are
just getting into that uh and so uh you're welcome if you're watching this on the live stream if you're listening to the audio version
uh do check out our facebook page and our youtube page you can subscribe and just come and join in the live stream and get to ask your questions
about i guess too so uh why not um now oops i'm just nearly knocking my computer off this uh
so omni-channel marketing then so you talked about the five channels uh email sms push notifications whatsapp
and facebook so we've discounted for the purpose of this conversation uh whatsapp and facebook which leaves us
with um email uh text messages and uh push notifications right so
last week i don't know if you caught the show last week we had on um gabby now gabby uh talked about email
marketing marketing and she was fabulous she was absolutely fabulous and so
um she was not a big fan of um clavio i'm not gonna lie she just put it
out there she wasn't a fan uh and there was certainly sps that she did like and certainly sps that she didn't like
and it was just it was most amusing to listen so let's in some respects you know i i wouldn't
lie it's it's a great news for me you know more people don't like clarion more customers we
have yeah absolutely absolutely this is kind of really really our main competitor but
yeah we admire all the competition that's for sure but uh both of us we have unique angles for
whom we are the best tool uh so yeah that's true but yeah i mean that's what's
but i i wouldn't lie you know it's a good news for me
i saw the smile on your face like yeah you go gabby you go girl now so let's let's let's start with the
Email marketing
first one let's talk about email marketing um and this idea i mean we've mentioned
it a few times in the past on the show but i think it is so fundamental right uh because even today i had a com
a conversation with a client who is going to spend insane amounts of money on adverts to go
and generate traffic facebook ads google ads but still even with all that expenditure planned
has a really well let's just call it impoverished email marketing plan
and system that they do so email marketing is not dead is it so what what are some of the golden rules
let's get into on email marketing that you see from the data that you see with all your customers using the the
omniscient channel what are some of the things that we should be thinking about yeah so um that's a very good point i
mean because we throw a lot of money into customer acquisition uh but retention marketing
matters equally even more and especially what what we saw what we saw from our
customer base during the kokoda times and the crisis times that uh customers are willing more and more to buy from the brands and stores they
already know they have already experienced be a bit more uh conservative and like saying bye to
their pounds and dollars or euros and that's why we kind of taking less risk to purchase from the
brands we don't know so that's why retention marketing really works and that's what we saw from our
customer base that you know we were like retaining purchases we have
way more often because we do have data not only about email marketing but about how does our
customer do in general so the first time purchases has decreased the number of those
and the repeated purchases has increased the level of it so and once we talk about retention
marketing there is no other better channel than email so that's why email is not dead and what
we see among our customer base so it's uh like to percent which is uh which is a
i would say healthy percentage of entire revenue which is being generated for email and uh i kind of have some numbers from
the freshly baked which is all could could be found on our website and our blog
like um research of previous year of so we we kind of really saw a huge a huge
uptick in uh in conversion rates coming from promotional email campaigns it grew by effectiveness of memory has grown by one
hundred eleven percent so magical number yeah so like measuring from promotion promotion
campaigns only in measuring uh measuring uh conversion so that's great so the effectiveness to what i
said yes so because this is a retention channel and you retain a customer so it doubled the effectiveness
has doubled in the previous year which is which is amazing at the same time at the same time what is like extremely
important trend which we see in the market is really that promotional campaigns are good but automation is really generating more and
more of your revenue which in generated almost percent
of uh entire revenue coming from the email channel with only two percent of emails traffic
so that's amazing and once we launched amazon like five years ago it was like percent i remember etc and now it
grew to it i believe it has a trend to grow more automations you you you set up uh
more revenue generate and the best thing with that is that while you sleep your marketing
automation tool earns you money so that's a bad thing well let's let's jump into that a little bit that's
yeah so the last just you know that you know this is not being taken from your promotional campaigns
it's being added on top so that's an advice for one who is still not utilizing like automations properly do it please do it
i mean if you're a beginner if you advance but maybe even the large companies will sometimes see they just run basic information like
car to cover let's say yeah it's very effective like super effective of conversion rate which is like
amazing for our but adapt automations on top there are plenty of those depending
on your business uh like vertical whatever you sell there are different automations which you can
