Here, we’re sharing some expert insights on what the pricing changes mean for you, and how to get the most out of the (early) spring cleaning you’ll need to do before the changes land.

So What’s Changing, and Why Does It Matter?

Starting February, Klaviyo’s pricing model is getting a major overhaul. Here’s the scoop:

• Email Plans: Pricing is shifting to a profile-based system. That means instead of being charged based on how many emails you send, you’ll pay for the number of active profiles in your account. For larger lists, this translates to higher costs with smaller volume discounts for email sends.
• SMS Plans: Prices for SMS are increasing too, reflecting rising carrier costs. However, Klaviyo has simplified the system. You won’t pay extra for SMS-consented profiles. Instead, you’ll choose an SMS package based on the credits you need, offering more clarity and flexibility.

What do Klaviyo pricing changes mean for your business? Simply put:

• Your costs now depend on list size, not activity levels.

• Paying for disengaged or inactive subscribers could drain your budget fast.

• The stakes are higher for maintaining a clean, engaged list.

But here’s the silver lining: these changes are the perfect excuse to do the list cleaning you probably should have done months ago. Here’s how we’re helping our clients win with smarter, leaner email marketing.

Tip 1: Don’t Panic and Mass Delete

The worst thing you can do right now is go scorched earth on your email list. If you overdelete, you’ll cut costs. But you could also cut potential (and even real) revenue. Because there are many reasons for a profile to be inactive. Inactive right now doesn’t necessarily mean gone for good. We all get this: 

• You see an email from a brand  you love.
• Now isn’t the time, but you’ll definitely buy again in future.
• The brand has stayed top of mind (or thereabouts), so you’re ready to buy next time.

If you mass unsubscribe profiles like this, you could be robbing them of the chance to re-engage (and robbing yourself of $).

So sure, there will be cuts. But don’t make those cuts too hastily. Dig into your data to figure out 

Tip 2: Do Clean Your List 

Not all subscribers are equal. Some may have signed up during a one-off promotion but never opened another email. Others may have used a fake or temporary email address to access a freebie. And then there are those who clicked “unsubscribe in spirit” months ago by ghosting your emails entirely.

Here’s how to clean your list without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Step 1: Understand Your Audience

Before you start pruning, get to know your subscribers:

Purchase Behavior: Who’s buying, and who’s just browsing? Prioritize keeping your buyers engaged.

Engagement Level: Segment low-engagers (occasional opens) from zero-engagers (no opens).

Active Interest: Don’t write off subscribers who ignore your emails but still visit your site.

Lifetime Value (LTV): A quiet but high-value customer might be worth re-engaging before you say goodbye.

Step 2: Make List Hygiene a Habit

Cleaning your list isn’t a one-time chore. It should be a habit – especially now that list size will mean pretty much everything if you’re on Klaviyo.

• Set a Schedule: Commit to reviewing your list every 3–6 months.
• Use Verification Tools: Platforms like NeverBounce and ZeroBounce can help identify invalid or risky emails.
• Handle Bounces: Automatically remove hard bounces and frequent soft bounces.
• Suppress the Detractors: If someone’s complaining or marking you as spam, let them go.

Pro Tip: Before deleting anyone, create a “to-be-removed” segment and export it. That way, you’ll have the data if you ever need it again. But in the meantime, these profiles won’t be bloating your bill.

Step 3: Re-Engage Before You Remove

Consider this scenario: a subscriber hasn’t opened an email in six months, but their lifetime value is off the charts. Maybe they’ve purchased five times in the past but are now taking a breather. They could be traveling, raising a newborn, or just waiting for the right product or promotion.

The key is to analyze their behavior holistically:

• Are they browsing your site or adding products to their cart?
• Have they made purchases in the past?
• Is there a pattern to their engagement, such as seasonal spikes?

Instead of cutting them loose immediately, give them a nudge. Sometimes, all it takes is a re-engagement email with a tailored offer or a witty subject line like, “Are we breaking up? Let’s fix this.”

1: Revamp Your Re-Engagement Flow

• First Email: A friendly “We miss you!” reminder.
• Second Email: Offer an incentive, like a discount or exclusive content.
• Final Email: Give a clear ultimatum: “Stay or unsubscribe.”

By the way, you can learn more about the nuts and bolts of re-engagement email flows here.

2: Explore Behavior-Based Personalization

Reference their last product viewed or category engaged for a personal touch.

3: Create Fresh, Exciting Content

Sneak peeks, exclusive previews, and new releases can reignite interest.

4: Be Transparent

Explain why they’re receiving these emails and the benefits of staying on your list.

Tip 3: Consider Alternatives

The Email Service Provider (ESP) market is still growing healthily, and it’s getting more competitive.

That’s great for buyers (like you). Vendors are competing on features and pricing, so you can afford to shop around for the best fit.

If Klaviyo pricing plans aren’t working out for you, here are some of the most popular alternatives for 2025:`

Multi-channel automation without the Klaviyo price tag. Omnisend combines email, SMS, and push notifications into a single platform, with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, pre-built workflows, and deep Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce integrations. 

Originally an SMS-first platform, Attentive has rapidly expanded into email marketing. AI-powered automation, interactive text messaging, and predictive personalization make it an excellent choice for brands that want to double down on SMS while keeping email in the mix. 

Yotpo brings together Email and SMS in one powerful platform, allowing marketers to create personalized email & text communications that drive sales and boost customer lifetime value. With a 360° view into customer data and behavior and a consolidated approach to Email & SMS, Yotpo helps create smarter, more personalized messages. Yotpo’s platform also includes Loyalty & Reviews empowering brands to connect the dots and enhance their Email and SMS campaigns even further. For brands looking to unify and strengthen their direct marketing channels, Yotpo’s integrated approach makes it a great alternative to Klaviyo.

