Uncovering Hidden Profit in Humanising Your Email Marketing With Priya From Flow Butler

Priya (00:00)

We uncovered $200,000 in lost revenue in a single month because they had been focusing on 90 day engaged and a whole bunch of people had dropped out of that and not been emailed in six months. So we rewarmed their list.

Dahna Borg (00:11)

Hi and welcome to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. I’m Dahna founder of Bright Red Marketing and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in eCommerce and eCommerce store owners. If you’re wanting relatable stories and actionable advice, as well as the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you’re in the right place. So let’s get into today’s episode.

Dahna Borg (00:31)

Hi and welcome to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. Today we’re here with Priya from Flow Butler. Welcome Priya. It’s so good to have you on the show. So before we jump in, can you just give everyone a rundown on who you are, what you do and why you’re good at what you do?

Priya (00:37)

Thanks for having me, Dahna

So I run FlowButler We are an email marketing agency. We specialise in e-commerce brands, specifically generally seven and eight figure e-commerce brands. We help them grow their businesses and scale through email flows and also campaign management. So we do quite a bit of both. I’d say our email flows are particularly famous and how most people tend to find us. And yeah, that’s what we do. And our team is…

Dahna Borg (01:08)

They really are.

Priya (01:11)

very committed to excellence and is very much the thing that makes us different is that we’re an extension of our clients’ brands and that’s how they feel about us as opposed to just being an agency that sits as a third party and doesn’t really get involved in the business.

Dahna Borg (01:25)

And that’s why we recommend you to our clients. So we’re at the beginning of the year, So what should e-commerce businesses be doing, planning, organizing for their email marketing at this time of year?

Priya (01:28)

Yeah. Question. This is generally the time of year where a lot of econ brands actually start thinking about email and that’s because they’ve just come off Q4, which is hopefully one of the most successful quarters for most businesses. And some of the things that they’re really starting to think about is how do we focus on retention? So there’s been a huge shift with ad costs increasing simply due to the fact that across all platforms, it is getting more expensive. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how of how big you are. It is a conversation we’re hearing across all brands from, you know, low seven figures all the way up to $60 million brands. so ad costs are rising. What a new ways that we can actually retain more customers, develop relationships with our customers, obviously with the introduction of Tmoo and Shein and all of these on Amazon and all these other places where people can now buy cheap products.

Now it’s much more about building brand. so email is now seen as, should have always been this way, but it’s now with the shift being seen as more of a retention and brand building tool. So we’re definitely seeing that shift and we’re recommending that people start to think about that. And also just reviewing how have you been sending emails? Is it actually working for you? This tends to be a quieter period for a number of

Dahna Borg (02:38)

It should.

Priya (02:56)

Brands across different industries, unless you’re in back to school sales, in which case you are going gangbusters right now. But yeah, just really thinking through how, what actually worked, what didn’t work, how are we thinking about our subscribers? What are different things that we can do in 2026 with all the new tools and all the cool things that are now out there to support email, what’s working, what’s not working. It’s a good time to just really stock take everything and start to think about

Dahna Borg (03:01)

That’s absolutely insane.

Priya (03:25)

Planning bigger strategies, thinking ahead and really starting to think in terms of quarters and what you’d like to achieve across the business and then how email can really support that and drive that growth.

Dahna Borg (03:36)

Yeah, I love that. We’ve been talking to a lot of our clients about retention as well because obviously we run ads. That’s great. We can get new customers, but if you’re not keeping them, it gets very expensive. In terms of retention, what are some of your favorite emails, flows, things that you do in the back end that really helps support that?

Priya (03:52)

Think flows are the number one thing to get set up and have performing really well. The really tricky thing about flows is to understand when they’re working and when they’re not working. And most people, even brands that are doing, you know, seven figures a year, I’ve had a brand doing $10 million a year, they’ve never really had solid flows. And so they’ve got these flows that have been set up by some sort of agency and they’re very cookie cutter. And then when you get flows properly set up, this brand, for example, we added $500,000 just in Black Friday flow revenue in comparison to what they did last year. And so it’s huge, right? Huge. Because flows are the backbone of the entire business and how you speak to customers. They’re automated, so they’re working in the backend. They should be designed properly. So I would say the number one thing to be thinking about is how do I get my flows?

Dahna Borg (04:29)

That’s insane.

Priya (04:48)

Set up to speak to customers, not just, hey, you left something in your cart. People know that they already did that. You don’t need to tell them. Yeah, exactly.

Dahna Borg (04:54)

We did it intentionally, thank you, sorry.

Priya (04:58)

And it’s wild how many brands doing that level of revenue have not got solid flows in place. And so when you’re sitting at, you know, even multi six figures, low seven figures, the impact that flows make to your overall business, to your ads, just even just to your profit at that level, you can be so profitable with good flow. So that would be my number one thing to get set up and to focus on this year.

Dahna Borg (05:23)

Yeah. I suppose this is why people pay you, what is it in the flows that is that like magic source to make that work?

Priya (05:31)

So one of the things that we do, which I think very few agencies do is we derive everything from first principles. And what I mean is we don’t just take some flow that we did for someone else, reword the copy slightly and slap it into your account. We actually look at your brand, your customers, what the purchasing behavior is across the funnel, who they are, what engagement they’ve had, what stage of the journey that they’re in. And then we design flows.

that match that. Now, obviously there are patterns across different sizes of businesses that we do, we have been able to recognize and we do follow those patterns, but now we know what works, but there is an element of actually matching it to your business. So just because two businesses do $10 million a year doesn’t mean that flow should look exactly the same. And we do see trends. If you’re in fashion, there’s different trends than if you’re in cookware or if you’re, you know, selling back to school supplies.

So there’s definitely different rhythms that we see and different brands, for example, will have different types of segmentation in their flows. So some brands, the reality is people are not going to purchase more than once. Your repeat purchase rate is like 8%. So we are really focusing all our flows on new customer acquisition and how to make that as profitable as possible. For other brands, your retention goes over multiple years. Or we know that you’re likely to make your second purchase within 60 days and then you’re never going to purchase again. So all the flows are designed around what your customers are actually doing and how to get more of those people to convert in the right timeframes and with the right messaging. So if you’ve got a whole, you know, we’ve got clients who have so many different products and skews and collections. And so we break the flows down to match customer behavior to what they’re actually looking at to keep things relevant. So I’d relevance is the number one thing that we craft in these flows based on your brand that then make the difference in terms of how they’re engaging and their conversion.

Dahna Borg (07:30)

Yeah, I love that. I’m just thinking there’s a brand that I buy from regularly that would be a really big brand in Australia. If I mentioned them, everyone would know who I’m talking about. And I don’t think I’m on any flows of theirs despite being a repeat customer because I’m pretty sure every email I get is just their like weekly blast.

Priya (07:48)

Yeah.

Dahna Borg (07:49)

Because they never

Priya (07:50)

Yep.

Dahna Borg (07:50)

Are relevant to anything that I’ve ever purchased before because I buy from a specific range of theirs and I just get whatever they seem to be yapping about that week. So I suppose that’s something that like a lot of businesses, even the big ones still aren’t getting right.

Priya (08:04)

100 % what what’s what a lot of the big ones are doing is they’re trying to segment. either they’re just batch blasting their entire list. And you know, we’ve been yelling this for years, like, please stop doing that. One day they might. ⁓ But you know, that that’s like number one error. And so then what they do is they go down, well, what’s the next level of segmentation? Okay, let’s do 90 day engaged. These are the people that open our emails. And this is what we’re going to send to.

Dahna Borg (08:15)

I mean, please.

Yeah.

Priya (08:31)

So we literally, we had a brand come to us who had been, whose agency had been doing this and had been telling them to do it. And within one month of working with us, we uncovered $200,000 in lost revenue in a single month because they had been focusing on 90 day engaged and a whole bunch of people had dropped out of that and not been emailed in six months. So we rewarmed their list. So this level of it’s better to do some segmentation than none, but not if you lose.

100,000 subscribers on your list and been emailing. So that’s not good. But when we’re thinking about segmentation, it’s thinking through not just how engaged are your subscribers, but what is relevant to them. in your case, this brand should be thinking about, well, we have this collection and so many people are going to be like you in purchasing from that specific collection. So we should be emailing relevant information to that collection. And that’s

You know, we’ve got flows on one side, but then also campaigns. This thought process should be across all of their email marketing. So they shouldn’t, they can, you can cross sell for sure. You can send certain types of emails to everybody, but really where you’re going to drive more revenue is where you’re sending relevant emails to people as opposed to just every email to everyone, hoping that they will find something relevant and then take action on that.

Dahna Borg (09:50)

At the moment their emails are just like a reminder that I’m out of something and then I just go to their website and buy the thing I was going to buy anyway rather than like there are things in their collection that I’ve just never tried whereas I’m sure if they sent me a couple emails on like hey you love this product you probably like this too they might get more money out of me. So we sort of touched on this a little bit in terms of like you know the seven figure eight figure businesses what do you find the biggest differences in

Priya (10:06)

It’s so simple. Yeah.

Dahna Borg (10:15)

People are using in their email flows for like a six figure business versus a seven figure business versus an eight figure business. Are there any like key differences that like as you’re scaling through those numbers these things become more important or is it the same it just expands?

Priya (10:30)

It does differ and with smaller businesses, you just don’t need as much segmentation. so there’s no point investing. We certainly won’t be selling one of our really complex flow packages to a very small business because it makes absolutely no sense and no difference to your revenue. It also depends on do the product ranges expand. So for example, if you have a single product business and you go from six to seven figures,

Often the flow structure doesn’t change that much if it’s not a replenishable product. So there is some variety. What we tend to find is as the business gets bigger, it gets more complex. So they will introduce a whole new collection. So perhaps they used to do fashion. Now they’ve added on skincare or they’ve added on supplements or whatever it started as. It isn’t just that. And so now they have entirely different categories of customers that they are trying to service. And that’s when it gets more complicated because people say, we should

Dahna Borg (11:20)

Yeah.

Priya (11:28)

Always be cross-selling. And we’ve had brands where it never works. People never buy from both sides of the business. They have the business that is in their mind of who these people are and they will consistently buy that one product. It’s not that we don’t try and cross-sell, but we don’t try and cross-sell through flows because the flows aren’t the thing that’s doing that job. And so there’s a different, as the business grows, we start to look at repeat purchase behavior.

and product lines and see whether we need how we need to chop up the flows and each flow might be chopped up a bit differently. So a post purchase flow won’t have the same segment as a browser bounding flow. And that doesn’t always have the same segmentation as an abandoned car or abandoned checkout flow. So it kind of depends on the flow as well. But certainly if you’re a small business, just have some flow set up with some base level of segmentation.

Dahna Borg (12:11)

Yeah.

Priya (12:21)

And have a really good flow set up, not like Klaviyo templated flows.

Dahna Borg (12:25)

What’s wrong with the Klaviyo Templated Believe it flows just for anyone listening that’s been relying on those.

Priya (12:29)

Wow. It’s just one of those things where every single person has seen this email before. And so sending an email that says, still thinking about this, it’s in your cart by now is just, it’s not going to cut it. And you’re probably going to lose a lot of subscribers and they’re unsubscribing or ignoring your emails because they’re so generic. That’s the biggest issue with them other than the fact that they also look terrible, but you know, you can get away with terrible looking emails if they’re good emails.

Dahna Borg (12:36)

Ciao. Look, I am definitely a fan of the like completely clean slate email. Like I have been in marketing for very long time. You send me one of those as a brand. I’m like, the founder emailed me, I’m so special. And I’m like, wait.

Priya (13:01)

Yeah.

Yeah, plain text emails for the win and we use so much of them. They work really well.

Dahna Borg (13:12)

Yeah, because you think that you’ve been emailed personally for a minute. Well, I mean, if I’m thinking it for a minute, I’m sure people who aren’t in marketing and around this actually think that’s what’s happening.

Priya (13:21)

Yeah. People do. We’ve had, it’s really interesting because sometimes the plain text emails are not necessarily, they’re not always designed to convert, they’re designed to support or engage or, hey, can we ask you, do you have any questions? Can we help? And the way that we’ve tracked this is we’ve seen with our especially larger clients where they’re getting these service requests through or emails through and customer services coming back to the person that we work with on the team saying, hey, what have you been doing? Because

Dahna Borg (13:36)

Yeah.

Priya (13:50)

All these people are replying to this email thinking that we’re personally reaching out to them. Do we keep pretending like this is personally us reaching out to them? Cause they think it’s coming from you or we’ve had a really great response or, you know, the sales aren’t always easily attributed to that email, but we’re able to see the benefits of that email because it’s creating engagement with the rest of the brand, answering questions, becoming that dialogue. And that’s the other piece that I think a lot of the bigger brands understand, but the smaller brands.

don’t. They need a little bit of convincing that the point of email is to actually build relationships with subscribers and it’s not just about sale, sale, sale, sale. Sales are important and they eventually come, you just won’t see it, it won’t come from that single email with Klaviyo attribution attached to it.

Dahna Borg (14:36)

And you can get away with that so much more with email marketing.

and can focus so much more on that relationship building because it’s so much lower cost. Obviously, Klaviyo is not cheap, you’re worth every penny. But like the act of sending the email is a lot cheaper versus trying to do the same job on meta ads, which is what we do, infinitely more expensive. Like so much better to send those like relationship building and do all of that via email and then like supplement with ads when you can and when you need to. But like that’s the beauty of email.

Priya (14:55)

percent.

Dahna Borg (15:05)

important.

Priya (15:06)

absolutely. And look, even, even when you pay a really good email marketing agency, the ROI on that should be more significant than the ROI on your ads. just always is. And so if you look at it as an investment and you’re looking at ROI, if you are not getting a greater ROI from email, then something’s wrong. Because that is one of the huge benefits of working with your email provider. And when people say Klaviyo is expensive,

Dahna Borg (15:26)

Yeah.

Priya (15:35)

Generally, my answer to that is, are you not using it right? Because if you look at what you actually pay in your monthly subscription, versus the revenue that it generates, it should be absolutely insane. It should be the best investment you’ve ever made. Not that, you know, obviously when Klaviyo increased prices and that became a bit of an issue for some brands because of the way their business is structured and they can’t, they’re not getting repeat purchases. But at the end of the day, if you’re using email right, Klaviyo is not actually very expensive. You know, we have brands spending

Dahna Borg (15:35)

They’re usually not using it right.

Yeah. It should be.

Priya (16:04)

two, three, $4,000 a month with Klaviyo. That’s nothing when you’re generating $20 million a year from the platform.

Dahna Borg (16:07)

which is to be the best money you’re spending.

Yeah, 100%. Do you still subscribe to the, what was it, your email marketing should account for 30 % of your revenue? Does that still stand?

Priya (16:21)

Look, I think it’s really dependent on a business. And yes, that’s a great baseline rule of thumb. If you’re lower than that, it can be those situations where you’ve got the one-off purchases. And so what we’ll see is a spike in Q4 of, for example, gifting brands, which are very one-off. We’ll see spikes of email revenue and Mother’s Day. We don’t always see that 30 % if your brand is hugely one-time purchase gifting focused, where sometimes it really should be

Dahna Borg (16:48)

Yeah.

Priya (16:50)

40 % plus is where we’re talking high repeat purchase. We do have brands which have 50 % email revenue, which is incredible. But again, this comes from the fact that they have such a high repeat purchase rate. And so it really depends on the brand as to where we really think they should be. And so if you’ve got subscription revenue, if you’ve got this stuff going on, really email should be more than that.

Dahna Borg (16:57)

Beautiful.

Yeah, perfect. Wonderful. Let’s see if we can go through some practical things. What was the most successful thing you’ve done recently and what did that look like?

Priya (17:25)

So there’s two things we did last year and I want to mention both if that’s okay because this is in January and one of them’s really relevant for Easter. So the first one is one of the Christmas campaigns that we saw working really well and it was actually a letter from Santa himself, which everyone just loved and it was really fun. It wasn’t from the brand. It was all about, you know, Santa basically asking the brand.

Dahna Borg (17:29)

Yeah, go for it. Oh no, more good things.

Priya (17:52)

to help him with gifting because he couldn’t get around the world. And this was such a cute email and it worked like we did it. Yeah, we actually for a couple of clients. And we did it quite genuinely across these it won’t work for all businesses, but it was just a really nice way of just sending something a bit different and just making it a bit more fun and being like I need help. And it was really a call from a call from Santa.

Dahna Borg (17:56)

That’s so cute.

close that.

That’s so sweet.

Priya (18:19)

For genuine help and it wasn’t even for kids products. We weren’t talking like a kids brand, it was for adults. But it worked really well and it was just a really, it was something outside the box and you can’t do outside the box all the time. But that actually was, know, we have a few clients that allow us to take risks. They’re always like, feel free to do something different and we’ve written poems, we’ve done all sorts of things. And so that was one that was really fun. So the second one was an Easter egg hunt.

Dahna Borg (18:42)

Beautiful.

Priya (18:46)

And we’ll be doing this again this year. And this works well for lots of brands because it engages people and it’s not about the sale. And so what we did is, and we did this last year, it works so well. did it for five clients. So we’ll be repeating that again this year. Yes. Yeah. And it was creating an email where they had to find the egg and it’s hidden. It’s a golden egg. It’s hidden in this email.

Dahna Borg (18:48)

Hahaha

So you think you did it for one of our clients, like that we shared. Yeah.

Priya (19:13)

And then for some of our larger clients, they actually did a whole Easter egg hunt on their website as well for discount codes. so people had to find, first you have to find the egg in the email, right? Because we want clicks. We’re here for clicks to ensure that our deliverability is up. obviously always trying to optimize for the boring metrics that sit on the back end of the email. And then we came up with this campaign. And so people went around and they found these discount codes and then they purchased. And so it ended up enabling quite a few sales.

made it really fun. was cross channels, how they used it on socials as well as email, and they ran some ads as well. And so it was just a really fun way to actually engage customers instead of just thinking about how we just send another sales email. So coming up with these creative ideas makes obviously our jobs really fun. But it was a really great way to engage with customers. So I think those two examples, and the reason I like to share them is because

Dahna Borg (19:47)

Yeah.

Priya (20:10)

I’m trying to encourage brands to just think outside the box and to make email fun and engaging. If people just receive sales emails from brands, that’s kind of what we think of when we think about most brands. It’s how do we actually make this a platform where it feels like a two-way street instead of us standing here with a megaphone trying to get you to buy things.

Dahna Borg (20:31)

I that’s so important across the board. Like we have this conversation with clients as well from the ad space and like even from like a social space, like I think everyone gets real serious about marketing and they’re like, we’ve to be professional and we’ve got to be corporate and we have to be perfect all of the time. And it’s like, well, ⁓ do you remember who you’re talking to? Like you’re talking to humans that are getting marketed to on a daily basis, thousands of times a day. Like we’re allowed to make marketing fun. We’re allowed to be human. We’re allowed to be.

bit silly. We’re allowed to actually make this in an enjoyable process. Like it’s okay not everything has to be so serious all the time so I love that one you’re keen to do that and two that it also works really well. this goes to prove the point people want that little bit of joy and the more that we can give them that the better.

Priya (21:04)

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I love that framing as well with joy. I don’t think we think about that enough. We think so much about how do we get people to buy products, but we don’t think enough about how do we make the experience better for a customer. If this was an actual store that they walked into, what would we want them to feel? And that doesn’t always have to be joy, but some sort of emotion, some sort of connection, even educational emails, they’ve been working well and I’ve been harping on about them for two years.

Dahna Borg (21:41)

Yeah.

Priya (21:46)

And I’ve had brands that just absolutely refuse to send them because they just want to make sales. And of course those brands are the ones that we end up letting go from our end because we just, they’re not a good fit. They don’t get the long-term results and they continue to try and just push sales 24 seven and they lose engagement with their subscribers.

Dahna Borg (22:07)

People just don’t want to be sold to all the time. They just don’t. I remember one of our best performing ads was literally just a team photo of the staff of this company with just a really beautiful thank you note. And we did it post purchase. yes, you probably should have been doing that in your email marketing, but they couldn’t at the time. But we did it as an ad. It was one of the best performing ads because people were like, aw.

Priya (22:10)

Yeah.

Dahna Borg (22:31)

They care. They cared so much they put an ad to be like, we’re so grateful, thank you. It had like 20, 30 times return on ad spend on this one ad and we were just like…

Priya (22:36)

And they’re spending money to do that.

amazing.

Dahna Borg (22:42)

Cool. Thank you for letting us test that. Because again, people just want to deal with people. They want that human interaction. Like, yes, cool, your product’s great. Cool. Lots of people have great products. People are gonna repeat buy from people that make them feel something. they feel a part of something. So I just love that you’re, yeah.

Priya (22:44)

That’s incredible.

Absolutely. I love that. And the other thing is educating people and adding value to their lives. We do have, sometimes they’re the best performing emails and sometimes they don’t perform from a conversion perspective at all, zero dollars. And what we find is the founders that are the most successful when we look at what happened throughout an entire year, right? Year on year growth, year on year revenue, sales, et cetera, are the ones that aren’t afraid of sending emails that don’t make any money. And they are happy to just have those emails as part of the mix. They get sent out regularly. They add value because what happens is people can’t just buy from you every week, right? But they’re hearing from you every week, sometimes three, four times a week and then when there is an offer, boy do they buy and they spend so much money because you have invested the time. kind of like dating where you invest the time in someone without constantly asking for something in return and you’re not just asking them to marry you every week because that would be super weird and super annoying.

Dahna Borg (24:03)

is um… so much so. Yeah, it’s like no one wants to read something that’s a sales pitch every single time, especially if you’re sending that three times a week. Like, give me something else to engage with.

Priya (24:10)

Yeah.

Exactly. And so really, though, if you can become a long term thinker, as a founder in 2026, I feel like that’s one of the superpowers that we we don’t even there. are businesses that make five plus million dollars a year that still don’t quite have it. And they’re in this constant reactive state because they are so afraid to just let go a little bit, send the emails, maybe run the ads that are educational. Not everything is about selling and not everything is about direct response marketing. And even though we are kind of direct response marketers, I think the more that we can go back to some of that old school marketing where we are just raising awareness, building brand and doing some of those things that we used to do back in the day before social media where you couldn’t one for one track the return. Those are the things that end up doubling and tripling year on year growth.

Dahna Borg (25:10)

I almost think it’s detrimental how much we can track these days. So like we had a client, we’ve got this really cool reporting tool that allows us to break down which ad with which influencers getting the best result. Like is it a video? Is it a carousel? Is it static? Is it getting the best result? And they wanted us to break it down into ad type. So like educational, infographic, you know, statement ads, this kind of ad. And I’m like, we can. But I don’t recommend it because same thing as you like, cool, well, we’ve got this ad that does this job and this ad that does this job, but this one’s going to make you lots of money and this one won’t, but you won’t make the money from this one if you don’t send this one. Same with your emails. If you’re not sending the educational emails, if you’re not sending the like cutesy sender email and the founder email and the, hey, what are your thoughts on this? Like if you’re not doing all of those nice things and you just track them on a dollar by dollar basis, you’re going to be like, well, these aren’t making me money. I’ll get rid of those.

But it’s like, well, actually, it’s the ecosystem of all of these lovely things that’s making a difference.

Priya (26:12)

Yeah, I agree. And that’s where sophisticated founders, where they get into that mindset of it’s the whole ecosystem, their businesses grow so rapidly. And it’s really game changing. have, most of our clients now are like that. There’s one in particular where I was truly almost inspired by him because so he has a brand and they’re stocked all around Australia, UK, Singapore.

And they’re growing quite rapidly in store and their online presence is something that we’ve been supporting them to grow. One of the interesting things that we found, however, this is a consumable product, ⁓ is that it’s a beverage is that we weren’t getting a lot of repeat sales online. And it was something that we were like, is this not working because this seems a little bit concerning. And so we did something here. He was like, how do we figure this out? And I said, well, let’s just ask people. He’s like, what do mean? Okay. Well, let’s send an email. Yeah.

Dahna Borg (26:56)

Yeah.

We forget that we can do that.

Priya (27:08)

We have their email address. Let’s send an email with a survey link and get people to answer these questions. And surveys was something we were huge on last year because it gives you so much information to use for the rest of the business. And so we sent this survey out and we discovered that over 50 % of people who had come through the online channel had bought in-store after that. And so while we were not seeing their return online in-store,

Dahna Borg (27:32)

course.

Priya (27:36)

It was actually benefiting in-store growth and they were purchasing, which then fed back to the rest of the team because now what we’re doing is the ads team is able to aggressively go after first-time customers online and then we are aggressively pushing them into the stores. And because he is not concerned about, well, dollar for dollar, what’s Klaviyo attributing? We know now.

Dahna Borg (27:37)

That’s what, yeah.

Priya (28:02)

This is hugely profitable to run these ads, even if it’s at a breakeven point for the entire year. Queue four, we make all of the money online because the deals are so good. For the rest of the year, the money is all being made in store. So it’s, it’s this funnel that really works as an entire ecosystem. And as you say, if he was just focused on, you know, what exactly is doing what for what little piece of revenue, we would never have been able to grow the business in this way.

Dahna Borg (28:02)

Yeah.

Yep.

100%.

Yeah. Because then you wouldn’t be getting the revenue because no one’s repeat purchasing through their emails. But then the ad team would be getting in not trouble, but like, what are you doing? Cause their cost per acquisition would be so high. And they’re like, well, no one’s repeat buying from you either. And it’s like, well, actually we wouldn’t have had all this growth in store if we didn’t do all these things. It’s just, it’s so fascinating. So again, I think it’s great that we have all this tracking. think it’s great that we have all this ability to look at things on such a granular level. Cause sometimes it does make a difference, but I think there is a real danger in being too granular and not stepping back every now and then and looking at that bigger picture. Yeah. We’ve talked a little bit about this and this may be some overlap, but are there any email marketing trends at the moment, both good or bad that you think brands should jump on or brands should definitely stay away from?

Priya (29:05)

Yeah, absolutely.

Or to be honest, we generally don’t recommend jumping on email trends unless it’s something that you feel incredibly strong about. We find email is the channel that you have to be the most careful with because at the end of the day, it’s in writing. People can go back to it. It’s not like socials where something goes viral, it goes wrong, quick deleter, maybe we’ll be okay and no one screenshot that. Now, of course, people are screenshotting, so there’s that additional.

Dahna Borg (29:34)

Yeah.

Priya (29:48)

But you can at least remove it or if an ad’s not going well, you can take it down. If that trend was a little bit off and you’ve got all these horrible comments and you can hide it from everyone else. Once you send an email, it’s in their inbox forever. And so we are very mindful of saying what is true to the brand. Let’s focus on that and let’s not worry about what’s trending.

Dahna Borg (29:48)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Priya (30:09)

Seasonal events are not so much trending. So we’re happy to jump on seasonal events. yeah, overall, I would say just avoid trends because unless it’s super, super on brand, it is too risky. And there are many things that we will say to our clients. I don’t want you to send this via email because you can’t take it back. So you really need to, it is that whole framing of if this ended up on the front page of a newspaper slash Facebook at this point, would you be okay with that? And if not, then we don’t send it.

Dahna Borg (30:35)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that’s wise. like that. And finally, I feel like we can’t have a marketing conversation this year or last year without talking about AI. So how are you finding it impacting the email marketing space, do’s and don’ts? What’s sort of your thoughts on this?

Priya (30:46)

Yeah.

This is so interesting because honestly, we’ve had so many AI tools come out that claim to replace the entire email system. We’re going to write your email and create an image for your email and structure email. And we’re even going to put it in Klaviyo and all you need to do is hit send and we’ll do all your segmentation and it’ll be amazing. And so we were really like, this is awesome. Let’s go check out some of these tools. And so they write the email.

And the email sounds incredibly AI and incredibly generic. And then they create the image and yes, it’s gotten better. I will admit that, you know, nano banana and all these things that have been integrated. ⁓

Dahna Borg (31:36)

Nano Banana is insane. Will I use it for clients? No. Will I use it for funsies? Absolutely.

Priya (31:42)

Yeah, exactly. And there are, there, there are a couple of clients where the design with AI has been incredible. So what I’d say about the overall tools is they do a pretty awful job of most of the things. And that is because they are trying to do all the things. as even when you think about the functions of humans, there are very few people that can strategize, write, design, execute and implement to perfection across the board. There’s a reason we have specialists in design. Like we have some of the best designers on our team. We’ve got the strategist, the copywriter, like the, you know, the implementer who’s insane with attention to detail. You get your designer to do that job, it doesn’t work as well. So there’s a reason we have specialists as humans. And I do think there is a place for AI right now with email, but it’s certainly not this all in one tool that will solve all your problems, particularly if you are a larger brand where brand is incredibly important.

As a smaller business, sure, you can probably get away with some of these if you’re willing, but not if you’re actually wanting to become a large business. If you want to stay small and do that thing, you can probably do it. Where it is becoming really interesting, however, is I’d say particularly from a design perspective, there are clients where designing emails was so difficult because they don’t have assets. So we’re not talking skincare where can take pretty products of your photos or makeup or any of these types of things. But talking brands where they create like model airplanes and that doesn’t look cool without a really cool background, which you you can’t take, it was very hard to get Photoshop and everything. Like we’d have to put it all together and design this background of a rocket ship taking off with the actual rocket ship in the front. Like this used to take forever, right? So now that’s really easy with AI and they’re very cool images.

Dahna Borg (33:30)

Yeah.

We have another brand where, you know, we’re talking if it’s, if it’s Lego, if it’s these different things, which is very, very hard to go and create as, as a brand, like it’s very expensive to go and build all these different things and they get humans, take photos, whatever. now anything that’s kind of a little bit more like playful, there are places where we can start to bring AI imagery in, but it certainly isn’t overlaying the correct font. there’s still manual work involved in ensuring that.

This email has all the best design principles. It’s sized, it’s ready for mobile, it’s stock mode appropriate, all of this. But so right now, design is pretty cool in terms of individual design features and that sort of thing that we can use. That’s probably my favorite place in terms of how other people, if they want to start experimenting with AI for email. The other thing is thinking through some of your analytics. Obviously, you have to be really mindful of what you put into AI. You do not want to put all of your revenue numbers and everything else into AI, but all of that. And a lot of people do this and you know, if you feel like sharing everything about your business, feel free. But there are things that you can look at as someone who doesn’t know a lot about email. You can go in and strip out certain bits of information and say like which campaigns are performing or what kind of trends, you know, what subject lines are performing well. So if you’re, if you don’t have an analytical background, I think AI can be really useful from an analytical point of view.

in terms of supporting with that analysis and then helping you decide what to do next. Obviously, judgment matters. AI is definitely really good at telling you that everything you say is correct and making you feel really great.

Dahna Borg (35:11)

I’ve gotten into so many fights with it lately. I’m like, you

just keep telling me that I’m right, but I know I’m wrong. So where am I wrong? Because you just keep telling me that I’m right, which is nice, but incorrect. ⁓

Priya (35:22)

Yeah, it is that exact thing where so that that meme that’s going around, is, know, I love AI, put a fight, I put a text message fight of me and my husband into chat, GBT, and it told me I’m right. And it is really that it keeps reinforcing that everything you say is correct. And when you pick up an error, it will be like, oh, great pickup on that error. And I’m like, that was simple math. Yeah.

Dahna Borg (35:48)

You’re supposed to be the smart one.

Yeah.

Priya (35:51)

So it’s important to be very careful with that, although it can be helpful in, you know, if you have a basic understanding of analytics, it can be helpful in drawing out some of those insights and just making that process quicker. So you don’t have to do so much of that manual Excel work that you may have previously been doing. Copywriting? yes, if you train it for solid hours on what is good.

If you go in and try and write an email flow, you chat GPT to go and write you an abandoned cart flow, the rubbish that it will spit out will destroy your business and your brand. be very careful of, you know, just use it. think AI, as I said, well-trained with all the principles. if you, if you train it up like that, yes, it can be helpful. You still have to have a layer of judgment on what makes a good email. but aside from that.

I think AI needs to be used in very individualized tools right now in piecing something together as opposed to just, yep, let’s just let it do its thing. And as it gets better, which I envision that it will, what will happen, of course, as we see on LinkedIn with all the posts is everybody just sounds the same. And so then my prediction is that the real benefit is going to be in being human because everyone

Dahna Borg (36:56)

Yeah.

Priya (37:12)

Every email, every text message, every LinkedIn post. It’s now sounds like AI, it all sounds fully optimized, it all sounds perfect. The hooks that we used to use, everyone uses them now. And so really humanizing your brand and moving away from that is probably going to be the superpower as opposed to the efficiencies and everything else that are currently being gained from using it.

Dahna Borg (37:33)

I 100 % agree. I do worry for grammar because I do think that… someone who likes to use an Oxford comma and a dash and like really like high level grammar I do feel like we’re gonna get to the point where some typos and some poorly written sentences is gonna be the marker that it’s written by a human so I do worry about that but I’m in full agreement I my theory very much aligns with yours is that AI is a tool that is best used by people who actually know what they’re doing so that you can make it better

Priya (37:42)

Yeah.

Dahna Borg (38:05)

So I have a slightly different take on the copywriting in that I prefer not to write from a blank screen So I’m just like you write your trash But now I’m not staring at a blank screen, so I’m gonna fix it

Priya (38:15)

But I think that that comes from you knowing what good copy looks like. And this is where the problem lies. If you know what it looks like, it makes it faster to write copy with AI. And again, I’m not against AI. If AI writes an email and it’s fantastic, I’m happy to send that email. The problem is that if we tell everybody that they can, you know, if everybody starts writing emails with AI, which they are already doing, like I can see it in my inbox, I get these cold emails or I get outreach emails or I get

Dahna Borg (38:19)

Yeah.

Priya (38:43)

Applications for jobs. And I’m like, I already know because I know I work, I know what it does. I know what it looks like. I know what a good email looks like. And now I know you’ve just given me the AI slot version of the email. And so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. And I do think it will continue to improve. But I think it’s, if you don’t actually know what you’re doing, that’s where the problem lies as opposed to, we don’t want to use it at all. I actually think that you should.

Dahna Borg (38:47)

I know what does. I know what it looks like.

Priya (39:09)

Everyone should be trying to use it because it does make things quicker. Just use it in a way that makes sense.

Dahna Borg (39:13)

Yeah yeah and again as you said before making sure that is your brand and not just i’m gonna rush that’ll do like that’ll do is never good enough

Priya (39:24)

No. And look, we’ve had, I won’t lie, like we’ve, I’ve used AI before to brainstorm subject lines and sometimes what it comes up with, I’m like, wow, loved that fourth one. You know, that was awesome. So there are definitely moments.

Dahna Borg (39:35)

100 % I also find that sometimes it gives you like 50 and you’re like they’re all terrible but I’ve actually had a really good idea now because I saw your terrible 50 and actually now I have an actually good idea

Priya (39:45)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think there’s nothing wrong in using it as a brainstorming partner and, all of that stuff. And we do it in-house as well. We’re just really mindful of, you know, all the things that just make it sound generic because that’s not what we get paid to do either.

Dahna Borg (40:03)

I mean, the moral of the story of this entire conversation has basically been be your brand, don’t be afraid to have some fun and, actually pay attention to the small details of these things.

Priya (40:14)

Yeah, absolutely, and humanize it.

Dahna Borg (40:16)

That’s it. Wonderful. We’ve got a couple of questions we ask everyone before we wrap up. Actually, no, I’ve missed a question. The most important question. If people want to work with you after this wonderful chat, what is the best way for them to reach out?

Priya (40:28)

Just head over to our website, flowbutler.com and you can take a look at what we do, the clients that we’ve worked with in the past and see if you think we’re a good fit and then you can book a call in with us and that’s probably the easiest way.

Dahna Borg (40:41)

Wonderful. So now to the questions we ask everyone. What would be your favorite business book or podcast?

Priya (40:47)

Or I would say my favorite business books would be the Hormozy books. So Alex Hormozy’s three books now that he’s written have been pretty amazing over the years. And so they would, they’re just manuals. And it’s one of those things that I wish existed, you know, 10 years ago. Didn’t, but yeah, they would definitely be my three, my favorite books.

Dahna Borg (41:01)

Yeah. We and we learn. And the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received.

Priya (41:14)

Thank you. If you don’t, if you stop loving it, stop doing it. And I think that’s, it doesn’t mean necessarily give up your whole business. I think it’s one of those things where at every stage of business, we go through different phases and different things that we enjoy doing. And some people love mastery of something and other people want to grow into a different area.

Dahna Borg (41:26)

Yeah.

Priya (41:40)

I think building a business is about having that right team and understanding what your strengths are and what everyone else strengths are and how to really build that team so that you can be the best business you can be. And I think love for what you’re doing is incredibly important.

Dahna Borg (41:54)

I agree with her, 100%. Well, thank you very much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Priya (42:00)

Thanks for having me.

Dahna Borg (42:02)

Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of Ecommerce podcast. As always, you can find the show notes on our website at brightredmarketing.com.au. Just look for the podcast page. Thanks for listening.