utilize and really increase the volume of revenue which emails generates you
okay so um it's really fascinating you talk about this with retention and code
and lockdown and the changes that have happened with the effectiveness of email going higher and higher because
i i'd never really thought that through actually i'm more likely to buy from people that i already know
um and i you are conserving cash so you tend to stick with what you know especially if they're a small local
business you're certainly in the uk there's been this big push to buy local um and not from you know uh companies
that show remain are nameless but have just lost their ceo uh anyway
um so uh we all know who i mean i wonder what is it yeah and you talked then about marketing
Marketing automations
automations you said you know setting up your automations let's just be clear what do you what how what is an automation what do
you mean when you say that in relation to email so automation is really like the
trigger-based campaigns which is when the content and the time of sending
and the audience is being selected by the tool by the machine omnisendo and i have a
tool yeah so basically you set the rules and then once someone the customer like
triggers so probably the not probably but the most popular and the most effective automation is abundant cartoon mind or
current recovery it's being called sometimes so uh what happens actually we
as a tool tool identifies with someone but mad is browsing but matt is adding specific product to
shopping basket and then abundance for card and this is the trigger boom so you analyze the customer's
behavior you have a trigger then the content is being actual format because
the products we're putting into the email is exactly the ones which matter was looking
and on top of that let's say we recommend uh look like similar products of
next best purchase product so maybe based on the previous maths purchases that he might be interested in those
products so that's just the most popular example automation so both the timing is set by the triggers which
are being based on customers uh behavior the products the content itself is being defined by
the customer's behavior yeah uh the customer the audience is being defined by customers behavior
so that's why we increase the the level of uh personality and the level of relevance
like by far and for all and many other cases let's say uh reactivation campaigns
which could be automated so we know that matt has purchased uh six months ago and we have not seen
him again so that's when on autopilot automation like reactivation campaign starts
within the activation campaign let's say we put uh some discount like free shipping free delivery all
those things of incentives yeah or let's say purchase campaigns when we
know that matt has purchased product x uh we sent a review how did
you like it can you evaluate us matt gives us and we say thank you matt could you please
have a public review by the way there is a discount or discount for a next purchase which is
about for three months then you set another automation campaign that after
uh two months and two weeks the system checks if matt has used this discount
code or not if not another automated campaign is going out to matt with a reminder by the
way you will still have you still have your discount code for next purchase and it's still valid for two
weeks and it could be the sequence of uh reminders uh sent by email send via text messages
as web push notification you can combine those different channels as well so that's the example of automation or
like a few examples of automations which you just set up once you think about the the your customer behavior and based
on that you set up them and they being sent out on the time when they're needed to send
out to that person yeah yeah no that's brilliant and it's it's such a powerful email tool isn't it
we call that you know the automations the sequences that a a piece of customer behavior a
customer behaves or acts in a certain way triggers an automation and you've said it at once and it's just going to do
whatever you want to do send this email three days later send that email four days later then this email and if they've still not done anything
you know send them a final email or whatever it is and some of the some of the automations
Other automations
that you talked about so you talked about the abandoned cart automation you talked about the sort of
reactivation of customer um automation what are some of the others that maybe
we should think about so i is just like uh abundant card uh
that the like little brother of blended card is like browse abundant but uh if if a customer is browsing on
our online store and even doesn't add any product to a shopping cart uh we are able to identify some of those
customers and send them just a reminder you have been looking at those products so maybe you are willing to purchase them
and buy the waivers there are the products which we recommend which is which are similar to the ones which you
were looking at so this we found this is very effective as well so browse abandonment yeah it's called
browser button yeah yeah then there are kind of more basic demographical bases like uh um
birthday campaigns which can be eliminated yeah and a lot of like purchase sequences which uh which i
still find that uh being underused and underutilized like first purchase but sometimes and
what's the great about press purchase campaigns automated whatever automated or not automated but automate is just way
easier to run uh it's that you can send even for those who didn't provide you a consent to send
marketing messages you just have to play like well with those you cannot like advertise