Spring Cleaning Starts Early This Year: Strategic Email List Hygiene

At Hustler Marketing, we don’t believe in cookie-cutter solutions. Every brand’s audience is unique, and we approach list cleaning with the same tailored care as every other part of the email marketing workflow. From re-engagement flows to segmentation strategies, we help brands retain high-value subscribers while cutting the dead weight.

Remember, your email list is more than just numbers. It’s a living, breathing community. With regular maintenance, thoughtful strategies, and a dash of humor, you can keep that community thriving, ensuring that you’re getting maximum value from your Klaviyo account.

So, are you ready to Marie Kondo your list? Let’s get started.

Your Klaviyo dashboard is your best friend when it comes to figuring out what your customers are up to, what they care about, and how you can reach them more effectively.

Tracking key email marketing metrics is essential to knowing whether your email marketing is working – or if you’re working with an agency, figuring out the ROI on the email marketing services you’re getting. 

Here, we’re looking at need-to-know email marketing metrics, what they mean, and how you should be tracking them to maximize retention revenue. 

Email Marketing KPIs to Keep an Eye On (all the time, basically):

Once your email marketing channel is big enough, it will generate a LOT of data. There are many ways to slice that up, but here are the email marketing metrics to prioritize on the daily.

Let’s start with the easiest: how many people are opening your emails?

1: Email Open Rate

This might be the simplest (handiest) of email marketing metrics. Your email open rate (OR) is the percentage of subscribers who opened your emails. A bad OR could show that your subject lines work. It could also suggest problems with deliverability. 

How to Boost Your Email Open Rate

• Test different subject lines, preheaders, and sender names.
• Segment your list to target more relevant content to specific groups for better engagement.
• Regularly clean your list to ensure you’re sending each profile the type of content they’re most likely to care about.

2: Click Through Rate (CTR) & Click Rate (CR)

Click Rate (CR) is an important indicator that helps you avoid the spammer label. It calculates the percentage of people who open an email and click on a link, relative to the total number of emails you deliver. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks received compared to the total number of views or impressions. (In email marketing, these are essentially opens). CTR provides insight into the effectiveness of your email’s content after that initial attention grab. This helps you understand how compelling your email content is.

Here’s the formula for CTR:

CTR = (Total Clicks / Total Emails Delivered) * 100.

How to Interpret Click Rate and Click Through Rate

A high CR may indicate that your email subject line or preheader text is enticing enough to encourage recipients to click through, while a high CTR may indicate that your email content is engaging and relevant to your audience.

Check in on these daily, because sudden drops could be a bad sign. By tracking both metrics, you can identify areas where your email campaigns are performing well and areas that need improvement.

3: Revenue Per Recipient (RPR): Digging Deeper Than OR & CTR

Open rates and click-through rates don’t directly tell you if a campaign generated revenue. To figure that out, you need to dig a little deeper. RPR is is a key email marketing metric that measures the average revenue that comes from each person who receives an email. It helps you understand how effective your campaigns are at the individual recipient level.

Let’s imagine a Black Friday early bird sale opener email to demonstrate the calculation.

• Total Email Sends: 50,000
• Total Bounces (to exclude): 2,000
• Total Revenue: $150,000

Your RPR is is the total revenue divided by the number of valid recipients. In this case, that gives us an RPR of $3.13, meaning each recipient contributed an average of $3.13 to the total revenue.

How to Use RPR to Improve Campaigns:

1. Segment your audience: Calculate RPR for different customer segments to see where your strongest ROI lies.
2. A/B test: Compare RPR across variations of subject lines, offers, or CTAs.
3. Timing: Analyze RPR across send times and days to determine optimal email scheduling.
4. Content Optimization: Identify emails that had higher RPR and replicate what worked—whether it was specific product recommendations or scarcity-driven copy.

4: How Do You Check Email Deliverability?

None of what we have just said matters if your emails aren’t landing in primary. Email deliverability is the bedrock of an effective email marketing service. One of the easiest ways to track it is to watch average ORs and CRs. If you notice a notable decrease on either of these, it’s a good idea to check in on deliverability, and dip into other email marketing KPIs that you probably aren’t checking daily.

Let’s look at those next.

Email Marketing KPIs That Deserve a Weekly Check-In (or a deep dive when you notice anomalies)

Spam Complaints

It hurts when people don’t open your emails. But it’s even worse when they mark them as spam. If your spam rate gets too high, inbox providers may block your account or take some other action against you. Here are some mistakes that can spike your spam complaints:

• Irrelevant content that doesn’t match the interests of the readers in each segment of your list.
• Spammy email copywriting: words like “free,” “act now,” “guarantee,” or excessive capitalization and exclamation marks.
• Clickbait subject lines that don’t match the offer in the email itself.
• High sending frequency: people don’t like to receive too many emails in a short space of time.

Number of Unsubscribes

Although a high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging, it can actually be a good sign. If people are able to find the unsubscribe option and remove themselves without friction, you’re doing well in terms of email design and format. A trustworthy eCommerce store will generally get more unsubscribes than spam complaints, as consumers choose to leave the sales funnel. 

List Growth Rate

Your email list is the backbone of your email marketing efforts, and tracking its growth over time is crucial. The list growth rate shows whether your efforts to attract new subscribers and retain current ones are paying off. A stagnant or shrinking list indicates it’s time to re-evaluate your acquisition strategies. By focusing on growing your list through engaging content and smart lead generation tactics, you ensure your campaigns continue reaching new and interested audiences.

Bounce Rate

For any email campaign, it is important to check and track the bounce rate, which measures how many subscribers did not receive your email. Tracking this metric helps identify soft and hard bounces, which is essential for assessing the quality of your subscriber list and maintaining the success of your campaigns. Ideally, you want your bounce rate to stay below 1%.

Some People Track Calories. We Track Email Marketing KPIs. Day In, Day Out.

A high-ROI email marketing service needs to be effective, transparent, and continually evolving to do better. That’s the model we have built at Hustler Marketing – and it’s how we have won major industry awards.

But there’s no secret: we just stay focused on email marketing KPIs that grow our clients’ businesses. That, and or exceptionally low account manager-to-client ratio, makes us the email marketing service of choice for eCommerce brands in virtually every niche. Alongside our expertise in email marketing KPIs, we also specialize in UGC ads, providing a potent combination of retention and acquisition tactics. Contact our team to learn more about how the one-two punch of KPI-driven email marketing and UGC advertising could help you exceed your goals for the next quarter and beyond.

As a remote email marketing agency that’s been remote since before remote was cool, we get that, and we’ve learned how to be creative and collaborative across the digital divide. But we also love to connect in person. 

So we sent our rockstar Account Manager Paola Vasquez all the way from Peru to BlendJet’s California GQ to hang out, discuss email marketing strategy, and plan for the future.

BlendJet: “Big Blender Power On The Go”.

BlendJet is the OG portable blender. Their blenders are compact, efficient and convenient for on-the-go use. Their flagship BlendJet 2 features a powerful motor and battery for blending smoothies, shakes and other beverages in seconds. It’sUSB rechargeable, spill-proof and easy to clean.

Basically, it’s everything that the health-conscious professional or fitness enthusiast needs to whip up their favorite drink whenever, wherever. As a result, BlendJet is an eCommerce phenomenon, and one of the most successful stores on Shopify.

They’re also one of our longest standing email marketing clients. Paola Vasquez manages BlendJet’s account at Hustler Marketing. She is an experienced marketer pursuing a Master’s in Design from the London School of Design and Marketing. Her resume combines marketing expertise with a strong background in visual design, which makes her the ideal account manager for highly visual brands like BlendJet. 

She and her dedicated Hustler Marketing team have helped BlendJet to scale their email marketing channel, which now accounts for 40% of store revenue. And when the opportunity came up to join a strategy session to discuss email marketing strategy and brainstorm future growth plans, it was a no-brainer.

Meeting the Team at BlendJet HQ

After making the long journey from Peru, Paola drove from San Francisco to BlendJet’s headquarters in Petaluma. There, she got to see the offices, showroom, as well as a range of product models and prototypes. She especially enjoyed getting to spend time with BlendJet team members – both the ones she works with every day, and the ones she hadn’t met before. 

“I really loved meeting other members of the team, especially in roles like data analysis. It’s super helpful to get insights from them, because it helps us personalize emails more effectively and refine our overall email marketing strategy” said Vasquez.

A Deep Dive on Klaviyo AI Features

One of the most valuable parts of the session was a presentation by Klaviyo’s Principal Customer Success Manager Neil Gogate. Together with Paola and the BlendJet team, he explored Klaviyo’s new features for analytics, segmenting based on AI, and AI-driven subject lines. They also discussed ways to optimize BlendJet’s current email marketing strategy and boost key metrics like revenue per recipient. 

Strengthening Relationships for Long Term Growth

Of course, it wasn’t all work and no play. After the strategy session, Paola made a stop in LA to visit the Warner Bros Studios with BlendJet’s Daniella Reda. “We talk every day, but it makes a huge difference to spend time with your clients in person. It strengthens relationships and lays the foundation for even better collaboration”.

Hustler Marketing: the Preferred Email Marketing Agency for Brands With Edge

Hustler Marketing is a young, energetic email marketing agency that’s famous for our linchpin mindset and enviable company culture. We support awesome brands like BlendJet with a customized, award-winning email marketing strategy that boosts retention revenue and increases customer lifetime value – all fully managed and done-for-you.

Book a call with our team to find out how our unique combination of strategic account management, email marketing expertise and youthful vision could transform your brand’s email marketing agency.

But sometimes, it means literally speaking many languages. Building a multilingual email marketing channel is a smart strategic move for any brand whose customer base includes multiple countries or language zones. 

If you’re only sending emails in one language, you’re probably losing out on email revenue that’s going to competitors who are doing more to localize their email marketing content.

Sure, But My Email Service Provider Doesn’t Have a Function for This

We know. And we’re here to help.

Unlike most of the content written about multilingual email marketing, this article is 0% fluff. We won’t bore you with the usual preamble about why email marketing works. Because if you’re reading this, you already know all of that. 

But we will be spilling the tea on some vital topics that our email account managers have mastered through years of trial and error helping multinational 6-figure eCommerce brands expand their footprint:

• Issues with Email Service Providers when it comes to multilingual email marketing
• 2 solutions, with technical guidance and pros & cons
• Talent management strategies for building a strong translator network

Email Service Providers (ESPs) Aren’t Great for Multilingual Email Marketing

Imagine you’re the manager of a large supplements brand. Your main target is Germany, but you’re getting traffic and interest from Hungary and the United Kingdom. 

But you set your Shopify store up for Euros. Now you need to manage sales in 3 territories, and 3 different currencies.

Accurate attribution and reporting of email revenue was tricky enough – now it’s 3 times harder (and we haven’t even begun to talk about email translation). 

3 Countries, 3 Online Stores. Sorted?

The obvious quick fix is to set up a new store in each country. That solves one problem, but creates new ones.

Firstly, you can only integrate your ESP (let’s say Klaviyo) with one online store. Some ESPs offer multi-store integration, but Klaviyo doesn’t:

Switch From Klavyio to a New Email Service Provider? Hold Your Horses…

There’s a reason everyone loves Klaviyo. It’s the reigning category leader in key areas like email design & functionality. It’s also hard to beat when it comes to using user behavior data to segment effectively and provide deeper personalization. And after all, the purpose of multilingual email marketing is ultimately to make emails feel – and be – more relevant and personal for each recipient. 

So let’s imagine that in the scenario we outlined above, the brand is using Klaviyo and doesn’t want to change.

What can they do to balance that with their multilingual, multinational expansion plans?

How to Use Klaviyo for Multilingual Email Marketing & eCommerce Localization

Luckily, we’ve squared this circle for some of our large multinational clients. Here are 2 ways of doing it, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Solution A: Separate Klaviyo Accounts for Each Country

With one of our clients, we have successfully set up a unique Shopify store for each country. Each of these accounts has its own Klaviyo account, like this:

Benefits

With this approach, you don’t need to worry about integrations, because each country manages its own online store and Klaviyo account.

You also no longer have issues with currencies. And it’s relatively easy to track results for each country to understand how each individual store is performing.

Challenge

But there are drawbacks:

• Logging in and out of different country accounts to schedule campaigns.
• Difficulty in reporting due to the need to manually aggregate data from multiple accounts.

So it works, but you sometimes need to work harder to get the big picture. 

Solution B: Keeping Everything Under 1 Klaviyo Account (Requires Code)

The other is more complex, and takes some custom development. We’ve built this for another multinational store that ships all around Europe.

They have everything under one Klaviyo account, using a custom integration that brings all their data together through an API. You can also use an ESP’s tagging system to separate results from different countries once you have everything under one account.

This one also works, but it’s not so easy to get up and running.

Benefits:

• Easier management with a single Klaviyo account.
• Cost-effective to maintain one big Klaviyo plan.

Challenges:

• Complexity in setting up custom development.
• Difficult to get country-by-country data.

To pick the right option for your multilingual email marketing, you need to think through a couple of complex issues. For example, if you go with Solution A, you will need at least one person to work full-time on aggregating and making sense of data in multiple siloes. For Solution B, you will need in-house software development expertise to get the custom build right.

Before we get to the issue of email translation…

We’d love to tell you which one is right for your brand. But we can’t. Because we don’t know you yet.

Get yourself a free consultation and we’ll figure it out with you.

But What About Email Translation?

Once you have a setup that can handle multilingual email marketing, you’ll need people who can adapt your content into a new language.

And we say adapt because simple, word-for-word translation is not the way to do this.

You actually need an approach to translation that takes style, tone, and cultural context seriously – in other words, transcreation.

What is Transcreation? Is That Really a Word?

Basically, it’s translation + creation – a way of translating a piece of copy from one language into the other, but changing it so that it resonates emotionally with the reader in the new language. Without this, you can end up with bland or incoherent email translations that sound very “second language” – which is terrible for engagement. 

The problem is that effective email translation (or transcreation) requires mastery of both languages, and mastery of the craft of copywriting. But in reality, most translators aren’t actually copywriters. So how do you find translators who fit the bill?

Email Translation 101: Finding the Right Translators to Work on Your Emails

Through years of trial and error, we’ve learned some effective strategies for sourcing translators for our multilingual email clients. 

Here are our favorite places to find talent, and best practices for vetting them. 

Where: Upwork & LinkedIn

We think Upwork is the best platform for sourcing translators. Here’s why:

• You can easily see reviews and ratings on each profile, so it’s easy to predict whether you’ll be a match.
• You can headhunt, so you don’t need to wait for talent to apply. This is crucial when you need to scale up in a hurry.
• The platform is HUGE. Over 18 million freelancers use Upwork to connect with businesses, so you have a large talent pool to work with.

TIP: add “copywriting” as a keyword in your search, so that you get translators with copywriting experience.

LinkedIn is also a good place to find talent, but you’ll need to add assessments as a filter. You can ask one of your in-house translators to read these assessments and rate them according to how well they have transmitted the message. 

Quality Assurance in Multilingual Email Marketing

As an email marketing agency, we have had to make a choice between direct sourcing and working with a translation agency.

We chose direct sourcing early on, because it’s much more cost-effective (up to 10x). That leaves us with enough budget to do proper QA for our multilingual clients. 

We have built strong relationships with a network of experienced translators who understand both their target language, and the art of email copywriting. We draw on that network to service large eCommerce stores with a global footprint that covers 15 languages (and counting).

If you’re looking to optimize your setup for multilingual email marketing and effective eCommerce localization, we’re here to help. Contact our team to learn more about our process and how it’s powering ambitious brands on a mission to connect with audiences around the globe. 

Defining pop-ups

A pop-up is a small window that appears on your screen while browsing a website. They are a great way to ask for information about your shoppers and create new points of contact with your customers. Their main purpose is to help you gather new leads by growing your email and/or SMS marketing lists. However, their benefits are many:

1. Grab people’s attention
2. Improve conversion rate
3. They are completely customizable
4. Help personalize your marketing experience

Email Popup Types

There are different kinds of pop-ups and functionalities that you can leverage to increase your subscriber growth. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the most popular options available.

Regular Multi-Step Popup: Here you can have 2 or 3 steps. The first one is usually the email input step, the second one can be a phone number input and the last step will be the “thank you” or success step. This is great if you are looking to increase both your email and SMS lists.

Survey-like popup: This popup type is great for brands that are looking to expand the information they keep on their leads’ profiles in order to customize their marketing experience.  Don’t be afraid to ask for your customers’ age, gender, style, or goals, depending on what your brand offers, and use this data to create personalized flows and segments.

Floating button/teaser/dynamic popup: When a user goes into your website, sees the popup, and closes it, a little button will go to a corner of the screen so the user can open it up again and sign up instead of the popup being lost until their next session. We have seen great results with this dynamic popup. 

Key elements for a successful email popup

Attractive offers

A popup can be an intrusive experience for many. However, if your popup includes interesting information for your website browser, like a special discount,  they’ll be glad your sign-up form popped up on their screen. That’s the power of including an attractive offer on your email capture popup. However, this is actually very common. Since people are used to getting these, we need to find new and interesting ways to present our offers.

Strong headlines and engaging copy

Your popup copy will do all the heavy lifting when we talk about sparking action. So make sure your copy:

• Includes strong headlines that quickly grab the attention of your customers.
• Is clear and concise. Don’t over or underexplain anything. 
• Includes a clear, so the user knows exactly what you want them to do. 
• Sets expectations. Do not only mention the discount you are offering but make sure you tell your potential subscribers what they can expect to land in their inbox if they sign up.

Eye-catching design

Your popup needs to stand out from the crowd and grab enough attention to prevent visitors from hitting the close button before they leave their email and/or phone number. So, make sure your email capture popup design is on-brand. 

Your popup also needs a good and well-thought image-to-text ratio to avoid boring your customers with too much text or confusing them with too much imagery. Spend some time thinking about how you want to present your products, which are some of your best-performing pictures, and what you want to highlight in the design.

Our best tips and tricks for email popups (with examples)

Noticeable but not intrusive

This is a popup one of our Hustler teams created for a premium knife brand. Sharina, the account manager behind the brand, shared with us the elements that make this a very successful email capture popup.

• A teaser is used to be noticeable but not intrusive for the browsing experience of the users. This way, users can access the popup at their convenience. Also, the popup appears from the bottom of the page instead of suddenly popping up in the middle of the page, which is less disruptive.
• After testing different offers, a free gift worked better than a % discount. The said gift is illustrated in a fun and animated way, which gives the popup a nice push.
• The brand’s story inspired the design, so it’s coherent with the overall store’s image.

Want to know how this popup does? Here’s a screenshot of the results it has gotten in Klaviyo. 

On average, the submit rate for this popup is 7.25% which surpasses the 2,92% submit rate Klaviyo benchmark by 148%. Incredible!

Spark curiosity with a mystery discount

For this apparel brand, our best email strategists got together to create a mystery discount popup. Christina, the account manager for this brand explains the thinking behind it:

• The mystery discount drives website users to leave their contact information. Yes, they know they will get a discount if they subscribe, but the excitement of wondering: “will I get a 10% or a 20% OFF discount” is what intrigues people and makes the popup super well performing. 
• In terms of design, this resulted from a month-long A/B test between using product pictures vs. model pictures in the popup. In the end, the product version was the best performing one, making it the final option. This shows how important it is to get to know your customer and what they like.
• Finding a perfect combination of settings for the popup behavior is essential. Here at Hustler, we run frequent A/B tests to make sure we optimize these settings as much as possible.

The results? An average 6.8% submit rate (132% above the Klaviyo benchmark). Go mystery discount!

Make SMS opt-ins easier

If you’re starting to use SMS as a marketing channel, but you have already built up a list of engaged email subscribers, make it easier for them to sign up to your SMS program too. You can do this by creating a one-step popup that will appear only to your email subscribers. In the sign-up form, instead of having an input field for email and another one for SMS, keep just the SMS one, so your email subscribers are just one step away from becoming SMS VIP profiles.

How well does this popup work? Numbers never lie. The submit rate is 11.2%.

Pro-tips

1. Ask for extra information in your popup (age, size, gender, style, goals) in order to be able to personalize their marketing experience with your brand even further
2. Connect your super popup to a Welcome Series in order to push conversions from your new leads.

Do you want to learn more about the true power of Hustler popups? Find out how we got 8 eCommerce stores with an average 716% increase in sign-ups (and a 1,563% average increase in Welcome Flow attributed revenue). Or are you ready to take your list growth to a whole new level? Book a free call with us.

1. The quality of your purchased list will lead to lower open rates

The success with email marketing doesn’t lie in having a big list, but rather a list of the right people. If the quality of your list isn’t good, then your email performance will be affected.   They are probably not interested and won’t like receiving the emails you put a lot of effort into.  If a contact has never heard from you before, chances are that they are not going to open your email. Not only will it be a waste of time but will affect your email performance. Your bounce rate will be high and your open rates will drop, which means your deliverability will be affected.  The opposite of what you were expecting, right? 

2. Sending emails to purchased lists will lead to higher spam rates

Buying an email list will definitely help increase one of your metrics, but it is the one you want to keep low: spam rates. 80% of promotional emails fall into the spam folder of your inbox! In fact let’s do a little test. Go into your SPAM folder right now and notice those emails. Notice anything from a brand you may have transacted with or opted in for a newsletter from? Likely not and that’s why they’re in spam.  Algorithms are smart enough

If the recipient is getting emails from a sender they never heard or consent before, it is more likely that he ends up marking them as spam and now you will really have a problem. And that’s not the worst part. Email algorithms are smart enough to establish a pattern between solicited emails and the kind of emails that are routinely marked spam, and even if it’s your first time sending out an email blast to a purchased list, the chances of almost all of them hitting the spam inbox are pretty high. What a waste of all that effort and money?

3. The performance of purchased lists will affect your organic list too

In email marketing, most metrics are interlinked. If you have a part organic and part purchased list, the poor performance of the emails to the purchased lists will eventually trickle down to your overall reputation and start affecting the performance of the emails to the organic list. To put it in simpler terms, when an email provider notices high spam rate and low open rate from a certain email domain (because of the purchased lists as described in the above points) it’ll start to penalise your account by putting your organic emails into the spam folder too.  Which means your overall ORs or Open Rates will take a nosedive, and unfortunately you may never be able to recover from it.

4. Sending emails to purchased lists violates GDPR and other laws

Even if somehow you manage to circumvent deliverability and miraculously land in the primary inboxes, the laws won’t look very kindly at you. As you know GDPR laws in Europe and similar email laws elsewhere mandate that your email list consists of people who have explicitly consented to receiving emails from you. Sending an email to anyone who has not opted in to receiving emails from you amounts to violation of GDPR and other laws.

It’s 2021 and privacy is really important for the customers and you could get in trouble if you don’t respect consent. By emailing without consent you could be violating the law and the cost of the penalty could be really high. 

5. Sending emails to purchased lists will lead to Soft and Hard Bounces

Purchased lists could have outdated email addresses, ones with spelling mistakes or emails that don’t exist! Sending emails to a large number of non-existent email addresses will lead to Hard Bounces while sending emails to temporarily unavailable email inboxes will lead to Soft Bounces, two metrics which affect email deliverability in the long run. The higher the number of bounces, the higher your spam score. Which agains boils down to lower future open rates and high spam score.

6. Most Email Marketing Platforms will suspend your account for using lists from a non-native source

This may be the most important point in all the reasons why you shouldn’t buy or acquire an email list.

As you know most ESPs like Klaviyo or Omnisend are integrated with Shopify and collect user emails automatically based on a transaction, opt-in pop or other on-site methods. For eg. the minute a customer completes a purchase on an ecommerce site, their email is automatically entered into a list. These emails flow into the system organically and hence are considered legit.

Contrast this with “importing a list” which is what you’d use if you were to create a list with the contacts you’ve purchased. According to Omnisend’s Terms of Use Chapter 9.4, “you should import, access, or use in any other way only permission-based subscriber lists in your email marketing activities through our platform. Purchased, third party, or rented lists must not be used.” There are reports of many ecommerce stores getting warnings or getting their account suspended altogether for using purchased lists.

7. You might face social media shaming for using purchased lists

Not only will purchased lists affect your email deliverability, overall performance, lead to compliance and legal issues, but they also stand to put you at a great risk of being called out on social media.

It would take just one disgruntled user who was a part of the purchased list to notice your unsolicited emails and post about it on various online forums like Twitter, Facebook groups etc. If you’re a reasonably well-known brand, this is a huge loss of reputation and goodwill and definitely not worth taking the risk for.

In conclusion, there is no easy way out to get subscribers and the consequences could be really bad in the long and short run. Instead of buying an email list that could cause you so many troubles, try following the best practices to build your list such as sign up form on your website, a  pop-up with discounts to the ones that subscribe, promote in social media and so on. 

Besides, you have to understand that quicker is not always better. It may take longer to grow your list but you will be reaching the audience you want to, you will be building a long-term brand by nurturing your contacts and your results will start reaching their true potential.

Sure, you already have an email list made up of your existing customers, but as an ecommerce store you need to constantly keep adding more emails to the list to grow your email revenue. Plus, accounting for the churn of emails due to unsubscribes, you need to backfill.  Even so, the excitement for your offers and brilliant campaigns can wear off after a few campaigns on your existing audience base, so you should always be targeting new, fresh subscribers.

But how can you get those fresh subscribers flocking to you consistently? The trick lies in the right timing, right incentive and of course the right strategy depending on your store goal, budget and relevance. Here are some of the ways you can grow your email list, incentivise your website visitors as well as get email signups from non-visitors using some well-known as well as offbeat techniques.

1. Offer a strong discount offer to sign up

Turning visitors into subscribers is at the very top of the email marketing funnel, and these pop-ups are designed to do just that.

This one’s really basic but it’s surprising how many ecommerce stores actually don’t have a welcome pop-up to collect emails. The welcome popup should have an attractive discount coupon to entice even casual visitors to an ecommerce website to submit their email address. They may or may not make an immediate purchase, but with their email in your armour, you can start with the lifecycle of email marketing with them beginning with a welcome flow to campaigns.

2. Use exit intent pop-up forms

Just like a welcome flow at the entry of a user to your website, have an “exit intent” pop up when it looks like the user is going to drop. Klaviyo and many third party apps like Privy allow you to have a custom exit popup enabled on your store, that track the user’s click movements, and the second it looks like the click is hovering towards the “x” or the close sign, the exit popup makes an entrance (!) offering them a special discount or perk if they subscribe to your email list. If you’re successful enough, these forms should land you new potential customers, who could eventually convert after your campaigns drop in their inbox.  Here at Hustler Marketing we build our clients’ pop-ups with Klaviyo. They’re astoundingly easy to build and use, and not only that—they provide you with insightful data about your customers. Just make sure to keep your message simple, add a little mystery and, of course, include a mention of your product and brand.

3. Offer content or regular pieces of useful information

B2b businesses use the “lead magnet” approach all the time, but even as an ecommerce store, you can attract users that were not particularly looking to buy from the store but for a specific information or query. Sometime it’s not just a discount or an offer that encourages the user to submit their email but rather the promise of the information they could receive for free on their email. For example, this beauty store has a weekly “beauty guide” and all one has to do is submit their email to receive free beauty and fashion advice delivered straight to their email. One of our clients Eternity Modern offers  a curated “buying guide” that offers great design tips and information on buying furniture.

4. Host online webinars or virtual consultation sessions and collect emails to sign them up

Even as an ecommerce store, you can create virtual sessions, webinars or other events that need an email sign up. The idea is to think creatively. For example, if you’re an online store selling baby clothing, you could host a monthly “Mom meetup” where you invite an expert like a nutritionalist or child behaviourist and attract new moms to attend the session. A webinar can be an amazing opportunity to gain access to a wide, relevant audience and also to build engagement in the long run. An amazing example of a list growth hack from the lingerie store Curvy Kate that organizes virtual “bra fitting consultations” which assumably don’t just work great to collect emails but to upsell the product to the registered user based on their fitting report!

5. Organize email signup contests, giveaways and sweepstakes

This might be one of the easiest ways to engage visitors into becoming subscribers because everyone loves themselves some free goodies from brands they like. And the best part? You can use contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways to drive your social media followers to your website and then collect their email. Use your social media accounts to host a free giveaway in exchange for contact information. Encourage entrants to click through to your website and sign up using their email address.  In order to keep your list clean, fresh, and growing consistently, you can even use this tactic once a month to ensure new subscribers keep flowing in. Don’t be afraid to give things away! You’ll end up gaining much more than what it costs you. 

6. Host an online quiz and send the detailed answers on email

Online quizzes are really popular and stimulate the user’s curiosity and ego depending on the topic. Have a light hearted quiz on your website that’s relevant to your niche and while you should give out the score on the page, a clever way to get the player’s email from the activity could be to send out a detailed answer sheet or a personality report based on their answers emailed to them.

7.  Create a sense of an exclusive “member’s online” community

This strategy can work well to make your visitors sign up with a sense of joining an exclusive member’s only community that’s privy to special offers, discounts, freebies and useful content.

8. Offer a small-value freebie on a user just entering an email 

Sure, sending a freebie to everyone who enters their email may sound like a foolhardy proposition, but hey think of the Customer Lifetime Value here. Customer acquisition does cost a pretty penny no matter what the channel. But if you could create an attribution-based rule and make a “Freebie popup” just for an audience that’s less likely to buy, it may be worth getting an email for. Also, another great hack to leverage here is to offer to send a freebie, but ask the user to just cover the shipping costs. Not ideal yes, but better than burning thousands of dollars on shipping to non-paying customers/

9. Collect emails in your store

It’s a back-to-the-basics tip, but if you’re lucky enough to own a physical store, you can make good use of your purchasers’ and visitors’ contact information. They can automatically become subscribers to your mailing list. Make sure your sales team is aware of this opportunity, and don’t let them waste the chance to grow the number of inboxes your campaigns can land in. 

Our bonus tip? Be as creative as you can while you’re upgrading your email list. Remember: clean list + new fresh subscribers means more $$. Good luck on your journey!

Growing an email list is no easy task, especially as privacy concerns and advertising competition increase. The most effective method is to drive traffic to an online property like a website, lander or social media page. Then present an enticing email capture form.

For years, email captures were a static website element. Webmasters would place them at the top, middle or bottom of a page, perhaps on every page. Their success was tied entirely to the appeal of their artistry and the strength of their offer.  

Enter the marketers’ secret weapon, and all its controversy: the popup.

A form of “Interruption Marketing,” it literally — but only for an instant — seizes control of the target’s computer screen and forces them to accept or reject an offer.  

Marketers, in turn, seized on popups as the ultimate email capture because their results were undeniable. According to a case study by OptiMonk, companies like BitNinja got 65% more leads and saw a 114% improvement in their subscriber rates. This is all due to a simple popup. In fact, Aweber reports that a pop-up outperformed sidebar opt-in conversions by 1375%. According to Sumo’s test of 1.75 billion, merely average popups convert at a remarkable rate of 3.09%. 

Despite this, many companies won’t use popups due to their negative reputation. Herein lies Permission Marketing’s Popup Paradox: marketers interrupt visitors to acquire permission to make contact at will, using a vehicle that is universally reviled in survey after survey. And visitors regularly comply!

Why? 

Popup Fans Say This

Pro-Popuppers conclude that visitors must be enticed by the offer and that the interruption is too brief to offend. After all, they willingly entered the website on their own. In fact, they likely even entered the site’s keyword phrases into a search engine and then selected its very link from among a list of competitors’. 

Therefore, they must have some interest in the offering, especially if the pop-up has now provided a discount or some other compelling incentive. Plus, popup complaints are relatively rare. (And 4.01% of web visitors actually convert through a popup).

But Popup Haters Say This

Anti-Interrupters fire back that truly compelling offers shouldn’t require mouse manipulation by an in-your-face popup to seal the deal. After all, if popups are so great, how come not a single consumer survey ever reveals demand for more? And why should the interrupted extend the interruption further by taking the trouble to volunteer feedback? No, their impact is much more insidious than a mere rant: they sap brand loyalty, diminish the shopping experience, and nix recommendations to friends.

Aggressive sales tactics work every day, but that doesn’t mean we should always use them. What role does huckstering have, especially in Reputation Marketing,

• for brands that carefully position themselves as a social enterprise welcoming visitors with freely available resources? 
• for brands who regularly submit themselves to scrutiny on every social platform?

 Sure, popups can accrue reluctant signups. But their value will never outweigh the reputation damage, disappointment and, most of all, the lost referral-based revenue they cause.

Sounds like a convincing rebuttal, right? Except it’s wrong. 

Is the Popup Just the New Commercial Break?

Anti-Interrupters forget a fundamental covenant between webmasters and visitors: the internet  needs advertising. Yes, Permission Marketing and Reputation Marketing are still vital principles, but they inform the “how” of popups, not the “why.” 

For generations we’ve accepted Interruption Marketing, starting with its earliest form, commercial breaks.  Commercials perform the valuable service of reducing the monthly content bill we would otherwise all have to pay. And, yet, consumers rarely line up for more.

Popups are a necessary response to the anonymity of the Internet which puts visitors at a distinct advantage over brands. Like a welcome discount, it’s okay for the initial meeting, but, over the long-term, the interchange of the Internet must become a two-way street. At least some of the visitors must self-select in order to pay for the costs of keeping the website open to the public. 

Popups simply trade an incentive in exchange for the recipient’s willingness to introduce themselves, a vital element of commerce since its invention. In fact, while critics deride the erosion of privacy online, only the Internet’s invention has made nearly anonymous commerce possible in the first place.

Finally, citing the modern Permission and Reputation adaptations of marketing while ignoring the newly available quantitative metrics that makes either of  them possible is specious. Unsent recommendations and phantom referral business simply contribute to a non-falsifiable argument that doesn’t stand up to the real data and dollars we see daily from popups. 

In Case it Isn’t Obvious, We’re Pro-Popup (With Some Caveats)

So be a Pro-Popupper unapologetically. But with respect for the tenets of enlightened ecommerce, including Permission and Reputation Marketing, that treats prospects carefully and respectfully while always delivering great value. (Read: Don’t be annoying.)

And be creative. “Sign up for emails” isn’t the most effective way to build your list, although it’s one of the most common pitches. Give prospects a reason to sign up. Most eCommerce companies play the “exchange” game. Give me your email address and I will give you something valuable in return. 

Let’s look at some concrete examples. 

#1: Offering a discount (percentage off or money off) to get your email address

The image below depicts Adidas’ strategy: “Sign up for news and get 15% off.”

#2: The Yes/No popup

Digital Marketer, however, creates a binary decision tree (see the image below) for the question “Would you like an ultimate list of blog post ideas?”:

• “Yes – I want free content ideas”
• “No – I’ve never had writer’s block”. 

Can you think of some way of how you can use this strategy for your own store? 

#3: Offer a free ebook/gift/training course

Asking for an email address seems especially innocuous when it’s in conjunction with sending the accountholder a premium they want to receive (see example below).

#4: Improve your lander’s conversion rates by hiding its form inside your popup.

Form fields tend to reduce lander conversion rates, so moving them into your popup like Smart Passive Income author 

Pat Flynn does (see image below) improves signups. Also, by making the popup only available by request, users are more easily engaged because they feel more in control. This is the opposite of being surprised by an unexpected popup.

#5: Offer a free consultation

Prospects have come to your site and looked around, but they haven’t bought, so they might need help getting off the fence. A popup that books an appointment for a consultative sales close or even just a Q&A session can be very effective at boosting revenue.

Finally, base your creative decisions on the data. You can track pop-up performance with Klaviyo:

Go to Dashboard > Analytics > Forms Overview to find all sorts of information regarding your pop-up.

Has a popup ever really surprised you, either in performance or in creativity? Comment below to share the inspiration. And speaking of inspiration, there’s lots more of that in the images we’ve collected for you below. Not all of them are from the eCommerce world, but you never know what will inspire you the most!

Time to Call In the Popup Pros?

You knew this part was coming. But we decided not to put in in a popup, because, well, you’ve already read this far.

Building lists and turning them into revenue is our bread and butter at Hustler Marketing. We got our start as an email marketing agency, and we’ve since built a range of services that go hand-in-hand with great emails, including eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Our team is obsessive (we really mean that) about building rich, engaging on-page experiences that carry users’ attention right from an email click through to checkout. Get in touch with our team for a free consultation about your brand, your goals, and how we can help you get there.

It might seem like an impossible task to get a decent number of emails if you’re starting from zero. But it’s not, as long as you remember that there’s no single way to win over a critical mass.

Rather, it’s a combination of many tactics. Each works together incrementally over time to build your list well beyond what you thought possible. Here’s a walk-through of the key ingredients in our formula—plus one to avoid—based on the discoveries we’ve made while steadily growing email lists.

Key Tactics for Growing Your Email List

• Sign-up forms on your website 📋
  These include sign-up forms embedded in your website, like in the footer. Additionally, you should definitely use pop-ups—start with a welcome pop-up and add others, such as an add-to-cart pop-up. Motivate customers to share their email by offering incentives like discounts.

• Leverage your existing customers 🛒
  Most customers provide their email during checkout. These emails are stored in your eCommerce platform, server, or perhaps a spreadsheet. Gather these emails and import them into your Email Service Provider (ESP).
• Utilize Facebook 📱
  Did you know you can create a sign-up form on your Facebook page? It can even be placed in your page menu for easy access. Many popular ESPs integrate with Facebook. For example, Klaviyo allows you to add subscribers from Facebook Lead Ad Forms directly to a list in Klaviyo and sync audiences for targeted ads.

What to Avoid

• Do not buy email lists 🚫
  Buying email lists might seem like the quickest way to gain new contacts, but it’s risky. Purchased lists often contain outdated or inaccurate addresses and may not align with your target audience. This can harm your email deliverability. If you must buy a list, ensure you understand its source and segment it carefully.

These are just a few main ways to gather new emails for your list. If you’d like to know more, comment below, and we’ll provide additional strategies!

Augustinas Pocevicius and Thomas McClintock
Hustler Marketing