How to Maximize Black Friday Sales with Automated Email Marketing – Featuring John Hogan from Grid and Pixel

In this Black Friday-themed episode of the Simple and Smart SEO Show, Crystal Waddell welcomes John Hogan, co-founder of Grid and Pixel. 

We dive deep into how e-commerce businesses, especially those on Shopify, can use personalized and fully automated email flows to drive more revenue. 

Learn the secrets to converting visitors with targeted popups, the importance of various email flows (including abandoned cart, product browse, and post-purchase), and how Grid and Pixel streamlines everything with AI. 

Whether you're a seasoned email marketer or just starting out, this episode is packed with practical tips for boosting Black Friday and year-round sales.

Key Takeaways:

• Automated Email Wins: Grid and Pixel helps brands automate both email campaigns and flows for increased sales and reduced workload.
• Email Flows Matter: Key flows like welcome series, abandoned cart, and post-purchase emails can significantly boost revenue.
• Personalization Drives Conversions: Tailored product recommendations and content outperform generic blasts.
• Shopify Email vs Klaviyo: Shopify email works for automations but struggles with high bounce rates in campaigns—Klaviyo or Omnisend are stronger choices.
• Time-Saving AI: Grid and Pixel acts like an AI-powered marketing assistant, reducing the need for costly agencies.

Episode Highlights:

• "We realized quickly that store owners didn’t want to implement email marketing themselves. They either didn’t have time or didn’t want to learn." – John Hogan
• "A product browse email can drive as much revenue as abandoned checkout emails over time." – John Hogan
• "Shopify email has a bounce problem—it’s great for automations, but campaigns can get shut down due to high bounce rates." – John Hogan

Listener Action Items:

1. Audit Your Email Flows: Review whether you’ve set up all the essential flows—welcome series, abandonments, post-purchase, win-backs, etc.
2. Test New Opt-in Offers: Swap out tired 10% disco

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Chapters

• 0:00 John Hogan: it became quickly apparent that store owners did not want to.
• 0:40 Welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO Show
• 0:53 Meet John Hogan from Grid and Pixel
• 1:26 The Origin Story of Grid and Pixel
• 2:48 Email Personalization and Customer Graphs
• 3:30 Challenges and Solutions in Email Marketing
• 4:27 Building and Growing Your Email List
• 5:27 Setting Up Effective Email Flows
• 6:05 Understanding Email Triggers
• 6:35 Types of Abandonment Emails
• 8:41 Post-Purchase Email Strategies
• 11:34 Advantages and Disadvantages of Shopify Email
• 14:14 Benefits of Using Grid and Pixel
• 15:49 Pricing and Black Friday Offers

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Hogan: it became quickly apparent that store owners did not want to.

Do it themselves. They didn't want to implement on their own right. Whether they're using Klaviyo, which is probably our most popular email platform.

Or we have some brands on Shopify email, we have some on Omnisend a couple other email platforms.

And when we asked them, it was either don't have time or don't wanna learn how to do it.

I barely know how to use Klaviyo, let alone this thing, whatever. So then we set off on our mission to like fully automate, make autonomous email marketing for brands.

And we've since achieved that, right?

When you sign up for Grid and Pixel, we can fully automate and personalize all your email flows and all your email campaigns.

[00:00:40] Meet John Hogan from Grid and Pixel

[00:00:40] Crystal Waddell: Welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast everybody. This is Black Friday and I am excited to have with me today John Hogan from Grid and Pixel.

And Grid and Pixel is a special email. Partner of Shopify and e-commerce sellers all over the [00:01:00] world.

And so John, thank you so much for being here today.

Tell us a little bit about Grid and Pixel, like how you guys got started. How long have you been working with Shopify stores?

And who is your ideal client in the Shopify 

[00:01:11] John Hogan: space?

Yeah, of course. 

[00:01:13] The Origin Story of Grid and Pixel

[00:01:13] John Hogan: We started Grid and Pixel about three years ago. I have two co-founders. Lou and Keem. And we had another company before this, it was actually in real estate property tech. It was called Homesnap. And we turned it into the largest real estate agent app in the country. And then in 2020 we got bought by a company called CoStar.

Probably don't know CoStar. But they own a couple brands apartments.com and now homes.com that they, you probably see like Super Bowl commercials for them and everything. They actually turned homesnap into homes.com. So like we, we ended up building that. But the way we grew Homesnap so quickly was email personalization for real estate agents, helping them to generate leads.

We did a lot of that. I invested did Facebook and Google marketing too. And so after we came to our end at [00:02:00] CoStar we had. Had some retention obligations. But in 20, 23, 3 years after getting acquired we wanted to go and start another company that used the same engine that we used to grow Homesnap, which is like email personalization.

But, in a different industry.

And we thought e-commerce would be the best. And real estate, when you're generating leads for real estate agents, you get a lead and it might convert into a sale six months, a year down the line.

And e-commerce great because you sent out an email and you could see results, full funnel results within 48 hours.

So we started Grid Pixel and it focuses on three things. 

[00:02:35] Email Personalization and Customer Graphs

[00:02:35] John Hogan: One is email personalization. So when you send out a grid pixel email.

Whether it's a campaign or an email flow, et cetera.

The products the product recommendations, the copy, it's all personalized to the end recipient.

And we build a customer graph for each of your email contacts and figure out like what are they most interested in?

So that instead of just untargeted blast emails, everybody gets a targeted email [00:03:00] that converts to the high rate.

Now, it's interesting how the company evolved.

Because we had that sort of product from the beginning. And it was a self-serve product where Shopify store owners could sign up for it and then implement on their own. And we got a ton of signups at first. We got a lot of app installs. 

[00:03:17] Challenges and Solutions in Email Marketing

[00:03:17] John Hogan: But it became quickly apparent that store owners did not want to.

Do it themselves. They didn't want to implement on their own, right? Whether they're using Klaviyo, which is probably our most popular email platform.

Or we have some brands on Shopify email, we have some on Omnisend a couple other email platforms.

And when we asked them, it was either don't have time or don't wanna learn how to do it.

I barely know how to use Klaviyo, let alone this thing, whatever. So then we set off on our mission to like fully automate, make autonomous email marketing for brands.

And we've since achieved that, right?

When you sign up for Grid and Pixel, we can fully automate and personalize all your email flows and all your email campaigns. 

[00:03:58] Crystal Waddell: What are the types of emails [00:04:00] that people can create? Because I think when, people hear, okay, I need an email list.

What are the steps that people need to take to be able to build an email list? Let's start with that first. Like, how do you even begin an email list? 

[00:04:13] John Hogan: Yeah. 

[00:04:14] Building and Growing Your Email List

[00:04:17] John Hogan: So the fastest way to grow your email list is through targeted popups and or cross promotion, right? So like through targeted popup, it's like having first time visitors and coming up with an offer that's right for them.

I'm sure we're all familiar with going to a Shopify store to see get 10% off. That one doesn't convert nearly as well as it used to. We're continually testing new hooks to get people in. Some of it's using language. And some of it's the offer itself.

So like we found recently using something like get a mystery discount gets a much higher submission rate than even offering like a higher percentage off 15, 20, 25%.

The second way is partnering with other stores or industry influencers in your area.

Where they're going to do some sort of promotion and like you might sponsor like a free product giveaway [00:05:00] or a free class or lesson or something like that.

And drive a bunch of email signups to be entered into that raffle or whatever, and you get the emails that way.

Those are the two fastest ways that I know. Yeah.

[00:05:08] Crystal Waddell: Okay. So then after those emails are collected, what are people supposed to do with them? 

[00:05:14] John Hogan: Yeah. 

[00:05:14] Setting Up Effective Email Flows

[00:05:15] John Hogan: So the first thing you need to do is set up all of your flows. So if you look at the difference between like flow emails, and these are trigger automations.

So a email subscriber does something on your site, right? They look at a product, they add something, cart, whatever.

Versus, campaigns or blast emails, whatever, which is the other type of email. The flows or automations in a well run account, typically account for, I don't know, 60, 50 to 60% of revenue generated, but only 2% of sends.

So they convert at a much higher rate. Obviously they're contextual. The person did something to trigger that, earn that email, and that's why they convert at a higher rate.

[00:05:50] Crystal Waddell: So let's talk about those triggers. 

[00:05:52] Understanding Email Triggers

[00:05:52] Crystal Waddell: what are the things that people can do that would trigger this particular kind of flow?

[00:05:56] John Hogan: There are different triggers available depending on what email platform you're [00:06:00] using, but, so for like Klaviyo, there's a set of 10 triggers that are basically available. And when I say basically it's like, anybody should be using them.

So the first is just your welcome series.

That's where you're giving somebody a discount for their first signup. It really encourages the first purchase, right?

And once you get somebody to try your product once, it's much easier to get 'em to try down the line, right? Everybody should have a welcome series signup.

After that. The abandonments are the most important.

[00:06:22] Types of Abandonment Emails

[00:06:22] John Hogan: Now, one of the typical mistakes or misconceptions with store owners is they think that abandoned cart email is it. And so I've got one of those and it's good.

There are actually like six types of abandonments that you can send. And they all have served their purpose.

They convert at different levels, but it's very important that you have them all on.

The one that's turned on by default for your Shopify store, if you're using Shopify emails.

Abandoned checkout, that's when somebody actually makes it to the shop to the Shopify point of sale, right?

But let's say they, they're on your store and they stop before that.

So they just hit add to cart.

If you don't have an abandoned cart flow set up as opposed to abandoned checkout, they're not gonna get that follow up email.

And you're gonna lose conversions, right? [00:07:00] And then it goes up from there. The next one is like abandoned product browse, right?

So they looked at a product, but they didn't add it to cart, or they didn't make it to the Shopify point of sale.

So then you could send a trigger for that. And what I tend to see is like abandoned checkout, right? Converts at a very high level, but fewer people make it that far down the funnel, right? Make it's intuitive.

The farther you have to go, the fewer people are gonna make it.

And so while a flow like product browse, it's much more high volume, it converts at a lower level.

But I see the dollar volume in terms of sales generated over an equal period of time to generally be similar, right? Checkout and product brows do about the same.

And then above product browse, there's viewed collection, right?

So they viewed collection instead of specific product. You could send a trigger for that. There's search abandonment. So they search for a specific term, like blue shirts.

And then left. And then, so you could send 'em a follow-up email with every blue shirt that you have.

And then finally, general site abandonment, meaning they were on your blog or something like that.

They didn't actually look at any specific products or collections. And you could send a trigger for that. And those all produce [00:08:00] meaningful revenue for our customers. On top of that, then there's all these post-purchase flows.

[00:08:04] Crystal Waddell: Okay. Yeah, so I just wanted to say I never knew that there were so many different types of flows that you could set up.

And there's so many different things that you could set up to trigger an action for your email to do something for you on your behalf.

So I always talk about using technology as an employee, like giving it a job.

And so this is like a really great use case for that.

[00:08:25] John Hogan: Yeah. So there, there are other flows that I think are very important. 

[00:08:28] Post-Purchase Email Strategies

[00:08:29] John Hogan: They're generally post-purchase, right? There's a couple that I'm sure most of you're familiar with like post-purchase.

Try to get 'em purchased again right away, right?

Now there are different takes on this. Some people will say you just bought an hour later they email you discount to make your second purchase.

I think that works, but in a very narrow slice. It really depends on the brand and what you're selling. For the most part.

I see, especially in the clothing supplement, et cetera, verticals which are some of the bigger categories in Shopify.

Making sure that like, you send that message to 'em right after they're likely to have tried it.

So we typically aim for 10 to 14 days [00:09:00] after purchase, right?