any other products directly but what you can do you can ask for opinion you can
ask for review and it's it's still interaction with your brand yeah so you can't advertise because you
don't have a content and it's against gdpr but you can send transactional emails transactional smses text messages
with some encoded like incentive to purchase like a discount by the way if you post crypto and this is just a
discount for a next purchase and that's perfectly fine you do not you do not uh
like you you obey all the privacy regulations etc and you have more interactions with your brand
and if customer is overall happy with a product which you send out and what you sold to the
customer so definitely it's it's good to have those interactions with with your brand yeah absolutely no it's very very good
well i hope you're getting something out of this so far with we just we've just scratched the service we're just talking about email but we are just going to
take a quick two second break to thank this week's show sponsor curious digital and we will be right back do not go
anywhere we'll be back in just a second let me give a big shout out to one of
our show sponsors curious digital you know what i love its flexibility
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Recap
well we are back with rita's lawrence reetus uh i'm looking forward to the second part of this conversation so so
far let me just give a quick recap uh we have talked about omnichannel marketing we have defined
omnichannel as communicating with your customers through their preferred channel of
communication yeah that's right and you can get tongue tied with this stuff quite easily so we've talked about email we've talked
about how email's not dead we've broken down some of the automations that we should look at um i guess one of the questions i was
thinking there was we're listening to the curious digital thing sort of go around how do you
how does the system know that i'm on the website looking at such and such a product right
now um i think this is one of the big questions that quite a lot of people ask me that's like with witchcraft i was looking at
this page here and then seconds later facebook is showing me that exact same product what is going on there how does that
work yeah so that's the tricky part so
basically it's still a lot of that it's it's based on cookies uh that's basically kind of when you are
subscribing to something and you are giving permissions either you accept cookies initially so what's
that system for remarketing those like facebook or google uh retargeting
network et cetera all those um all of those networks so we use the similar technologies yeah so once you
subscribe we do we do understand that this is mad this is the particular person who is like
looking now at the tool so at the product and then browsing browsing your store so once you
subscribe on whatever it could be like pop-ups or checkout pages
we do identify who is exactly the person the same once you read emails once you
click on emails it's one thing it's really registered by click another thing which we identify
who is the person emails text messages wordpress notifications etc so that's what allows tools like ours
to identify who is actually the person and the five person and then for for for
certain time window it depends sometimes days sometimes days to really be capable to track its activities online
in that particular store you cannot which for us as marketers like uh the
tool developers would be perfect to be capable to track you uh through our different stores
that's actually the capability which google does have which facebook doesn't have but uh but yeah you you don't have this uh
what's what's talking about emails because it's really like like more more sensitive data
yeah it's a really personal date and personal identifiable data so there are more restrictions here yeah
SMS Marketing
okay so it's not witchcraft it's just basic common sense science isn't it that just
kind of uses the good old-fashioned cooking notifications that you see on your computer they're basically following what you're doing
so we've talked then about email let's talk about a topic that i don't
hear talked about an awful lot um and that's sms marketing as a channel should we
um think about sms how should we you go about using sms for marketing
absolutely so you not only should think but you should be using i would say that would be my statement so that's
that's really really and again like from the research which was a relative quoting uh of of uh because we would have not only
analyzed our email performance of our customers but other channels as well so sms actually had almost the same
increase in effectiveness by okay so which which is which is great
and like overall conversion rate is like percent which which is a really it's it's it's those are really good
numbers and it's still underutilized across the
market in general so people don't receive that many text messages as they do receive emails and they're just you know the
inbox placement uh it's immediate and it's almost impossible for a customer to
to uh avoid opening or seeing the content of it so uh that might be kind of some other
people might treat it as being a bit too intrusive but what's good and why i believe sms kind of
i call it like renaissance of sms it used to be effective channel yeah in the past but it was used in very
spammy and intrusive way when you just spam send bulk campaigns without having any permissions
to do that etc and there and the customer can't can't unsubscribe that's the main thing
so now uh it really depends on location so within europe or rest of the world what do we do we just
include a short link unsubscribe so from the sms as all of us are using
smartphones nowadays yeah so it's so easy on the text message just click link and it says easy to unsubscribe as
from an email uh in in various locations like united states and canada you just can't reply with a word stop
and it's an obligation to immediately stop the can yeah remove from the subscriber list yeah so
that was kind of the the major technological shift as we were talking about technology today a
bit uh in general so that was a major technological shift which happened and
which really allowed customers to subscribe like be willing to subscribe to text messages as well
yeah so and their effectiveness is yeah due to the immediate uh thing and all those
things is really high still that the subscriber lists are smaller comparing to email subscribers
and that's another which i heavily suggest all the marketers to to make a shift a bit because still
usually once we name subscriber we have in mind email subscriber the one which subscribed from our email
communication which is not the case anymore subscriber could be subscribed to any channel or multiple channels yeah
so that the person who subscribed for your text messages communication is equally
as subscriber as the one which subscribe you push notification or all email campaigns all the best what
you can get as a marketer to actually have multiple permissions from the same customer
but you know they have subscribed for your email text messages communications web push communication so that's the best because then you can put different
channels on the same campaigns on the same automations and if a person is really ignoring at
that time uh let's say your email communication then you are following it by by text
message and that's maybe the channel which the person is just feeling more comfortable okay now
uh and maybe next time it's going to be different that's fine and to what we talked about only chance is really about the customer
and his ability to choose which is the best channel for the brand to communicate with them yeah okay now that's that
that that that all sounds fantastic and that makes me think ritus i'm glad that there's technology that can cope with
SMS vs Email
all of that because if you had to do it manually there's just no way is there it's just genuinely there's just it's not going to happen
let's be real absolutely yeah absolutely that's that's just impossible
yeah it is so when if i've got this sms channel and when should when's good to
actually use sms versus email i get that um with email i can send my
you know my weekly offer or my weekly newsletter i can send my email sequences but what should i be
thinking about with sms yeah so i would recommend like start using sms for
uh automations sometimes you can run like campaigns as well as like blasts and
bulk sending so blasts like bulk sending is okay when you have like limited time offers
let's say so you can play with them as well and inside people this is a very limited time offer or
limited stock offer and first come first served and all those things yeah so then
because the placement is immediate and the open is is way way more immediate comparing to email there
because email we control our inbox and maybe sometimes we read those promotional emails after a
few days with sms you can you can raise the urgency so that's the occasion which you can be using it
second is really what i would suggest is just as basic as welcome campaign so when someone is subscribing to you
usually what happens we as marketers only send welcome emails but we rarely send
the welcome text messages which is again could be very effective and and then
show that okay we will be sending from this particular number that's how our text messages will look like etc so again it's another
interaction with the brand yeah even though you're not trying to directly convert from text message
from that particular welcome message but you have another interaction which you know it's very important because
today's buyer's journey is so complicated and you need so many touch points so you just add some extra touch points to that uh other i
would really suggest using for all the ways like press purchase so announcements about okay we have all
dispatched your parcel um here you can find your tracking link yeah and then there's a link with a tracking code
and you can do it in two ways first way is really just tracking code and go to
whatever ups dhl or whatever provider you use or another thing you can use there are
tools in the market which really built a beautiful landing page with a tracking information but some
promotional material that as well so it's just transactional text message
but if you play it well it's not intrusive it's a compliant with law of regulations
and you still send some promotional message in like having this workaround applied etc so so those are
kind of the most uh uh effective occasions where i recommend to uh to send text messages yeah brilliant
and like subcategory of uh text messages is mms so when you attach
visuals yeah so it is media rich not that much of a media but still you can send
image so it's very very very effective once you have especially if you're selling products
which are visual like clothing accessories and web i mean if you're selling books maybe not that important but
those visual ones well the decision to buy is being made on uh emotional matter like and visual is very
important so adding like new collections new arrivals sales and you just add the visuals to to
sms yeah in mms format and it's again it's they they have great great open rates great click-through
rates and conversions are very very great as well for right for that category of text messages and is it is
