# The Email Marketing Mistake That’s Killing Your Ecom Profits (Fix This First) Channel: Emiel Dingemans | eCommerce Retention Marketing Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVcPNDDS3uo Duration: 13 min Language: English Words: 2282 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/QVcPNDDS3uo --- [0:00] There is one mistake I see in almost every e-commerce clavio email account that I audit. And the reason it's so dangerous is that it looks like it's working. Revenue comes in, campaigns get sent, the numbers look okay on the surface, but underneath it's slowly draining your customers to never pay full price again. And after working with over 120 e-com brands in the last 7 years with my agency Magically, I have seen this pattern destroy margins at scale. And that's why in this video I'm going to show you exactly what it is and how to fix it. So, let's first talk about how brands train their customers [0:38] to ignore them. And this will probably sound familiar to you. So, a brand launches an email campaign, it's a promotion, so maybe 20% off for the weekend. Your revenue will spike, and then the team is happy. So, the next week another promotion, maybe a flash sale, and the revenue spikes again. And slowly, without anyone making a deliberate decision about it, email calendar becomes almost entirely discounts and product highlights. But here's what is happening in the background while this is going on. And that is that your email subscribers are learning. Every email they open from you is teaching them something about your brand. And if the lesson they learn is [1:17] that you send a discount every week, they start waiting. Because why would they buy today at full price when there will be almost certainly be a deal in the next 7 days. So, you've accidentally created a segment of discount seekers for your brand. So, people who will only convert when there is an offer on the table. And the compounding effect is what really hurts. Because over time your full price campaigns start to underperform because people have been trained to hold off. So, your open rates on non-promotional emails drop because people have learned that if it's not a sale, it's probably not worth opening the email. And with that, your margins [1:56] shrink with every campaign because you keep having to offer deeper discounts to get the same response. So, no, this is not a traffic quality problem. It's not a product problem. It's just simply a conditioning problem. And the good news is that it's completely fixable. But before we get into how, stick around because the fix has a specific order to it and skipping the first step makes the rest significantly less effective. So, let's get into this. But before we go further, I just want to quickly mention I have a free email marketing course on my website that goes deep on all of this. It's completely free, there's no [2:35] fluff, and the link is in the description below. Now, let's continue with the video. So, the fix is not to stop discounting entirely because discounts have their place and time. The fix is to change the ratio and change what your audience expects when they see your name in their inbox. Because right now, if most of your campaigns are promotional, your email subscribers have one association with your brand. Sale incoming or not worth opening. So, you need to give them a different reason to open your emails. So, multiple different reasons consistently over time until your brand becomes something they [3:12] actually look forward to hearing from. So, the way to do this is through content variety. And I want to be specific with what that means because most brands interpreted this as write more interesting promotional emails. And that's not the shift. The shift is a significant chunk of your discount emails with content that delivers genuine value without asking for a sale at all. So, what does it look like in practice? It looks like a myth-busting email that addresses a common misconception in your niche and connects it back to your product naturally. It looks like a customer story that shows a real before and after results after using your product. It looks like an [3:51] educational email that teaches your email subscribers something useful. It looks like an email where you share your behind-the-scenes that shows exactly who is actually behind the brand and what they really care about. Or it looks like a product feature breakdown that explains why something about what you sell is different without screaming all the time that people have to buy their product now. So, none of these emails are asking for a sale directly, but every one of them is doing something that discounts cannot do. It's building genuine trust and genuine desire. And customers who trust a brand buy from the brand at full price immediately without needing a coupon to just push them over [4:32] the edge. Now, here's the part that most guides on this topic get wrong. So, they will tell you to just stop sending discounts and start sending better content. But if your email list has been conditioned over months or even years to expect deals, switching abruptly to value content is just going to look strange. So, your open rates might dip briefly before they recover. And of course, also your revenue will go down during that period. So, the approach [4:58] that works better is a gradual shift. So, if for example, in the first month, aim for roughly one promotional email for every five value-driven emails. In the second month, you can push that further. So, give your list time to learn a new expectation. And over time, your open rates on non-promotional emails will climb because subscribers are discovering that your emails are worth reading even when they're not selling something. So, the brands we work with that make the shift consistently report two things happening within 60 to 90 days. So, their full price conversion rate on non-promotional campaigns goes up, and their response to actual promotions goes up, too, because [5:39] now when a discount appears, it feels like something special rather than just another Tuesday with another discount. And once you have started shifting your content mix, the next lever is testing. And I want to talk about this differently than most email marketing content does. Cuz most advice on AB testing in email is generally low value. So, you'll see people obsessed over testing subject lines with and without emojis or testing the color of a CTA button or testing whether to use first name personalization. And of course, don't get me wrong, these are fine things to test, but they are not a test that's going to move real revenue [6:18] for your store. And if you're spending your testing bandwidth on surface level tweaks like the examples I just mentioned, you're just missing