So like we use the delivered trigger. And like maybe give 'em 48 hours to have tried it. So then they put on their jeans and tried 'em and said, Hey, these fit really good.

Okay, now I'm gonna order three more pairs or whatever. There's another flow called Win Back, right? Which is if somebody purchased, and then a large gap of time goes by and you define that gap of time.

By default for most email platforms is 60 days.

You send them, some sort of, nudge to purchase again. After that you'd have a sunset Flow, which is used for, controlling your email platform's costs, right? So on Klaviyo, paid by profile.

So if a profile gets to be very old and they haven't purchased in a while, you have to answer the question.

Doesn't make sense to keep paying Klaviyo for this?

But you can set up a flow that gives 'em a last chance and then automatically suppresses them. If you have any sort of consumable or supplement brand, one that's like often overlooked, is what's called an order replenishment flow.

So this you set on a timer.

Let's say you're selling somebody like a 30 day supply of supplements. On day 25. You know that when they go into the bathroom in the morning and [00:10:00] open their medicine cabinet or at night, right?

They're gonna notice that the bottle's getting pretty light and they're not gonna wanna miss a day, if they're bought into their product.

So you could send them like a one click trigger, right? Where they just click that it takes 'em immediately to Shopify checkout and all they do is push one button.

Whether they have a Shopify profile or not to check out and make the next order. So those would be like all the standard basic ones that I would want to have set up for any brand.

And then. There are others, right? Let's just say this is based on like custom data.

So for example, we have a brand that we work with. 

And this owner, she sells affirming messages, but they're based on your Zodiac sign, right? So we're able to set up a ton of other triggers that both help us collect zodiacs for profiles that we don't know. And then also push content out for those zodiacs when it's relevant, right?

And so this is just saying okay, Crystal's an email subscriber and it's the month of May, right? And she's a Gemini. I don't know if that's true. It's probably false, but we're really gonna focus on her for the month of May.

Sending out this whole journey on [00:11:00] Gemini and what you can get and everything like that, right?

You could accomplish the same thing through campaigns for a lot of these custom triggers, but you just save yourself so much time and energy if you really go through the details and set it up beforehand. 

[00:11:11] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so just a couple more questions because I know that some people pay for Klaviyo.

And I know that I switched away from Klaviyo because they started charging by profiles.

[00:11:21] Advantages and Disadvantages of Shopify Email

[00:11:21] Crystal Waddell: And so I just went with the basic Shopify email.

I was wondering if you could touch real quickly on the advantages or disadvantages of just using Shopify email. Is it sufficient? Or what are your recommendations there? 

[00:11:35] John Hogan: Yeah, so really it's really two things. So if you're just doing automations you're not sending out campaigns.

Shopify email I think can get you probably about 90% of what Klaviyo does. 

Now, it depends on the brand, right? Like that, that 10% could actually be 50% for other brands.

Depending on, your product, your offer, your customer base. Everybody's unique. Unique, right? Like I said. So when I generally see that a, product abandonment generates just [00:12:00] as much money as a checkout abandonment, right? That may or may not be true depending on the brand. Sometimes the checkout abandon won't do anything at all, but the product browse does everything for 'em. It depends on your brand. Second thing is if you are sending out campaigns on a regular basis, right?

So you're just saying Hey, here's our Black Friday sale.

And you wanna send it to all of your subscribers. Whether you know it or not, like Shopify email's not appropriate for sending out that email.

If you go and look, I don't know what it is with Shopify email, but they know it's a problem.

We know it's a problem. We've been talking to them about it for three years now. You'll see that you have a very high bounce rate on the email. Generally between two and a half and 5%, right?

And then the email send gets shut down because the bounce rate is high. Now. That's not a problem with your email addresses.

It's a problem with Shopify's platform. I think it goes back to the fact that they initially built Shopify email as transactional. So there's a difference between transactional emails and marketing emails, right? Transactional emails.

You don't need an opt-in. You're actually required to send out an order confirmation every time somebody orders, right?

[00:13:00] So that's what they built it for. Shopify actually owns a substantial stake in Klaviyo. You might be aware aren't, they own 40% of all Klaviyo. They pick Klaviyo as the winner, right?

But for people who don't wanna pay for Klaviyo, don't want to, don't wanna use it, they were like we may as well convert this transactional email tool we have, into a marketing email tool.

The only problem is that the campaigns don't work very well. So if you wanna be sending campaigns, you need an alternative.

Klaviyo is my favorite, but Omnis send works really well and there's a bunch of others. 

[00:13:27] Crystal Waddell: Okay. That is very helpful. I know that we're gonna have a question about that coming up 'cause it triggered something in my mind that we've talked about in here before.

So yeah, I didn't realize that, that the bounce rate was impacted by the type of email service provider. 

[00:13:40] John Hogan: That's really specific to Shopify. I haven't seen the problem on any other platform, but they got something going on there and they haven't fixed it. And it's been going on for years.

I was really hopeful. I went up to Toronto to meet with them a couple years ago and we talked about it. And they were like, yeah, we're gonna fix this. I got so excited and then just nothing since.

[00:13:55] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, and that stinks 'cause I send all my campaigns through Shopify email. 

[00:13:59] John Hogan: You [00:14:00] should look at the bounce rate.

[00:14:00] Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

[00:14:01] Benefits of Using Grid and Pixel

[00:14:08] Crystal Waddell: So just to clarify, grid and Pixel is a program that's supplementary to like a email service provider like Shopify email or Klaviyo.

So can you tell us like what's the major benefit of using Grid and Pixel in conjunction with your email service provider? 

[00:14:20] John Hogan: Yeah. Yeah. And to reinforce that upfront: if you think about what an email platform does, it helps you send emails.

What we do is we figure out we help you figure out what to send in those emails so that they convert at a high rate. So you're really looking at two things.

One is higher conversion rate, right? Which comes in the form of first higher click rates.

Then second, higher conversion rate on your actual point of sale, Shopify et cetera.

And then two, is just time savings or money savings. We're not trying to replace marketing agencies necessarily.

But like we've essentially created that function where instead of paying 4,000 or $1,800 a month for an email marketing agency. We charge way less because we're able to automate.

So much of it through the ai marketing agent we've [00:15:00] created. So like our starting price point for doing flows and campaigns is 1 49 a month.

And we have like a sale on that too, right? And like our highest price point gets up to 7 99 a month. So, I have several customers quite large that we're paying $8,000 a month for a top name marketing agency.

And then they ab tested our content against theirs.

And ours actually performed better. And, these guys pay us anywhere from, five, $600 a month. That's about it. So they're thrilled with the results. 

[00:15:29] Crystal Waddell: Okay. So real quick before we pop off do you have Black Friday deals ready to go right now?

[00:15:36] Pricing and Black Friday Offers

[00:15:36] John Hogan: So if you're looking at pricing for Grid and Pixel, like I said, it depends on how many contacts you have. But we start at 1 49.

Our Black Friday offer is actually a hundred dollars off that first month. And the pricing scales from there, depending on how many email contacts you have.

So up to 10,000, 1 99 up to here, 2 99. But there's a healthy first month discount.

So you could try to the end of the year for relatively little. I think you'll be [00:16:00] happy with the results. 

[00:16:00] Crystal Waddell: And I'm currently on the one where you're like doing it yourself.

Like after you guys set it up for me.

Do you still have that option?

[00:16:08] John Hogan: We have a flat $49 a month. Do it yourself one, too, that you can take advantage of. Okay.

[00:16:14] Crystal Waddell: Okay. Awesome John, so I will be sharing this for my Black Friday episode.

I appreciate you coming in here and talk about Grid and Pixel. I appreciate how accessible you and your team are, even to really small shops and businesses.

I will drop all of the info in the show notes.

And definitely check out John and Grid Pixel at that contact info. Thanks again, John. 

[00:16:35] John Hogan: Thanks for having me Crystal.