Cost of SMS
it expensive to use sms for for marketing or the other prices because
when sms first came out you're like this is tempe ago right or cents ago whatever it is
i'm assuming the costs have shot way down yeah that's true so i would i would
phrase that way so it's not cents but your roi is very good okay so it's actually
doesn't matter what the cost for sending it doesn't matter how it doesn't matter how much it earned you
so the roi of sms is like extremely high now as i said it's still
like the traffic is not that high so those who do you use this channel they really get great
return on investment but yes and definitely whatever price it went down to to one cent it really depends on the uh
on the on the country like country by country for ice so for united states let's say we charge
we charge uh as low as nothing uh ourselves like the thomas and if you
are going to with our pro plan so we if you pay bucks for pro plan you get bucks for
sms credits so so basically that's that's cost you anything
with omnisend but yeah other tools and competitors so like as low as one send the text message
that's really interesting okay so and you're right it's the roi that matters and so the roi
um from what you see on sms marketing is high so we as e-commerce business owners
should definitely be using sms especially if um you know you you can automate it
like you can with email and merge the two things together and have them sort of join up that makes
a lot of sense to me so the third one that you mentioned is push notifications and uh um let's just again start off by
defining what do you mean by push notification
yeah so in in in the case i'm talking so it's a web push notification so then there is a like a kind of pop-up
which pop-ups once you are browsing something and really asks for permission to send web push notifications so there are other kind of
push notifications which are mobile apps boost notifications so it's it's a different kind of of
these so we're not talking about that because those are being used being used for mobile apps to
provide some information so reactivate you and all those things but it's web push notifications but they
could be equally used on your desktop browsers and as well as in your mobile browsers so that that that's fine
like both both works mobile and desktop that so yeah so that's what push notification this is the
correct name of of that channel okay so and you do see this in browsers where you're on a
site and something will pop up uh on the on the screen and so you found this to be an effective
sort of marketing channel you found this to be um a good way of of doing things again from
an roi is the roi good on sort of push notifications
extremely good because push notifications more or less it's for free
extremely cheap so if you are using tools like omnis and others which have push notifications
included so basically pay for email and you get push for free and uh
and then yeah as i said in our case we give you sms text messages for free as well but other tools as well or if you use
like standalone like point solution for push notifications only so the prices are like very very low comparing to any
other channel so you know roi it's sometimes difficult to calculate
it try dividing it by zero yeah yeah it's infinity right it's infinity
so um so i'm thinking here i'm thinking well i've got these three channels i i
How to Get Subscribers
get what email is i get what sms is and i'm i'm thinking push notification is good and i could do with the tool to do
that but of course it leaves me with one fundamental big question right you know and maybe we'll sort of uh
we'll kind of close here with this question because um i'm aware of time and we could i think we could talk about this for hours
but um i guess if i'm if i'm starting out if i'm starting a business i'm thinking
i'm thinking to myself this sounds great matt this sounds great regis but how do i get the subscribers how do i get people
to sign up to my email list to sign up to sms to sign up to push notification how does that all work right
have you got any tips on on on how to build your your list or to start getting
subscribers yeah so that's a question which i actually kind of get quite often from our customers so
once i you know speak like run some seminars webinars etc so um yes and i kind of simplified it to
one sentence answer just by asking that's the key thing
okay ask for permission yeah so that's that's the key that's where everything starts and then
really like um being creative when and how can you ask for permission to communicate yeah
so kind of like technologically so uh pop-ups highly effective some people still even
sometimes marketers say oh say but they are intrusive i mean they are popping up yes you can make them intrusive or you
can make in the good way that's you know you can automate that the pop-up appears only when the
customer the visitor is visiting for let's say seconds seconds or maybe third page which shows the level of engagement and
you can have one one size fits all pop up across your website or you can have some individual uh copy individual visuals
for that specific uh page or product let's say someone is browsing you you tell you sell guitars
and mobile phones and whatever fans yeah so if someone is
visiting the fans category so show the images and so show the copy with fans not not with tires yeah and
so that's that's the thing yeah on on check out and check out once person is checking out your customer so ask for permission
to to to send promotional materials via email
text messages the same with web push notifications yeah so make this pop-ups contextual not just someone is
entering your website and that books immediately pop up i have been visiting you i have never visited before your website and you
asked me the permission to give exchange your personal data yeah so of course i will not we'll close it out but
you know if you use it contextual people are willing to exchange and of course usually
incentives work it doesn't work but there is kind of a way there is a smart way how can you do so what i would
suggest is really to use incentives which are really um somehow relates with whatever you sell
so the bad the bad example i'm selling shoes and then i'm promising that okay with an ipad
uh for subscribing to our newsletter yeah yeah yeah that's the best application so definitely you're gonna get a lot of
trash subscribers which will never convert yes but if you provide let's say exchange
free shipping or discount for your product or one pair of shoes or like free
uh consultant service or if you do have enough so you can be creative but it has to be
related with your service so that's pretty fine to incentivize people to exchange their personal data for some
other value which can provide it just has to be related to what actually you sell if it's product or service whatever
yeah yeah no it's very good i like that so how do you build your email list you just ask for permission it's as
How to Build Your Email List
simple as that you ask for permission uh at the most appropriate time uh for
you guys now ritus i'm you know i we've not talked massively about your software now i'm
just going to assume right if someone's listening and they're like i need a tool on how to do this everything that you've talked about
tonight omnisend is is a tool that can do that and can help people
and will it be is it a good tool for the startup as well as the you know the multi million pound
business as well yeah so from all the way from startup uh to uh
to growing businesses we're not we're not targeting an enterprise level customers so if
although we do have some of them like samsung lego and then unilever are using omnisend but
but yeah our key market is really from the very beginning uh mom and dad store and uh
all the way to multi-billion but but not enterprise i would say so so that's that's where our smb what
you could define smb so ourselves we define from zero to like million in gmb
so that's our sweet spot that's where we can create the most of the value okay because we as i've already
mentioned we simplify things it's just very straightforward it's just really really the learning curve
uh is very low and you can start benefiting just immediately after after you install we
sync your data we have pre-built uh sequences examples for you like based on the market
market you know knowledge and deep understanding which we already have yeah yeah from all the data that you've got and i'm yes and you've mentioned
once and twice about your blog so you've got a whole bunch of educational materials on there if people want to find out more about
specific examples like to do with how do i do the web notification thing that that's all on there and all that
training and so on and so forth yeah absolutely yeah and if yeah i know
if you're okay we can share just you know the uh the link on the notes to the to the research
which i have shared some data about so you can find a lot of useful information there as well and yeah
blog we believe we really work a lot on content on helping our customers or potential future customers
to succeed in their marketing yeah yeah absolutely i think the very least people should do is go to your
website and sign up for your emails newsletter just to see how you do it right these guys these guys are the top of the
tree they they should they should have a good idea on how to do this well and um just sign up and see what happens
i'd be intrigued um it was funny i mentioned that to gabby last week and she went no no no don't sign up to me
it was really funny so um you know that but being honest when you said that when
you said that actually there was a bit of doubt in my head are we really good at ourselves
it's it's crazy it's the first question but but i have an explanation for that but you know because you are ecommerce
businesses we are sas business software as a service business so that actually the way we you apply
the same channels is different yeah so you're not comparing eggs with eggs yeah yeah
yeah exactly exactly so the best way actually to learn is really again so the best way to learn is let's
say to visit our blog and they're gonna you're gonna find the case studies there of the companies which really apply email
marketing and text like sms marketing and push notification marketing very well
and then subscribe to their communication and that's where you can really learn things which we can be directly
applicable to your business to selling online yeah so that's what i would suggest yeah
very good that was that was very good maneuvering well done
if people are listening watching the show they want to get ahold of you how do they reach out how do they connect with you
yeah so uh linkedin is my most uh preferred social network so ritas.loris
find me on linkedin let's connect there i also use twitter uh not a big fan of other social
networks and of course anytime read us at omnisend.com so you can reach out to me
via email because i believe in email a lot and i use email for both not only promotional communication
but for personal owners as well yeah email's not dead right and we'll put all of those links
uh of course in the show notes in terms of how you can connect with ritus we'll link to his linkedin we'll link to his twitter and
