How to Simplify Online Shopping with Interactive Emails: Retention Strategies with Zaymo's Brice Douglas

Wiehan  Britz: Okay, welcome to another episode of Inbox Invaders where we talk about everything related to email and SMS marketing. Today I have a very special guest joining me, Brice Douglas, CEO and co-founder of Zaymo. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Brice Douglas: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Wiehan  Britz: Absolutely. Okay, so it's a pretty easy format. I'm gonna let him basically tell us what problems they are solving with their email and SMS or email tool. And then I'll also give him some time just to go into the backend showcasing the tool, the capabilities and how you can actually build out some of these shoppable. Shoppable emails. Shopping email, very interesting concept. I've been in the industry now for quite a while and it's even something that's quite new to me. So I'm going to hand over to him, he's going to show us around and I think there's a lot that we can learn from what they're doing over at Zaymo.

Wiehan  Britz: So over to you, Brice.

Brice Douglas: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me on. I think big picture, Zaymo is something where we try to decrease friction between brands and their existing customers in their retention field. And the way we do that right now is really just through interactive email. Interactive email is something that's been around for a long time and has a lot of definitions.

So I guess when we think of it as Zaymo is, we're trying to take practical approaches to ways to increase attributed revenue and data collection from customers so you can do more with your retention efforts. And what that looks like functionally is, I'd say, number one, our most popular feature is a one click add on in the email. And that's something that, especially for subscription brands where you have a credit card on file, where we can just add items to upcoming orders, change delivery date.

Brice Douglas: And that by itself has been a feature that significantly decreases churn by making it easy to lock in your delivery and also increases one time upsells, which are a lot of these brands. Think of that same functionality in the email. Similar with review collection. With SMS collection, go down the list of reasons you want to engage with customers and that's what we do.

Wiehan  Britz: Very cool. Nice. Are you basically saying that it's a frictionless way to shop within an email?

Brice Douglas: Yes. Frictionless way to shop in an email. Frictionless way to collect data in an email and really just frictionless way to interact with your customers.

Wiehan  Britz: Very cool.

Brice Douglas: And so with that, I guess I can go in to show a demo or talk about some customer stories if.

Wiehan  Britz: You'D like, yeah, if you can show us some examples and potentially if there's a back end on how you actually go about building this. Also keen to also understand what type of third party integrations do you also support, just because of course the nature of the ecosystem is do you support the recharges, the loops, loyalty programs? So just. Absolutely. How can someone pick up the software and incorporate it into their business?

Brice Douglas: Great. Yeah, great question. So essentially what we are is we help you design these emails and integrate with your existing email provider. So for most of our customers that would be like a klaviyo. And so we're not asking to replace Klaviyo or anything like that, but we help make those emails you're already sending being that much more effective. And then the way it works is Brandwood onboard. We have kind of white label or white glove onboarding where we'll kind of help you set up your first flows. And then there's access to a drag and drop builder that's really simple to use to add functionality that then integrates with Klavia, anyone that comes on in the next two months.

Brice Douglas: We're also doing a 30 day free trial, so really kind of risk free for any brands there included with white glove onboarding. And I'll go and maybe just share my screen here, if that's right, with you, and we could talk through a couple of examples. Okay, so let me show you.

Wiehan  Britz: And you say you support most esps. Playvio omnisende, great question.

Brice Douglas: Today it is just Klaviyo, although Omnisend, braze and others are on the list upcoming. So let's see here. Share. And we've got the infinity screen of death here. Okay, are you seeing that?

Wiehan  Britz: All right, I can absolutely see this.

Brice Douglas: Okay, so this is kind of one of the brands recently started working with an example of a perfect kind of use case for Zaymo. So this is a pre Zaymo email, very well designed. We have kind of this HTML email with a good header, and then if someone has a subscription upcoming, they get this email telling them, hey, this is your delivery address, etcetera. Now what we can do here is post Zaymo.

Instead of having links to your website to take actions, we bring the most valuable actions here, namely one time add ons and the ability to change delivery date. So you can see how much more easy it is to have this in your inbox right here. And then I can go add this oil right there to my upcoming order. If I want to.

I could come over here and add, oh, maybe I want these sleep gummies, not the other one. You know, kind of make changes to your cart right from the email. And what that did is it's actually being delivered on the next order because there's credit cards on file and the shipment's gonna look exactly how they want it to. Some other functionality with this would be the ability to go ahead and maybe even delay the shipment two weeks.

If I have too much product, I can do that. And it will actually update my delivery date here in the email. So if you look at that, it's really just anything you want to do. The customer to complete, except for canceling, can be done here in the email.

Brice Douglas: And that's kind of the vision on at least that feature. Now, how easy is this to actually implement? Probably easier than you'd expect. This is that very email imported from Klaviyo. We have a great integration with them. And then we're dragging over this billing reminder right here. The branding's all preloaded and everything. And all I do is go ahead and export this to Klaviyo, and it's in your templates there, ready to send. So, very simple process.

As simple as that is, we also go ahead and do it for most of our customers and kind of a white glove onboarding for the beginning flows.

Wiehan  Britz: Got it. This is absolutely splendid. And tell me, of course it is, because it's integrated into klaviyo. Whatever actions or events happen on the email, all data will get pushed straight into klaviyo. Correct. So if I make an action, it will fall under the. The action or activity log for the particular person.

Brice Douglas: Yeah, exactly. So we send everything from generic Zaymo interaction events to klaviyo. So you can measure how many people have actually interacted with some form of button in the email. And then each individual action that can be taken sends a separate event to Klaviyo as well. So you can kind of run that through your CDP and run a b tests and see how different rates increase.

Yeah. And so I think you asked earlier how this customer portal, specifically these subscription tools, we have a one click reactivate as well for churn subscribers. Those integrate with, recharge, with loop, with skio, with state AI, and with smarter as well as order.

Brice Douglas: Group two actually just got added this week. So basically, most subscription providers, and we add kind of the long tail over time as customers come in as well.

Wiehan  Britz: Good support. Absolutely good supporting all the major subscription platforms. Do you also support just a normal cart recovery action? Correct. It doesn't need to be tied to a subscription service specifically. Correct.

Brice Douglas: And that, that integrates with Shopify.

Wiehan  Britz: Shopify, okay. And currently you only support Shopify. Really? There's no woocommerce, you know, not supporting woocommerce. Magenta. It's very much shopify at the moment.

Brice Douglas: Right? Yeah. And that's, that's where we are currently and obviously have plans to go past that. But we really love the Shopify ecosystem and it's, it's been a great place to start with you.

Wiehan  Britz: I'm with you. Okay. I absolutely love this. I love the fact that you almost reducing the amount of button clicks that needs to happen for someone to take an action as opposed to someone clicking loading the site. We know if your page loading time or speed is slow, there's a lot of scripts running in the background. It can absolutely affect some of your experiences. Question around mobile compatibility. Is that widget that you embed, is it pretty much mobile optimized as well?

Brice Douglas: Yes. So everything we do is mobile optimized. If you look at any demos on our site, they're usually in mobile format. And so across the device, we're pretty agnostic. And when we design mobile first, just like any modern software really should in the consumer world, especially for email, I'd say if you want to talk limitations, I'll actually point you in the right direction.

And it's actually on the email client side. And that's a really interesting problem for interactive emails. I'd say most brands or software providers that have tried interactive emails get stuck on the amp framework, which is what Gmail does.

Brice Douglas: However, it really depends on the demographics. But if you want to pull United States numbers, Gmail only has about a 30% to 40% market penetration based on who you ask. And what surprises me is Apple Mail has a 30% to 50% market share penetration depending on who you ask. And so when we use XAML, we designed it in a way that will actually render interactive on Gmail, Yahoo and Apple Mail and then all others will get sort of a static fallback. And we kind of manage that for our customers.

So if you see the same email we were talking about, we have this Gmail version completely interactive. The Apple Mail version also completely interactive. I could go add this item and then all others will have this kind of call to action button here, like the email would have been otherwise.

Brice Douglas: So you're actually sending a single template, but it has different versions baked into it depending on where the customer might open it.

Wiehan  Britz: And your code embed in the email. Your code embed holds the fallback rules, correct?

Brice Douglas: Yes, yes.

Wiehan Britz: It does stunning. Tell me also while we, while you're sharing your screen here, I know you've also recently introduced more functionality to this where someone can also subscribe to an SMS list. You have a handful of other very neat secondary goals or actions that someone can take, which I think is just great. You're just expanding the capabilities of what is achievable within these interactive emails.

Brice Douglas: Absolutely. And I can maybe show a couple of these. So here would be one that we quite like is the ability to choose a product from your Shopify store. Say I want these sneakers, I can add it here and actually pre populate a discount code so that becomes as a kind of a shoppable product page in the email. Now, some limitations of this are that we're not actually checking out in the email when it's a net new customer. So only on returning subscription brands can we actually purchase in the email. But you see this right here, this PDP, we have the discount applied with the price crossed out here. I can actually shop around for different variants, change quantity, read description, all that is pulled in dynamically.

Brice Douglas: If I had multiple images here, which this product does not, you could again swipe through there and do the same thing. So that's one that's been quite nice. We just closed our first case study on that and saw a significant lift in conversion rates on our website and our blog and everything. Something even better than that is actually our review collection. And I try to point most people here, really simple.

You can drag in kind of your reviews, integrate with Yotpo or Kendo or judge me, any other kind of reviews tool that you're used to, and this will radically increase the number of reviews collected. We've seen some brands double, although consistently we see like a 50% increase. So if you see on this, I could come in and actually leave a five star review, type up the review in the email, submit it, and not only do it for that product, but do it for multiple products here in the email and that will go straight to your page on your website immediately.

Brice Douglas: That's been really powerful. We allow our customers to almost double the reviews they're collecting just by embedding our widgets inside.

Wiehan  Britz: That's brilliant. I can see that working well because I think currently it pretty much you can select the stars, but then it pushes you out to the external review page where you need to submit your, your actual review. So allowing people to do it inside the email is once again you are keeping people in this little box. They can complete all the actions in the email without losing them, you know, by that click. So I absolutely love the concept here.

Brice Douglas: Yeah. And I'd say that's we've learned over time that some use cases we thought would have been really exciting or actually not that effective. For example, the cart abandonment, it's kind of something you would want to do at first, but over time, as we a B tested, we realized that a user who already built a cart and then is getting reminded about it doesn't actually need much interactivity to make the decision.

It's simply just a do I want this or not? Type thing. And so a button to return to the website does quite well. But when we do something like allow you to one click upsell in the email or leave a review, which is something people kind of naturally want to do out of the goodness of their heart, but if there's a link somewhere, they don't really want to take the time to do that. In those sets of actions, we make a very significant difference. And if I could go ahead and highlight one, we'll see this case study published soon.

Brice Douglas: But we just closed it yesterday is we have a supplement brand based out of the UK who ran one email with Zaymo in it on an A/B test. It was the upcoming billing notification for recharge and they had really sophisticated recharge quick links built into the email where they could go in and choose the items that were recommended for them to go and go purchase as add ons, however.

So we went and did the best case scenario with their links. A B tested versus no links Zaymo subscription portal. And I guess the short story is that brand saw a 440% ROI on Zaymo's cost just from that one single email. And that's before adding in any other flows or use cases on top of that. So that was quite successful on that email in terms of number of one time add ons added, we were 83% higher on the Zaymo side compared to the static links.

Wiehan  Britz: Amazing. And that's true testament of what capability you are unlocking for d two c brands here. And I think it also eliminates a need for having to get your call to action buttons placed in the right areas within the email, because I know that is something that too many brands are struggling with. Why go through the pain of that if you can embed the entire experience within the email? So I absolutely love that case study. Thanks for pointing that one out. Last question from me is how can anyone get started here? Is it a monthly subscription fee? Is it a once off fee? How does that look like from a I want to get started point of view.

Brice Douglas: Yes, great question. So right now we have a monthly subscription fee. There are different tiers based on kind of the usage that you want out of Zaymo and the size of your brand. To be honest, right now, while we're kind of coming out of our beta into our public, our pricing is quite affordable. I think most brands are getting a pretty good deal out of us.

Wiehan  Britz: I'm bought it now.

Brice Douglas: And it's really just setting up a 30 day trial on our website. So if you go to zaymo.com, you can go through that flow and as part of that, we'll set up kind of a white glove, 30 minutes onboarding call and then you'll be good to go from then. So quite simple.

Wiehan Britz: And tell me during the, on the 30 day free trial, you can run any of those experiments. If you want to do the subscription one or the cart abandonment you're on cap by the. Okay, I mean, that's a no brainer.

Brice Douglas: Yeah. And actually for all of our brands, we unlock all functionality. Our discrimination in pricing right now is mostly just on kind of number of active profiles you have, but unlimited the.

Wiehan Britz: Amount of people that will receive the email. Okay. Okay. Very cool. I mean, that's a no brainer. I mean, goodness me, if someone doesn't take hold of that opportunity, that will be dumb. I've seen I say so too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Wiehan Britz: I know you also quite familiar with the one text guys where they doing very similar stuff, but on the sms, the text messaging side of things. So I feel like, you know, this is definitely a, you know, next generation type of thing because you, you've pointed out amp emails and how many times people have tried to make amp emails work. I haven't seen a lot of great cases of amp working. Well, gamification, yeah.

But in terms of making the email shoppable, I haven't seen great use cases. So I'm actually quite delighted that you guys are trying to be a bridge, you know, between Amp doesn't work for me. Amp is too complicated. Play Theo.

Wiehan Britz: Just stock standard emails are not cutting it anymore. What is the alternative? And I think you guys are bringing that to the table. So exciting stuff, right?

Brice Douglas: And kind of just the future of DSC retention marketing is really exciting how close you can get to your customer, both with conversational AI. I know a lot of chatbot side are obvious ways to kind of cut costs and get quicker results. As well as the one text guys, really big fan of their product. We actually have a similar investor the same same partner over at Y Combinator works with us and been really impressed with one text has pulled off as well. We kind of see ourselves as a one text for email for a lot of the same use cases.

Wiehan Britz: Pretty damn cool. And thank you for making our lives better. We also shine as even SMS marketers when you guys enable us to be better. So looking forward to actually getting my hands dirty on it. Oh yeah. Cool. So people again, how can they get hold of you just on your personal LinkedIn? They can go to your website as well just to book a demo.

Brice Douglas: Yes, both of those methods will come straight to me. You can reach out at bryce email.com as well for email.

Wiehan Britz: Cheers. Love it. Thank you so much once again for your time. I think it's always nice to actually see the behind the scenes of the tool, the capabilities and how you can actually pull it off. And we'll definitely send some people over to you because I don't want people to miss out on this cool bit of technology. Thank you so much for joining me.

Brice Douglas: Of course. I'm really excited about what you're doing at Magnet Monster as well.

Wiehan Britz: Absolutely cool, man. Thanks once again and check back in for another episode of Inbox Monster where we'll be talking about everything, email, SMS marketing and very cool technology. Till next time. Cheers.

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