How to Use Email Marketing to Get More Sales On Amazon

Mina Elias: 
Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint podcast. I’m joined by one of the biggest marketers in the world, Eddie Maalouf, my good friend and also from the Middle east. And he’s going to walk us through, step by step, exactly how to capture Amazon shoppers information. Email, sms, get them to opt in and then start email marketing, sms marketing. And increase their lifetime value. Eddie, what’s up, man?

Eddie Maalouf:
What’s up, mina? Just want to make it clear for everyone when Mina says biggest is talking about my stomach, nothing more than that. So don’t get too excited over here. I don’t know that much. Excited to be on the show, man. Thank you so much.

Mina Elias:
Dude. You’re a killer, man. You have a massive team. Eddie has like a team of what, 130? Something like that people? Yes.

Eddie Maalouf:
By the end of the month we’ll be at about 160.

Mina Elias:
Crazy, man. And I’ve been to the office in Atlanta and the culture is next level, man. Like, you’ve built an incredible company, man.

Eddie Maalouf:
Thank you, dude. It’s been a long time to get that to happen, though.

Mina Elias:
They actually got tattooed. Some people got tattooed.

Eddie Maalouf:
We had some tattoos.

Mina Elias:
All right, man, let’s jump right in. I think the first step everyone’s wondering is how can I get those people who are buying my products every day on Amazon to give me their emails?

Eddie Maalouf:
Yeah. So here’s the thing. You got to be pretty compliant when you’re doing this with Amazon. There’s obviously a lot of rules. I’m not going to go through all those rules. That’s not really my job on the team. It’s other people’s jobs on the team to check my rules. So you can go and make sure you follow the Amazon terms and service when it comes to being compliant about this stuff. But for us, I’ll tell you what works the best is just inserts telling people basically to stop. And before you use this product, stop and go ahead and scan this QR code before you do so. And what it does is it kind of stops people from taking it, thinking that they might harm themselves, thinking that they might break the product. They are very cautious to do so. And so about a fourth of people who get that card will actually scan that card. And on the back end, how it’s kind of connected is we’ll basically connect it to a postscript sequence. So Postscript is our personal preferred SMS platform, and you can also connect it to Klaviyo on the back end as well, which is our preferred email platform.

Eddie Maalouf:
And essentially, we notice the text just works better. So we’ll basically enroll them into postscript automatically. So if they scan that QR code, it basically auto populates a message into their cell phone, sending it to our company. So let’s say I’m selling a pet product as an example. I’d scan it, they’d auto populate a text right there on their phone to send to us. And when we do that, we’ve now basically gotten them to opt in into our SMS sequence. And then what we’re responding back is like, hey, check out this page with all the information that you need. And then we send them to essentially what is like an upgraded FAQ page where we’re basically showing them how many servings you need to do, how often you need to give it to your pet, things like that. Now here’s the key. It’s not like a one size fits all strategy, right? So if you think about it this way, a pet brand is a good example for the stop before you use it. Do that. But let’s take a different scenario. Let’s take, instead of me wanting to give them stop, do this. Before you start, I want to give them a warranty.

Eddie Maalouf:
Warranties work really well in a lot of categories, but in a lot of categories they’re not. So, like, if you take a pet product, warranty is not going to work. It’s food, it’s a consumable. This product is going to be gone in 30 days. Like, what warranty are you talking about? Right? No one’s going to even scan it in the first place. You take a product like an accessory, like a wallet or headphones, they’re going to scan it for the warranty, you know what I mean? So being very aware of what that is, if you’re looking more into accessories, electronics, things that aren’t consumable, warranties are going to be a really good bet. If you’re going into the discount route, which I see a lot of people try to do, just know anything less than 25% is a waste of your time. They’re not even going to scan it. 25% is like the bare minimum. And if you really want to get people to opt in, you’re going to need to give more than that. And what happens is you just bleed too much in your margin. If that’s the case and you’re getting the wrong kind of customer.