we'll put all of that there if you need that you can head on over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
listen ritus it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you uh it's um it's i always
i always enjoy talking about the tactics and the marketing and the strategies and i'm just like i have got a few ideas already so i'm
you know it's i always talk to my marketing team on friday mornings after recording these podcasts and we're like right
who was on the podcast last night let's how do we implement x y and z and they're all like oh here we go
that's very good that's very good yeah i believe to matt with what you said i'm a strong believer and you know if you learn
something new i mean listening to podcasts going to webinar seminar when it's being like
live etc and if you don't start applying just immediately straight after usually just
forget it and you get back to your routine to the same wheel and then you're turning back and you just never apply
things yeah so i really admire this modest approaches you know you learn things you start applying now there is no better time than now so
absolutely well between your conversation and gabby's conversation last week about email marketing
um we we've started to radically overhaul how we do email marketing now in our in our company and i think it's good
actually i mean we turn over you know a fair few shillings as they say
uh here in the uk and we've got a lot of customers and i think i would say our email
marketing has not changed in the last two years and um just getting that
that energy and that that um excitement to go no look we can do this better guys do i mean let's just not rest on our
laurels let's something that was set up for two years ago let's look at it is it working is it not working let's figure out what's going on
um and so even for us who are a bigger ecommerce company it's still good to revisit and to get into this
stuff and to set it up right because for me email is the primary marketing tool you've got to nail
right if you're starting out you've got you've got to nail it you've got to get it sorted out from day
one as much as you can and so um using tools like omnisend is is is
is high on my list if you're starting out you need an ecommerce platform you need an email marketing platform the
rest of it you can figure out once you've got those things set up right
couldn't agree more matt couldn't agree more i'm preaching to the choir yeah yeah [Laughter]
absolutely and in your case in your case what you said yeah maybe for two years you have not even reviewed et cetera so
i would advise to really augment with our channels if you have not done yet text messages webpage notifications etc
so that's that's really really great augmentation for email which is still a core but
uh but you can really increase their your revenue which is uh the main goal of any business always
the key goal this is brilliant rita's thank you so much for being with us uh really appreciate your time really
appreciate you sharing your wisdom around these key areas thank you so much
uh for being with us and hopefully we will get to talk to you again very very soon thanks for inviting
no problem it's a real great pleasure to talk to you and to your audience so talk to you next time bye thanks ruta
spina well that was ladies and gentlemen ritus
loris now wasn't he fantastic i mean absolutely fantastic super generous with his
information there uh so i hope you've been taking notes the three areas which you need to look at as an e-commerce
business your email marketing your sms marketing and your web push
notifications have a look at those three things and if you if you start deep diving into this i
know you're also going to look at things like custom facebook audiences stuff that you know is just on a whole new level
and you can use this platform to do all these kind of really cool things but start with those basics and build up
uh to what you need i really really enjoyed that like i say lots to talk about with my marketing
team tomorrow so let us know what you're going to change as a result of listening to ritus
i love what he said right there at the end did you capture that pill if you don't take action straight away you may as well forget it
and so take action today on whatever you've learned from ritus okay because uh it's gonna
pack value and maybe the first action is just connecting with him just reaching out to him on linkedin and
saying hey thanks for what you shared on the show uh thanks for what you said about x y z
i really got a lot out of this or even asking a question i'm sure he'll be super helpful and be willing to help you so if you did
get some good stuff out of this i would also appreciate it if you could rate the show on itunes and even share it out so we
can connect with more folks around the world as we're all learning to grow our e-commerce businesses
as i said at the start all of the notes links and transcripts transcript that was a hard word to say
transcripts to today's show are onlining you can get them for free at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
or just head on over to the website ecommercepodnet ecommercepodcast.net and just search for
retesting the show notes will come up so that's all from me thanks for listening thanks for watching if you've
been on the live stream make sure you come back next week as we are going to carry on interviewing some more great guests on
how to grow our own online businesses thanks for watching i'm just looking for the button on my pad here it is
thanks for watching my name is matt edmondson and i will see you again very very soon
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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