0:09
I’m Laryssa, and I want to help you find the best strategy for communicating the magic and wonder of your jewelry brand, so you can thrive by doing what you love and filling the world with beauty and creativity. Welcome to the Joy Joya Jewelry Marketing Podcast.

0:29
Hi, I’m your host Laryssa Wirstiuk. Through this podcast I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and professionals so they can thrive while adding more beauty to the world. I’m passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands and I’m excited to share my passion with you. As we all know, “Jewelry is joy”, so I’ll gladly seize any opportunity to talk about it.

0:53
This episode 161, and today I’m going to provide you with five tips for instantly upgrading your email marketing. Email marketing for jewelry brands can be complex, as you probably know, and optimizing an email marketing strategy can take a lot of time and testing. However, there’s always something that every brand from the solopreneur jewelry designer to the multimillion dollar jewelry brand can be doing to instantly optimize the deliverability and effectiveness of their email campaigns. A few small tweaks can make a major difference while you’re in the process of figuring out your audience habits and adjusting your content calendar to support your business goals. What are some things that you can try today and at any stage of your marketing journey? At least one of the five tips I’m going to share in this episode will likely apply to you. So keep watching or listening for the scoop.

1:56
But before we get to the solid gold of this episode, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that this podcast has both an audio and video component. So you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube by searching Joy Joya. I love creating this content as my active service to you my awesome listeners and you can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe, but also to leave a rating or review on iTunes which helps other jewelry dreamers find it too.

2:28
Let’s discuss some recent news related to jewelry or marketing. Each week I share my thoughts about three relevant articles. And you can get those links by visiting joyjoya.com/signup. Once you’re on the VIP list, you’ll receive our weekly digest filled with new episode announcements. First, we have an article that comes from InStore Mag, and it’s all about Valentine’s Day jewelry spending hitting a record number this year. When this podcast episode comes out, it will be the day before Valentine’s Day and some of you might be listening after Valentine’s Day. But I still wanted to share this news because I think it’s really important and sets a benchmark for Valentine’s Day moving forward. So according to a new survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights and Analytics, Valentine’s Day spending is expected to reach $23.9 billion this year, up from $21.8 billion in 2021. And it’s the second highest year on record. About 22% of consumers are opting to gift jewelry to a special someone. Sounds like Cupid’s definitely inspiring people to buy jewelry for themselves or their loved ones this year. It may just be a Hallmark holiday as they say. But more than half 53% of US consumers plan to celebrate the holiday. People are citing the pandemic as a reason to do so. Online continues to be the most popular shopping destination for Valentine’s Day this year visited by 41% of consumers. I’d love to hear your experience of Valentine’s Day sales this year. Have your sales followed the general trending spend is Valentine’s Day not a big holiday for you? I think it really varies from brand to brand but it’s important to kind of know the regular sales cycle of your business. So I would love to know about your personal experience with Valentine’s Day.

4:27
Next, this article comes from martech.org and it’s all about Facebook finally hitting a brick wall. You may have heard the recent announcement that Facebook or Meta had its first drop in daily user numbers in the social media giant’s history. Does your business have an active presence on Facebook? Do you rely heavily on Facebook for marketing and sales of your products? Most of the clients I work with don’t spend a lot of time and energy investing in Facebook and basically are just maintaining a minimum presence on the platform. What could be some reasons for this sign of Facebook’s potential demise? According to this article, these are some ideas. Maybe it’s Apple’s fault, the iOS 14.5 update made it possible for users to opt out of being tracked by Facebook. Could it be TikTok? It seems that a lot of users are leaving other social media platforms in favor of TikTok. And finally, Facebook isn’t necessarily the most likeable brand. So some people might just be moving away from it. I’m really interested to see how the evolution of Facebook influences what happens with social media. And I’m definitely looking out to see what happens next. I’d also love to hear about how your business is navigating changes, and whether or not you still care about Facebook, in your marketing strategy. Does your target audience spend time there?

