Jimmy Kim is disrupting a billion dollar industry

Jimmy is founder and CEO of Sendlane, a unified email, SMS and reviews platform that places tech consolidation and consumer journeys at the center of how they think about retention marketing and is my latest guest on the Bitesized podcast.

Consolidation of marketing capabilities and mar-tech is something I really believe in. It’s why my agency is full service: creative, media buying, landing pages, email/sms all connected, working together. It’s more efficient. Fights against fragmentation in strategy, execution and measurement.

It’s an ethos shared by Jimmy. One of the quotes I loved from the episode spoke to why he is building Sendlane and what drives his vision for the platform:

“I’m solving for the marketer”

Other highlights from the episode:

• Jimmy's journey from car sales to in-house brand partner, to founding Sendlane

• How Sendlane was born out of an internal need & tool created for his own companies

• Why Sendlane? Solving data delays & creating one unified, consolidated platform.

• Email first, then SMS & now reviews, but they're still building.. what next and what informs how he thinks about product development.

• The mindset of an entrepreneur that gave Jimmy the confidence to launch Sendlane and take on billion dollar companies

• Avoiding shiny object syndrome.

• How to build a community and where email and sms come into play

Listen on SPOTIFY

Prefer to watch and listen? Watch below:

Your BFCM Retention Marketing Playbook

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge moments for brands.

A lot is written about offers, creative, ads… but show some love to your current customers! Rewarding loyal customers with exclusive offers or early access strengthens customer loyalty and LTV.

Bucket #1: Campaigns

Inboxes during this time are a war zone. Make your campaigns strong and stand out against the rest. Don’t send a campaign just to send one because everyone else is doing it. Our retention team laid out some of their favorite and proven BFCM campaigns that WORK. Steal them.

• Early Access

  • Provide early access to sales exclusively for your SMS subscribers, these are your VIPs.

  • Send a campaign to your email subscribers and create FOMO by outlining the deals with the CTA to sign up for SMS to get first dibs.

    • Pro-Tip: This not only grows your SMS list, BUT it also gives email subscribers the opportunity to choose their communication preference from your brand.

• Loyalty Program

  • If you have a loyalty program, this is your time to lean into it. Instead of slashing your prices or offering steep discounts that hurt your margin, build campaigns around bonus point days, exclusive point redemptions for products, or even to turn in points for exclusive sale access.

• Subscription

  • Your brand has a subscription program - recurring monthly revenue is a WIN. Target non-subscription customers AND your 2+ purchasers (non-subscription) with larger discounts on a 3 month subscription minimum. Build their routine during the busiest shopping season of the year.

  • Discount ideas:

    • Your first month FREE or 50% off

    • Sign up for 2 months, get your 3rd month at X% off

    • Add in a complimentary item to their subscription

• Resends

  • Resend your sale email, every single one. Change the Subject Line and Pre-header and create a new segment specific to that send’s non-openers + subscribers who opened but did not click.

• Plain-text

  • Lean into plain text email over beautifully branded designs to help better inbox placement and deliverability.

• SMS Short code

  • If you have over 20K SMS subscribers, migrate to a 5-digit short code and make your life easier. Your campaign messages won’t be delayed during this heavy sending period.

Bucket #2: Flows

Mailbox money, as we like to call it. Our flows are working for us, not against us. Haven’t updated your email marketing or even SMS marketing flows in 1 year? Now is the time to do so.

• Abandoned Cart + Browse Abandonment

  • These flows should be your top revenue drivers and need to sit within your BFCM strategy because it’s not remarketing the deals, it’s not a sale email - it’s focused on closing the deal with that subscriber. You’re leaving money on the table if you either 1) don’t have an Abandoned Cart or Browse Abandonment flow 2) it’s not optimized for mobile conversion 3) you’re not offering an incentive at the end of the flow as one last grab.

    • Email 1 = Reminder

    • Email 2 = Deadline

    • Email 3 = Reminder #2

    • Email 4 = Last chance with stacked promotion

• Welcome Flow

  • Ideally, you’re going to want to create a net new pop-up during BFCM to segment out these leads and talk to them differently than your existing customer base. Build out a unique welcome flow specifically for BFCM deals + high-level education on your brand + push the incentive they signed up for.

    • Pro-tip: Create a new list connected to this pop-up for post holiday retargeting campaigns. Build your list in October with a pop up catered to ONLY email + SMS subscribers will receive BFCM exclusive access.

Bucket #3: List Clean + Segmentation

Maximize your efforts with a clean, engaged, ready to receive emails + SMS list. Specifically for email, you don’t want to pay for delivery on emails that are hitting spam.

• List Clean

  • Spend October cleaning your list to avoid clogged inboxes and poor deliverability.

• Segmentation

  Tailor your efforts to suit each individual in your list rather than a batch and blast.

  • Segment #1: Abandoned Cart + Browse Abandonment non-purchasers past 275 days - target BFCM sales

  • Segment #2: Engaged 365 Days

    • Has opened or clicked email 2+ times in the last year, has not purchased.

  • Segment #3: Non-Purchasers All-Time

  • Segment #4: Purchasing Buckets

    • Pro-tip: Create segments for your past purchasers based on their AOV and/or total lifetime $ spent.

      • Example: Subscriber who has spent $500 in the past year with your brand will get a different email than the subscriber who spent $200.

      • Why? Do this to target your audience with the spending power you know they have. Upsell + cross sell your big spender and provide complimentary items to upsell to your lower spenders.

Bonus Tip:

• Change your sender address during BFCM. You have a higher chance standing out with a more personalized sending address than previously, especially if the subscriber has marked your email as spam or junk.

  • Example: blackfridayonly at your brand dot com VS hello @ your brand dot com

Let’s talk Thumbstop Ratio 

I may be miscrediting here, but the first time I heard this phrase was David Hermann on Twitter. WTF is it? Thumbstop ratio measures the effectiveness of your ads based on the ads ability to stop the scroll calculated by video views over 3 seconds (3-second video plays + impressions x 100).

It’s why so much emphasis is put on the ‘hook’ within direct response marketing.

You have that first 3 seconds to capture someone's attention, and stop the death scroll.

If you can't capture people's attention in those first 3 seconds the rest of your creative isn't ever going to get viewed.

It’s one of the metrics within Motion, our creative analytics platform have within their Motion Metrics and is the first place to start when looking to optimize your creative for better performance.

A consistent challenge I see is even if you know you need to test more hooks & optimize for that initial 3 seconds to increase your thumbstop, knowing HOW… that’s where the art and science of creative strategy and execution comes in.

Our friends at Motion are here to help.

A weekly newsletter on the art and science of creative strategy, called… Thumbstop. I had a preview of some of the content and it’s packed with practical and actionable information to help you develop creative to increase not just your thumbstop, but your creative performance overall including a special series on creative angles working right now in DTC, all vetted by experts spending over $200M per month on Meta and other platforms.

If you're a creative strategist, media buyer, and want to get better performing creative across Meta, TikTok, YouTube, it’s a must read.

Be sure to subscribe HERE

The best advice for marketers

People first, platforms second.

Understanding people, how they make decisions, what drives action and how to influence these things will have more impact on results than any platform tip, trick or hack.

A must read for any marketer is Influence by Robert Cialdini

Content Recommendations

• As a die hard Manchester United fan, David Beckham was a hero of mine growing up. His new Netflix documentary is masterfully shot, and tells a raw and real account of what it took for ‘Becks’ to grow up under the limelight and the pressures of being a global superstar. And yes, I did copy the mohawk hairstyle.

• Would you pay for no ads on your Instagram feed? Meta are reportedly considering a monthly subscription for an ad-free social experience. Read more HERE

• Nike is often held up as one of the examples of how to build a brand. From their products to their marketing. I’m sure most of us have read Shoe Dog. Ben and David who host the Acquired podcast broke it all down in this episode .. fascinating insights on what it really took to build the Nike we all know today.

• Make TikToks, not ads. Learn from TikTok how, HERE

• Meta has unveiled it’s first generative AI features for advertisers allowing you to use AI for ad creation including AI backgrounds, image expansion, copy iteration. Could this start to change the requirements for ad creative shops?

That’s a wrap!

Next week I’m outlining our exact structure for producing high converting landing pages, lessons on entrepreneurship and building a brand with Taylor Offer, CEO of clothing brand FEAT, ad reviews across our agency clients: the winners and the losers.

Thank you so much for subscribing & reading!