the tests that actually matter for an e-commerce brand. So, here's how we think about AB testing at Retentionly. So, first of all, every test should start with a hypothesis tied to a business outcome. So, not just I want to test two subject lines, but the actual framing should be, "I believe that leading with a pain point in the subject line will outperform leading with the offer because our audience is earlier in the awareness and responds better to problem recognition than to discounts." So, by [6:58] having such a hypothesis, it forces you to think about why you're actually running the test and what winning actually means for your brand. So, the highest impact tests across the brands we work with fall into a few specific categories. So, the first is email angle. For campaigns specifically, the angle is everything. So, testing a social proof angle against an educational angle on the same product or testing a problem to solution angle against a best seller frame will tell you far more about how your audience thinks about you than any other subject [7:34] line test will ever do for your store. And in the end, the revenue difference between a strong angle and a weak one can be substantial. The second test is plain text versus designed. And this is a high-impact test that most eco brands avoid cuz it feels risky. A plain text email that looks like it came from a real person rather than from a marketing department consistently outperforms [7:55] design templates in specific contexts. Not for every brand, not for every niche, but particularly this works really well as the last email in a flow or as a re-engagement touchpoint. So, if you've never tested this, it should be near the top of your list. Third test is send time and send day. And this sounds basic, but the impact is real cuz your audience has specific habits. Some people might respond better on Tuesday mornings right before they go to work, while others on Thursday evenings when they're chilling on the couch. And the only way to know is to test systematically running the same type of emails at different times across [8:32] multiple sends and looking for consistent patterns. So, you want to run exploratory send time tests at least five to eight times before drawing conclusions because a single data point on timing is too easily influenced by other factors. And super important with this, you don't just want to look at open rates, but you want to look at how much revenue this email has generated [8:52] and what is the place order rate. Sometimes when you're testing the send time, a certain time might lead to higher opens but to lower revenue compared to a different timing. The next test is copy length and style. So, short copy of three to five sentences against longer copy. So, a branded conversational tone against a more direct, punchy style. Testing these angles across your non-promotional campaigns tells you how your audience wants to be spoken to, which directly informs how you write every future email in your calendar. Now, do keep this in mind about AB testing. Build testing into your process as a permanent habit, not just as a one-time thing you can do [9:30] when something breaks. So, you want to run a new test every two to four weeks. You want to document what you test and what the results were. And over time, you build a compounding body of knowledge about exactly what your audience responds to. And that knowledge is one of the most valuable assets in your email program. So, everything that we've talked about, the content shift, the trust building, the testing, none of it works without a structured plan. Cuz if you do not have a calendar, you default to whatever is the easiest. And whatever is the easiest is almost always a promotion. So, the campaign calendar [10:05] is what protects you from that default. It forces you to think about your content mix before the week starts, rather than just scrambling to put something together at the last minute. So, a healthy monthly calendar for most e-comm brands should have at least one or two promotional or sales-based emails, four to six product-focused emails that highlight features, benefits, best sellers, or new arrivals without discounting, four to six value or education-based emails, two to four social proof emails, and two to four brand emails. So, this is 12 to 18 email campaigns in a month, which works out to roughly three to four email campaigns per week. And at that frequency, you [10:45] stay top of mind without overwhelming your email subscribers. And because the content varies significantly from email to email, each one lands with fresh attention, rather than being filtered out as more of the same. And the other thing a calendar does is force you to plan your promotions intentionally. So, when you can see the full month laid out, it becomes obvious if you have too many discount emails stacked up. And because the promotions are planned, rather than reactive, they tend to be better executed and better timed. And that's it. So, this is the strategy to fix the profit-killing mistake that a lot of e-comm brands are making. And [11:22] don't get me wrong, this mistake doesn't happen because brand owners are lazy or bad at marketing, it just simply happens because discounts work in the short term. So, the spike in revenue feels good, and the long-term damage to how your customers think about your brand is a slow process and invisible until it's already significant for your store. So, the fix is a shift in philosophy. Email is not a discount distribution channel, it's a trust-building system that also drives revenue. And when you build that trust properly, through content, through consistency, through testing, what actually resonates with your specific audience, the revenue that comes from it is cleaner, higher margin, and more [12:05] predictable. But, here's what I want you to think about. Because even with the perfect content strategy and a perfectly optimized campaign calendar, if someone visits your store, adds a product to the cart, and leaves without buying, you're still losing that sale unless you have something in place to bring them back. So, if you want my team to build out your entire email back end properly, including the flows, the campaigns, the seg- mentation, and the testing framework, check out the first link in the description below and book a free strategy call with me. And during that call, we will just look at your current email setup, and I will tell you exactly [12:41] where the biggest gaps are. And right after this, go watch my full tutorial on how to build a high-converting abandoned cart flow in Klaviyo. Because the strategy we covered today protects your margins on the campaign side, but the abandoned cart flow is --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt