#98 Adam Kitchen From Magnet Monster: Stop Telling Your Customer What to Do

None of us like being told what to do. Especially when we’re shopping! The key to keeping your customers happy is in getting to know them inside out. But, how does one go about that? Do we stop telling customers to sign up, how and where do you listen to what your customers want?

Find out in today’s episode of the Ecom show. Join our founder, Daniel Budai, in conversation with Adam Kitchen. Adam Kitchen is the founder of Magnet Monster, a UK-based agency providing experiential email marketing services to e-commerce businesses.

Tune in to hear Daniel and Adam discuss:

• Adam’s journey with Magnet Monster
• The Success of using Lead Magnets to attract customers
• Data-driven email marketing
• Effective e-commerce strategies to attract customers

Adam’s Journey With Magnet Monster

Adam started his e-commerce journey quite young at the tender age of 17. He first ventured into digital marketing and e-commerce by selling nutritional supplements online. Back in the days when everything was custom-coded and built from scratch. And it was still a relatively novel thing.

“I was actually really interested in content marketing and community building. And that was the main focus of my digital marketing experience for the company I was working with in the UK. And email was always involved in the mix, even back then, in fact, it was a power channel, just like it still is today. So I was always doing a little bit of email.”

Ultimately, he gave up his full-time job as a kindergarten teacher and set off to explore the world as a digital nomad at the age of 25. Adam ultimately returned to the UK and started his own nutritional supplement store, however, his partner and he saw more potential in running an agency, and together they started Magnet Monster.

Magnet Monster started as a company focusing on providing e-commerce businesses with beautiful lead magnets. However, over the years they transitioned into the niche field of providing email marketing to e-commerce businesses using tools like Klaviyo. With a team of 17 people, Magnet Monster is a boutique agency focusing on intricate CRM strategies to help e-commerce businesses exponentially scale their sales.

The Success of Using Lead Magnets to Attract Customers

Lead magnets are a strategy where businesses use a gated approach to provide customers with content. For example when businesses make you sign up to receive a discount code. Since Magnet Monster started its e-commerce journey by providing beautiful lead magnets we were curious to know Adam’s opinion on how effective they are in acquiring customers. Here’s what he had to say:

"In my opinion, a lot of them have become obsolete, because gating content for the sake of generating leads, just does not make much sense. Instead, when you give the content out for free, it builds credibility and reaches a broader audience."

This is precisely why we started off this episode by saying you need to stop telling your customers what to do. When you make valuable content readily available your customers get curious to know what more you have to say. Hence, they’ll more willingly subscribe to your newsletter. The key here is to chase qualitative lead generation.

Data-Driven Email Marketing

You’ve got your basic setup of flows for new customers, abandoned carts, and various other segments, and you’ve got your monthly campaigns for holidays and promotional products. Is that all there is to email marketing? No, there’s so much more that needs to be done to ensure that your brand is making the most out of email marketing.

Daniel and Adam discuss the role data plays in understanding consumer behavior which in turn affects your email marketing strategy.

It improves the zero-party data capture fees and optimizes a brand’s front-end acquisition strategy.

It also helps in automating more user-generated content, promoting brand collections, and establishing ambassador programs to build customer retention. This entire process works when data is used to create intricate flows and adjust for consumer behavior. You see the value-added when your emails trigger customers to engage in conversation and more frequent interactions with your brand.

Effective E-commerce Strategies to Attract Customers

Speaking of holistic e-commerce strategies let’s take a look at some beyond the world of email marketing. Let's talk about loyalty. How do you make customers more loyal, and keep them coming back to your brand?

There’s no one formula fits all approach to increasing your customer loyalty, however, there are some best practices you can keep in mind. You need to have a good product that works. You need to have good customer service because these are the main two drivers of encouraging people to come back. Post this, you need to focus on your distribution channels. Email marketing is one, but having an omnichannel approach is what ultimately helps brands grow.

Increase your presence with messenger marketing, SMS, WhatsApp, and even retail distribution to truly get your brand noticed.

“So if you look at a brand like Coca-Cola, I'm in South Africa at the moment, I go downstairs, and there’s Coca Cola in the lobby like it's in my mini-bar here, it's in the convenience store. It's the same with Nike and Adidas. The retention and repeat purchase rates are higher because one, it's a good product and second, it's absolutely everywhere and easy to buy.”

That being said, let’s bring our attention back to email for a second and talk about an extremely integral role that email can play that people often overlook. Email plays a huge role in discovering bottlenecks as to why someone's not making repeat purchases, It's a touchpoint to get feedback on where the gap between the delivery and expectation of an end-user is and finds out what’s stopping them from making that repeat sale.

Lastly, your strategy will depend greatly on your content and incentive. Offering your customers a complicated rewards program won’t get them excited, it’ll only confuse or drive them away. However, segmenting and focusing on rewarding your VIP customers will help build loyalty toward your brand. Great content and design also play an important role in keeping customers hooked.

If you’re interested in e-commerce and email marketing, visit Magnet Monster, and follow Adam Kitchen on LinkedIn.

Before we close this episode, we’d like to thank you for listening! We come out with new episodes every Thursday, so stay tuned!

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