Eddie Maalouf:
Not all email lists are created equal, to say the least. Right? So even us, we have probably like 100 accounts we manage email and sms for. And I’ll tell you this, some I’ll look and the average revenue per subscriber is thirty cents. And some, I look in, the average revenue per subscriber is $2.50. Literally like seven x, eight x what it was. And the reason is the reason that the people opted in in the first place. So if someone’s opting in for the first place to just get a discount, there’s going to be very discount responsive customers. They’re not going to buy from you all year and they’re going to run a Black Friday sale for 40% off and then they’re going to buy from you, which means lower margin for you. Right? On the other hand, the ones who are coming in for warranties or you scan this before you take it, these are people who are not necessarily as price sensitive, even though they might be, that’s not the reason that they came into your brand in the first place. And so their perception of your brand is not discount product right out the gate.

Eddie Maalouf:
And so it’s very important to kind of differentiate those two things and not a one size fits all. But I’ll tell you for us, if you’re not using an accessory or an electronic, telling people to stop and scan this before you use it is definitely the highest return we’ve seen. And we’ve tested dozens of different kinds of mailing.

Mina Elias:
And let’s pause here and let’s talk more technical tech stack type of stuff. So you’re going to design the QR code. Easy. What are you using for the QR code?

Eddie Maalouf:
Bit ly? For me, I use bit ly.

Mina Elias:
They can create QR codes for you? Oh, yeah.

Eddie Maalouf:
You can customize how the QR code looks. It’s free.

Mina Elias:
You get bit ly, you get the QR code. You can design the insert card in canva. Where do you get the inserts made?

Eddie Maalouf:
Oh, man, there’s a million different companies to do that.

Mina Elias:
Honestly, should we do USA or should we do China?

Eddie Maalouf:
No, I do USA. It’s just faster, it’s easier. I’ve never bought inserts from China, to be honest, and I don’t think it’s that expensive. It’s a paper good product at the end of the day, you know what I mean? Unless you’re moving like a million inserts a month, you know what I mean? I really don’t think it’s worth like for most people, they’re moving thousands or tens of thousands a month. You know what I mean?

Eddie Maalouf:
It just doesn’t really make it worth that logistical nightmare of China. I can just buy them and I can have them done in two days here.

Mina Elias:
Okay, got it. And then you’re using postscript. And basically the QR code is you basically go into postscript and you create some sort of link that the QR code activates. And then when someone scans the QR code, the link knows to open up a message in your messenger. This works for Android and iPhone?

Eddie Maalouf:
That’s correct, yep. And you can change whatever the message is.

Mina Elias:

What’s the message? Usually?

Eddie Maalouf:
Yeah, it just depends what the offer. Right. So, like, I’m very conscious that the message comes from the customer, not from me. Right. So I send it like, let’s say Mina is the name of the brand, which is a pretty good brand name, honestly. Mina. We should open up a brand called Mina. Let’s say, like, hey, Mina, I just got the insert card and got the product from Amazon just messaging, you guys know, get XYZ, whatever it is that was promised on the insert. And it’s just auto populated message so that they don’t have to sit there and change anything. What I hate is when people do this and the auto populated message is clearly an auto populated message that doesn’t even sound like it’s being sent from them. You know what I mean? It’s like so robotic. It has nothing to do with them being sent. And people forget that this is someone else sending the message. Right. It kind of feels weird when you text someone a message from you that doesn’t sound like it’s you at all. So I try to make it very casual, very easy, very short, and saying, hey, here’s why I’m doing it.

Eddie Maalouf:
And here’s what I’m expecting in return kind of thing to make it super clear so that when they send this message or they go back in a week and they read their messages and they forgot where this message was sent from, that it’s very easy to kind of understand what happened there. So I try to keep it just super simple. It’s a text message. Perfect.

Mina Elias:
And then postscript will then collect all of these people’s phone numbers. And you can either individually message people or you can do broadcasts. Correct?

Eddie Maalouf:
Exactly. Yeah. So I’m not really too sure. Off the top of my head. If you can individually outbound message one person, for example, you can send a campaign and filter down to those people. You can have a two way response with people where they respond and you message them back, et cetera. But I don’t think there’s a way for me to just go be like Mina and then send something to Mina. Unless I filter Mina and send a campaign with only Mina. To my knowledge, I may be wrong again. My SMS team handles that mainly. But from my perspective, yeah, you can basically put them into campaigns. And what I like to do different than most people, let’s just talk outside of just Amazon strategy, let’s talk about email SMS strategy. I like to engage people and get them to respond back to me. It costs way more money because you pay per text. Okay. But the results are incredible. So I’ll give you an example. I have a wall art brand, and it was March 23 and I was like, okay, it’s the 23rd of the month. Let me run a text and say, who do you think is the goat of basketball, Michael Jordan or LeBron James?

Eddie Maalouf:
And I just sent a message like that and say, based on your response, we’ll give you a code for their ward. Instead of people writing like Jordan LeBron, each one wrote like three messages worth of text and engaged with the brand. They feel like they’re messaging us back and having in depth conversations, which creates a community, which creates the best buyer pool you can imagine. Another example would be like, which one would you like the red pill or the blue pill? And it’s a gif of the Matrix and it’s the blue pill and the red pill, and it’s like, pick which one and you’ll get something in return based on what you pick. You know what I mean? And so you can be very creative with text messages. I see a lot of people one way texting, which is cool, but it’s like, dude, I don’t know how your girl’s phone looks, but my girl’s phone, dude, sometimes it’s like 15 messages back to back of promos. Like 20% off today. Fashion nova, buy one, get one free, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s just like 15 in a row. And I’m like, dude, how do you even just stand out in here?

Eddie Maalouf:
And I think it’s being conversational, looking forward to them getting gifts, getting questions that you have to answer to kind of determine an outcome that you’re going to get from it. So I think gamifying text messaging is super important in today’s world because everyone’s just like, one way, one way, one way.

Mina Elias:
Dude, that’sick. That’s really creative. I never even thought about that. I don’t do much email or sms marketing, so that’s definitely creative. Now, let me ask you this. What are you doing to segment these audiences? Are you segmenting them by age? Not age of the person, but like, when they bought the product what are you segmenting them by?

Eddie Maalouf:
How much product they buy is one of the most important segments. How many orders they’ve made is another very important segment. Those are my two favorites because I can create like vip list so I can say people that have bought five times from us and spent over $150 total. Example, boom. I have a very defined list and I know exactly who I’m going to. You can’t filter by demographics unless you’ve had them opt in those demographics. So unless someone says I’m a male or female, it’s not that simple as just filtering females or filtering males. It’s a little hard. You have to survey them to get their age or to get their birthday or to get their gender and things like that. Birthday ones are always really good just because you can automate it. You can literally set an automation when it triggers when it’s someone’s birthday and they get a birthday email the day before wishing them a happy birthday, giving them an insane offer or giving them something for free in return. I think that’s definitely one of the most creative automations. That’s very easy. You could just do one time for the most part, the main segments are those two.

Eddie Maalouf:
From a purchase standpoint, we target very specifically engagement. So like last 30 day engage segment, last 90 day engaged segment, those are the segments that do the best. Here’s the thing, let’s get kind of technical on the deliverability side. So I think a lot of people think, okay, I’ll just get emails, I’ll start sending emails and whatever. But you have something called domain authority is what it’s called in this email world. And based on your website domain, these Gmail servers, all these other servers, they basically track how spammy you are in a way, let’s call it. And the bigger the segments that you send to, the more spammy you are because you’re going to get lower open rates because they’re not specific. If I only send to my last 30 day engaged emails, I’m going to have very high open rates all the time because these are people who have opened my stuff up in the last 30 days. So the more refined we get, the higher the open rates are going to be and the lower the unsubscribe rates and therefore resulting in a higher authority of your domain and getting more deliverability long term.

Eddie Maalouf:
So I’m saying all this to say it’s not just about sending to the most people, it’s sending to the right people so that these Gmail servers and other platforms can identify that people like to open your emails. And when they identify that a lot of the people receiving the email like to open your emails, they’ll start showing in the primary inbox a lot more, and they’ll start allowing it to go through and get to the top.

Mina Elias:
I love that, man. And while you were speaking, I thought of one thing. One email I would definitely do is everyone who’s purchased from me, let’s say, like five day delay, or anyone who’s scanned the QR code, like two day delay, and I would say, hey, how’s the product? Everything good? Let me know if there’s any issues with the product. This way I can proactively prevent as many one star reviews as possible. If they’re like, oh, this tasted horrible. I’m like, okay, did you try mixing in 6oz instead of 16oz? Blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff?

Eddie Maalouf:
Yeah. And another way you can do that too, is here’s how I basically stop bad reviews. So I’ll send an email or a text and I’ll say, hey, leave us some feedback. How is the product? They click the link in the email. It’s embedded in the text. It’s going to not be embedded, it’s just going to be a link. But essentially it’s a five star system, right? If they vote four or five stars, I let them give some feedback. Cool. Five stars. And then I push them to a review page. Okay. If they give me one to three stars, I take them to a form. And so instead of pushing them to the reviews, I’m actually letting them vent. Sometimes it’s better to get it off their chest to you instead of to Amazon. Therefore saving yourself a review. You can now correct the situation. And if you do, you can say, hey, what’s your experience now? Four or five? Perfect. Send them to review. And so now you start getting all this, not only internal feedback, but you start filtering all the bad reviews out before they even happen in the first place.

Mina Elias:
I love it, man. I love it. Okay, let’s talk about making money. This is, I think, the last segment, and I think what everyone’s interested in the most, what are the sequences to make money? And I’m talking, like, you could talk about launching, you can talk about ranking, we can talk about reviews. We can talk about promotions, Black Friday, whatever. You tell me. What do you think makes the most money? How can we do it?

Eddie Maalouf:
I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that you need to sell, sell, sell to make the money in emails. Okay? In reality, that’s not the case in reality in emails. Actually, most of the money is made by telling the story. Something that you don’t get to do on Amazon is tell the story. Okay? You can talk about the product, you can talk about the benefits and the features, but how deep are you usually going into the owner’s story and why they started the brand? And all these things have become emotionally attached to the brand. You know what I mean? Like, you can do it on your listing a bit, you can do it on your a plus content a bit, but it’s not like the primary focus of what you’re doing, right? I take people, dude, who write sequences who are just like discount, discount, promo, promo, sale, sale, sale, whatever it is. I take those people and I just changed their email sequence to come as a brand, as a founder, as a story. Here is why I made Mina. Here is why I created this product. Here’s the story.

Eddie Maalouf:
Let me give you an example. So I have one here, this Middle Eastern jewelry brand. You can see here, I have like the husband and wife, and I’m basically telling the story. This is the first post purchase on a Black Friday campaign. As soon as someone buys, the first thing they read is the story. Why do we make this brand? Why do we believe in this brand? What is the good cause of our brand and selling people on the brand? Because at the end of the day, dude, when you’re on Amazon, it’s a very tough marketplace to compete in for repeat purchases, right? You’re just like another cell phone case. You’re just another supplement, you’re just another pre workout. Like, people aren’t necessarily as obsessed with your brand all the time. They’re usually obsessed with the product that you’re offering, in a way. And so email and sms is your chance to get them obsessed with the brand because then you can sell them anything else you want. And so my entire welcome sequence is a mix of brand. What is our story, why do we do it? What’s the good part? And how you’re helping the world by doing it.

Eddie Maalouf:
We give 10% of our profits away. We do this. We do this. Whatever it is, we build that trust. And then two is also explaining the process of using the product. So I’ll give you an example. We have a hair growth shampoo. It grows your hair. I use it. And it’s been working pretty well for me. I had some pretty thin hair. And our post purchase sequence, dude, we changed the entire company because every time someone made a purchase, now what we’re doing is we’re actually giving them a calendar of how to use the product over the next 60 days. Take a progress picture today, do this today, do this today. And it’s like an entire calendar where we’re keeping them updated. We’re basically building this habit, this brand, of using this product over and over, taking progress pictures, do all these things and it gets them super involved in the brand itself. And I think that’s where the real money is made, man. I think a lot of people confuse it with, like, how can I get a discount? Or how can I push a sale real quick and how can I get the quickest dollar right now?

Eddie Maalouf:
But in reality, we’re building these ecommerce brands to make money consistently, not just to make money today and take a lower margin, because I would just want to sell something today and get that high of getting purchases coming in. And so I’m all about building the brand. I didn’t used to be like this two years ago, man. I’ve come a long way since. But shockingly, that is actually the correct answer to the question. And I think a lot of people would be kind of shocked to hear that.

Mina Elias:
Yeah. And I think it makes sense because once you build the brand loyalty and brand following and they feel engaged and they feel like it’s more of a human, not like just a machine. Sell, sell. Then do, do a drop and you’re like, hey, we just launched this new product. They’re going to be like, I love this brand, I’m going to support it. Or when you ask for a review, you’re going to get a lot more engagement. Or when you do a discount because it’s prime day or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you’re going to get a lot of engagement. As opposed to, hey, we’re doing a Black Friday sale. Yeah, everyone else is doing a Black.

Eddie Maalouf:
Friday sale and I got everyone 50 texts. Yeah, minimum 50 texts, minimum 300 emails a day. It’s absolutely crazy. And correct me if I’m wrong, bro, you must be the same way. I kind of already know who I’m shopping with at Black Friday. I’m like, I want these shirts. I want Jim sharp pants. Exactly right. You have your brands and you’re like, I’m going to go buy from them. It’s not like someone’s going to go and just squeeze you out that day on black. I mean, it happens. Don’t get me wrong, you might make one impulse purchase, two max, but the majority of your money, I don’t know how much you spend, but I don’t spend much in the year. And then on Black Friday, I’ll spend like three day and I’ll just buy everything super cheap and I’ll buy from the same two, three brands that I always buy from. And I just kind of save up and I just buy those and then I’ll have an impulse, why? Oh, that thing is really cheap. I’ll buy it now. But for the most part, that’s where I’m going back. I’m going back to the brands that I like, not just the discounts that I like.

And sometimes I’ll even just be like, whatever. It’s not as discounted as I thought. I’m going to buy it anyways.

Mina Elias:
Yeah, and that’s true, man. I mean, that’s how it is for me. I will browse Amazon all day, but I know I’m planning that I’m going to buy 15 shirts and four workout shorts and shoes and stuff like that. I know exactly who I’m buying from. If I just stay top of mind in a nice way, people can come back and be like, okay, I’m running out. And instead of going looking for another electrolyte, MMA nutrition has been awesome.

Eddie Maalouf:
Yeah, no, 100%. That’s exactly the situation. I think if you let them know why you’re named MMA nutrition, what you stand for, what you believe in, what the purpose of the company is, and why you made these products a lot more, they will come back and keep buying. And here’s the thing, dude, there’s no better marketing than your own customers is the reality of the situation. The more that they believe in your brand, it becomes different. It’s like it’s sitting on their countertop at home and someone’s like, oh, what is that? And it’s the difference between them saying, oh, these are electrolytes versus. Dude, you’ve never heard of MMA nutrition. These guys are incredible. Let me tell you all about them. And that’s the difference there, dude. And it comes from the email and the sms marketing and just being very well branded about it and everything like that.

Mina Elias:
I love it, man. Dude, this has been amazing. This is very useful. Thank you for breaking down, like, the tech stack. I don’t use insert cards now. I think I’m going to go after this video and try and that. I think I’m just going to figure out, like a way local to get some stickers. I’m going to use postscript and I’ll give it a shot, man.

Eddie Maalouf:
If anyone cares to learn more about this email stuff, I’ll give you a link for like a dollar. I put together like a 40 page guide of everything. Black Friday, cyber Monday in here. Everything you need to know to be able to take advantage of it. If you built an email SMS list, I’ll give it to your audience for a dollar.

Mina Elias:
If people want to find you, where should they reach out?

Eddie Maalouf:
Right now, I’m pretty big on YouTube. I’d follow my YouTube. Since we’re on YouTube right now, it’s just Eddie Maloof. Thank you so much for having me, dude. Hopefully people got some value. And feel free to message me anytime. And if you’re a friend of Mina’s or a follower of mina’s, you’re a friend of mine, so I’ll make sure to take care of you.

Mina Elias:
Amazing, man. Peace out.