5:58
And our last article comes from Forbes titled “Where are brands spending their marketing dollars these days?” Hmm, let’s find out. In an article for Forbes performance marketer, Brooke Shepherd shared her insights about how dollars are being spent. So in her own experience, she felt that in 2014, brands had really reached peak Google. So she thinks that at that point, that was the height of when people were investing in Google advertising in SEO, and that after that point, maybe people wouldn’t be spending that much money on the Google platform. And instead, they were shifting away to social media advertising on platforms like Facebook, and Instagram. The logic at that time was, quote, Google is for searching things you already know exist. And Facebook, Instagram is how you introduce yourself to people who don’t know you exist, end quote, but that’s kind of changing now. So among this author’s direct to consumer clients, this is how she’s seen budget budget budgets shift over the years. So as of 2020, for her direct to consumer brand clients, roughly 70% of every dollar was spent on Facebook and Instagram, while 30% was spent on Google as of 2021, going into 2022. For their direct to consumer brand clients, they are finding that about 60% of every dollar is being spent on Facebook, Instagram, so less than in 2020 30% is spent on Google, about the same and then 10% of every dollar spent on another platform. So again, the Facebook Instagram share is decreasing. And brands are kind of experimenting with platforms away from Facebook, Instagram, and Google. So this particular author has really been pushing her clients to diversify their spend and not put all their quote unquote eggs in the Facebook Instagram basket. This is a really great quote from the article: “Facebook, a leader in online advertising for the last 10 years is still a leader but is less effective. Therefore you need to diversify your media mix into other platforms. I recommend testing one new platform a quarter”. End quote. What have you been testing lately? I’d love to hear your experience of your media mix and your spend on different marketing platforms.

8:30
As I mentioned, if you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can become a Joy Joya VIP by visiting joyjoya.com/sign up. Without further delay, let’s get to my five instant email marketing upgrades.

8:47
Number one resend to non openers. resending your emails works. So on average with my clients, I observe a 10% additional open rate for emails that have been re sent to people who did not open the first email. So to put that in perspective, if you have 10,000 subscribers on your list, and in general, an average open rate of let’s say 30%, then resending your emails can increase your open rates by 23% or more without very much extra effort, except replicating the original email and clicking send to a segment of people who didn’t open it the first time around. Now, it’s kind of delicate, I would say don’t resend all of your emails, perhaps to people who haven’t opened because if they get if your subscribers get in the habit of kind of seeing you in the inbox too much, that could turn them off and they could potentially unsubscribe, but it also depends on your send frequency. If you’re a brand that’s only sending emails bi weekly or once a month, it probably won’t hurt you to resend all or most of your emails because you’re still not bombarding your subscribers with your email campaigns. However, if you’re sending weekly or more than once a week really choose the most important emails to resend. So if there’s a really big promotion, or really big product or collection announcement, those are the ones you’re going to want to resend to people who did not open your original email because you want to make sure you get the most eyeballs you can on it. There are tons of reasons why someone may not open your email. And probably the number one reason is, they just didn’t see it. I know personally, I subscribe to emails of so many jewelry brands. And it gets so overwhelming to keep up with that. I will often just like mass-select all the emails and do a delete and not look at them, because it’s just too much. Now most people probably don’t subscribe to as many jewelry brand emails as I do. But a lot of people subscribe to emails from a lot of stores that where they shop regularly their favorite brands, people get inundated with so many promotional emails. So the fact that someone doesn’t open your email doesn’t mean they’re not interested. They just may have not seen it, you may have caught them at the wrong time. Again resending those emails, typically will get you at least an additional 10% open rate. And of course clicks if your email is optimized for clicking through to your website. So that’s something I definitely recommend. The other thing is if you’re doing email marketing, right, each campaign takes a lot of time, effort, planning, thought, choosing the graphics, choosing the right copy. And if you think about how much time you put into one campaign, and then you’re just hitting click and sending off into the world and hoping for the best, that seems like a little bit of a missed opportunity. So you want to make sure that you get the most out of the effort that you’re putting into email campaigns.

12:06
Let’s talk about number two, take a mobile first approach to email layout. So just to give you some perspective, in 2020, Super Office did a survey and they found that nearly one in five email campaigns is not optimized for mobile devices. So if you are one of those five, campaign senders, your campaigns could easily be falling flat on a smartphone, especially if you’re catering to a younger audience, the generations that really are checking their emails on their smartphone. Your emails need to look good on a cell phone or tablet because a lot of people are going to view them on these devices. So one easy way to do this is to use an email provider like MailChimp, or Klaviyo that has templates that are already optimized for mobile, and not only building the template out so that it’s optimized for mobile devices but make sure when you’re sending test emails or testing your emails before you’re scheduling them or sending them to look at them yourself or have your marketing team checking them on various mobile devices to make sure they actually are easy to read that the images are loading quickly that the buttons are all clear. Also that it’s a short and sweet subject line, which I’m going to be talking about next. Basically just ensuring that you’re providing a great mobile experience, because probably at least half of your subscribers are opening that email on a mobile device, at least for the first time, they may come back to it later on a desktop, they may not. But that will be the first way that they are digesting it. So keeping that mobile first approach a top priority.

13:49
Number three, I just mentioned that for mobile friendly emails, you want to have short and sweet subject lines. But in general, that’s an instant easy upgrade. Keep your subject lines short and sweet. By that I mean no more than 30 characters is ideal, especially when you’re optimizing for smartphones. I want to give you some examples of subject lines that recently hit my inbox. So from Mejuri, “Let’s Connect”; from Stephanie Gottlieb, “Newness, Glitter Enamel”; from Ariel Gordon Jewelry, “Sweets for Your Sweet”; from K Kane, “Forward This to Your SO”; Monica Rich Kosann, “10 Lockets for Your Valentine”. They’re all really direct. I mean, they kind of all sound nice, and they are descriptive of likely what is the content of the email, but they’re super short. You don’t want to pack too much information in that subject line or get too clever or too descriptive. Because again, when someone is looking at the email on a smartphone, either that subject line is going to get cut off. Or it’s just overwhelming because there’s a lot of text coming at them in their email inbox on their smartphone. So like definitely no more than five words, if you can get it to three or four words, that’s great. Crafting subject lines is a challenge and an art in itself. You can go and listen to episode 102 of this podcast for more details. I focus solely on this, so I would recommend going back to that episode if you want to learn how to write better subject lines.

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Number four, focus on providing value, I can promise you, your subscribers are getting plenty of discounts and new product announcements in their inboxes every day, as I mentioned earlier, and if I’m a subscriber on your email list, I’m getting all the things all the emails from every jewelry brand. If your subscribers or just customers in general want to buy something at any given time, I promise you, they know where to go. They don’t need emails to like help them out with that. The power is really at the consumers fingertips. So instead you want to be thinking, what can we do as a brand to enrich these people’s lives. Decide what you want your emails to do for your customers in line with your brand, mission and voice. For example, your emails can inspire, entertain, inform, delight, educate, amuse, etc. Or they can do a mix of a few different things. Depending on the content and the day. Maybe you can share some inspiration or some unique and delightful ideas for styling. Maybe you can share something entertaining, like an authentic behind the scenes peek at your business operations. Instead of asking yourself, How is this email going to benefit us? Always ask yourself, How is this email going to benefit our subscribers and add value to their lives.

16:50
And then five, coordinate your email marketing efforts with all communications. So your social media marketing efforts as well as any other digital marketing initiatives should all be coordinated with your email marketing so that customers receive a unified experience no matter how they’re interacting with you. Why is this so important? Well consider your typical customer journey. They may see your latest product in an email campaign, but okay, then they’re distracted and they need to hop on a Zoom meeting, they completely forgot to return to the email because hey, they’re busy and their inbox is flooded and their kids are screaming and dinner needs to be made. Later that day, they’re scrolling Instagram and they see the same product from your email presented in a similar way on your Instagram feed. They think, oh yeah, I saw that earlier today and loved it. And then they click the Instagram shopping details for more information, and they actually have the time to take a moment to check out and purchase your product. When it comes to your email marketing efforts. Don’t assume that your message will sink in the first time your customer sees it. You need to present your message multiple times across multiple platforms for the idea to really catch and sink in and really give the time for the customer to take action on that product.

18:18
What did you think? Got any questions or feedback? How were your Valentine’s Day sales? You can always email me Laryssa that’s laryssa@joyjoya.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with a friend who’d appreciate it. And don’t forget to subscribe as well as leave a review on iTunes to purchase a copy of my book Jewelry Marketing Joy, visit joyjoya.com/book for more information.

18:44
Thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more information about marketing services for your jewelry brand. Visit joyjoya.com where you can download our free ebook, proven conversion strategies for E commerce retailers.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai