Most retailers don’t lose sales because email doesn’t work.

They lose sales because they send the same message to everyone.

Hi, I’m Clare Bailey, founder of Retail Champion.

In this episode of Retail Reckoning, I’m joined by email marketing, CRM, and paid ads specialist Sophie Walton to unpack why email blasting is quietly costing retail businesses sales.

Email isn’t dead.

But bad email habits are expensive.

We talk about why blanket emails damage engagement, how poor segmentation wastes time and ad spend, and why your email list is often more valuable than chasing new customers through paid ads.

This episode isn’t about complicated funnels or marketing jargon.

It’s about making your marketing calmer, more human, and far more effective.

This episode breaks down:

1. Why emailing everyone backfires for retailers
2. How simple segmentation improves sales and retention
3. Where most retailers waste money with paid ads
4. How email, CRM, and ads should actually work together
5. What to focus on first when marketing feels overwhelming

If your marketing feels noisy, exhausting, or expensive, this episode will help you simplify what you’re doing and focus on what genuinely moves sales forward.

Less blasting.

More relevance.

Better results.

Let’s get your Retail Reckoning together.

Subscribe to the Retail Reckoning Newsletter

https://retailreckoningpodcast.co.uk/newsletter

Useful links:

Retail Champion: https://theretailchampion.co.uk

Sophie Walton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-walton-3877b221/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Today's episode is all about marketing that works without wasting time or

money. And I'm joined by a special guest today, Sophie

Walton, who is our go to expert for the

retail champion on email marketing, remarketing

CRM, paid social, Google Ads and

LinkedIn. That's a lot, isn't it? Sounds good, yes. Thank you for having me.

Welcome back to Retail Reckoning. I'm Claire Bailey, the retail champion and today

we're diving into something every retailer needs to know.

How to make your marketing actually work without wasting time, money or

brain power. A lot of people say to me, oh, email's

old school, it's dead. It's all about social media now.

But social media ads are a black hole and they're a money pit.

But done right, email, CRM, paid social,

Google Ads and even LinkedIn work together to grow

your sales. Hopefully they will recover your lost

customers and build loyal fans. So I'm joined today

by my colleague Sophie go to expert on social media,

email marketing, remarketing CRM and ad campaigns. Thank you, Sophie,

very much for joining us today.

Yeah, retail reckoning.

Retail reckoning. No space for

dusty shelves Cause retail

reckoning owns the floor.

Sophie is our guru in email marketing,

CRM and paid ads. And everybody needs to listen to her

advice because if she doesn't know it, nobody knows it.

So let's start with the basics. Why is it that

email does in fact, still outperform many other channels?

Email is your own data, it's personal.

You can very much tailor and personalize communications with email. It's

fully owned by your business, so you're not relying on fighting on an

algorithm or other people that are effectively in auction

online to generate new leads, purchases, whatever else it

might be, once it's yours, it's yours. When you get your email

strategy and campaigns right, it's an incredibly

efficient way to generate revenue for your business, increase customer

lifetime value and very importantly, customer retention. But I

think a lot of small retailers believe that email is just about

shouting about offers or sharing deals. And I

don't think they really understand about building the

journey. And I know you talk a lot about building the

journey. So could you share with us some of the biggest

mistakes that you see retailers making with email marketing and how they could perhaps

overcome that? Yeah, absolutely. I would say the biggest thing and one of

the greatest things about email marketing is, as I just mentioned, you can be

really personalized with it. So always, always think. As with any

marketing campaign, any marketing tactic, who is it that you're

talking to? What's going to resonate with them and how

can you be really specific around that person and the messages that you're

sending to them? So certainly in its basic form don't

just like blanket your, you know, blanket message. Your email

marketing database, there's so many

tools within platforms that you can use now. You know,

Klaviyo, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, whatever it is that you're using that will

allow you to segment your customer data by their

behaviors, by what it is that they're doing on your website,

so on and so forth. So super important to be as segmented and

as targeted as you can be. And I guess to answer your question, like, probably

one of the biggest mistakes that I see retailers making when using email

is they're just blasting everyone with emails. It's not

one size fits all thing. Your engagement rates so you're

opening click throughs in doing that are going to go wallop.

Your unsubscribe rates are gonna go through the roof.

You'll soon be able to see through the analytics

in front of you and the content that you're sending out what's working and what

isn't. So super important to look at your data and tailor your content

strategy accordingly. So it's not always about selling, not always

a one size fits all approach. Very much about education,

inspiring people, helping customers. You're soft selling, aren't

you? You're building a picture of your business and your brand without saying

here. By this you're inciting trust and then layering

that with occasional messages around. Direct selling

is far more powerful and impactful than sending

out three emails a week to everybody saying

buy me now. It isn't going to work, as

easy as that would be. No, it doesn't work.

I mean, it sounds really intimidating, especially for someone like me. I'm a natural

logistician. I like maths, not words. I mean, I do

talk a lot, but I still like maths more than words. And I was only

chatting to someone this morning that's like, if you get me a job as a

fractional supply chain and logistics director, I'd be really happy. But marketing

leaves me sitting there rocking back and forth going, oh yeah, I just don't

understand. It's so intimidating. Have you got some sort of simple

examples that list listeners could perhaps relate to

in order to be able to feel a bit less overwhelmed?

Because from my point of view, it's not natural to me and it

is overwhelming. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Again,

kind of as with anything, it's keeping it simple, isn't it? You know, the

platforms, integrations, all of the different things that you can do with

email. It is super overwhelming, isn't it? But as long as you

have a good database, a database that you've generated yourself, you've

not bought very, very important as well. You are paying attention

to basic segmentation. You've got your master email

list and you think yourself, right, okay, I'm gonna create a

segment of engaged subscribers. So a portion of those people

that have been on my website in the past 30 days and I'm

going to send them a different message to my unengaged subscribers who

haven't been on my website for the past 60 days. So you might try and

pull back in your unengaged subscribers with some sort of a little offer,

flash sale, whatever else it might be to try and bring them back into

that fold of your engaged subscribers. And then your engaged subscribers,

you might be treating them to some sort of VIP messaging

or VIP product drops. They'll get to see stuff before

anybody else because they're engaged, they're actively purchasing from you.

That's probably just a basic example like from a segmentation

point of view from actually generating email

subscribers. Or one really, really simple thing to do is to add like

a pop up on your website, which again can be easily done with mailchimp

Klaviyo, another email service provider. So

pop up appears when subscriber to be lands on your website.

They fill in the pop up, you get their email, you send them

a welcome email saying thank you, here's a bit more about our brand, so on

and so forth and gradually again drip feed those soft

selling communications with an eventual offer

or something similar to help tip them to buy.

I think it also ties in really well with some of the conversations we've had

with Steph talking about Shopify and E commerce, with

Fran about Pinterest. And it builds into something

really, really powerful. But one of the things that again

I hear a lot about this and I defer to you guys,

it's this word, funnel. What on earth is a

funnel? And how can we avoid scaring people by

talking about funnel and this and that and the other and emails and

automation without it sounding like we're just being

robots. You think of your funnel,

visualize one. So top of funnel, that's your cold

traffic. People that have never heard of you, aren't familiar with your

brand. Middle is general awareness of your brand,

potentially have heard with you, have engaged with you in some way before and Then

bottom of funnel is purchases, trigging people into

purchasing. So that's our funnel flow of our funnel format. So

if you think of the funnel as like a journey, your customer goes on with

you, the introduction, start of the relationship. So in the early stages you

want people to feel comfortable, you want to welcome people into your world,

to your brand. You could do this using a welcome email automation,

as I just mentioned, getting people to sign up, drip feeding, a first

purchase discount, value driven content, perhaps a

product showcase and then a reminder of their discount if they've not yet

purchased. And you literally rinse and repeat that process for new

subscribers that are coming to into your world. And the great thing

about setting up email automations like that Claire, is

you are selling in your sleep. Once you set up those automations,

they're working as a salesperson in the background for you, which everyone

wants, right? It's set up, it's done and, and that's part of the advertise

selling and keeping leads warm, kind of taken off you. One

sort of mistake I guess that I do see people making

again as we've just mentioned, is sending inappropriate

bad times emails. For example, sending like a last minute

discount to people who have just purchased. That's going to annoy the hell out of

you, right? Like you're going to be, well, I've just spent that money and I

could have got a discount. And, and I have seen it as well where people

do message and say, I've just bought this and you've just sent me a discount,

can I have the discount now? So you gotta be really careful about,

you know, who you send in these messages to. Obviously bad timing

again, just gives bad feeling between your brand

and your customer. It's so competitive online,

you know, if your competitor's doing that right and really getting this

process right, where do you think that customer's gonna go? That's actually quite

interesting because I talked about this when we talked about the buyer's remorse

at Boxing Day in an earlier podcast we did Y people

would be disinclined to buy anything pre Christmas because they know

it's going to be 50% off as soon as Boxing Day lands.

And I think that it is important, isn't it, where if you're going

to offer a discount that you have to then offer it back to people who

might have purchased a full price otherwise it's just going to

really disengage them. But I mean there's a lot of talk

now about AI running all of this and I

feel like, yes, okay, it can help, it can help you with some

structure and so on. And again, a previous podcast we talked about

AI as well and how it could be like your sort of secret

admin assistant, but it's surely got to have

that human touch. I mean, where does AI come into this?

Yeah, absolutely. I think you're, you're completely right in what you just

said. AI is God. It's a time saver. Right. You know, like,

yes, you can help you like, map out automation sequences,

ideas for, you know, funnel sequences, flows and so on and so forth.

But I certainly wouldn't recommend using, you know, heavy

AI like Driven Copy in your emails. Yes, perhaps use it for,

you know, helping you to think about how is this process,

this flow, this series of emails going to work and be presented to my prospect,

my customer. But you tweak it and, you know, mold it so it still

has that human touch accordingly. So without sounding

robotic. So, yes, use it to inform what you're doing, allowing you

to obviously hopefully scale what you're doing and increase

customer retention. But the last thing you want to do, of course is sound robotic,

you know, unlike your brand. So which unfortunately is probably the downside

of using AI. Right. It can sound very, you know, blanket. You can,

you can quite easily see sometimes online, can't you, where people have generated AI copy

the long dashes. Yeah, long dashes and funny ones.

That's right, yeah, yeah, you can kind of spot it a mile off. So for

God's sake, no, you know, certainly put your own touch on it if you've been

using it initially for sure. Well,

that kind of leads me into the next point because I've worked in

B2B for most of my life. I help

retailers, but typically that's me being a service

provider to them. So things like CRM,

customer relationship management and data and

so on is normal. But a lot of retailers don't

understand how they can use CRM tools, particularly for

loyalty. And for everything you've said about email and automation,

how could an independent retailer or even a large

retailer use a CRM tool in a way that

works with a consumer rather than the known customer,

which it's typically used for? Yeah, sure. So

again, like, CRM is just so, so powerful. There's many out there

on the market. I really like using ActiveCampaign for CRM based

email marketing in particular. So not only can you segment

by Claire, as you just mentioned, obviously existing customers, their purchase history,

purchase preferences and so on, but you can also start to build out

profiles within the platform of People that have been browsing certain pages on

your website that have spent X amount of time on a page,

that have abandoned cart, so on and so forth. So again, all these

different sort of profiles that you're building that can then be used as criteria to

inform and segment again your communications, to make them very

tailored, very, very, very relevant to the person that

you're sending the communication to. So super powerful. And again,

you can be as basic or as like complex with it as you like.

Recommendation would obviously always be to keep it simple, specifically when you're starting out.

But certainly again those segments around like browsing history

and timing a message to people that have spent a lot of time looking at

a product, you know, the intents, there's, what do you need to do

to educate, inform and tip them into a

sale. And that's where you sort of, you know, your segmentation, your drip feeding emails

comes in. This sounds really again for a small business

it does sound quite overwhelming. How much time

and effort would you suggest that they would need to

spend? Or are we talking about them

allocating a budget to actually getting somebody else in to do it for

them? Because you know, from my experience, most of the independent retailers

I've worked with, they love their product, they love their

customers, they can dress the store and make the windows beautiful,

but they're not necessarily that tech savvy and

this scares people. So is it better to

perhaps invest in outsourcing support or is it

better to get somebody to teach you how to do it because then it takes

away the fear. Again, a number of the clients that I've worked

with through Retail Champion are those exact people. Claire, so

busy store owners be that physical store, online

store. I personally have worked with clients on a

consultancy basis giving training on Klaviyo for example

and client has often started to do it themselves and then gone.

Do you know what, can you just do it? So it very much

depends on, as you just mentioned, the time.

Of course, you know, it takes like we all have our own

proficiencies, don't we? I can do what you do, you probably couldn't do what

I do. You got to be realistic, haven't you? And I think

yes, ultimately, of course, if you have the budget

to do it, I would always recommend using a professional and someone that knows

what they're doing because God, you can't off waste your time, your

resource and potentially your sanity by trying to

learn something that is so overwhelming, you know, really

or can be and ultimately frustrating if you're, you know, not getting the

results that you want. And a lot of people talk to me about,

you know, oh, I've had a go at Facebook ads or Google Ads and this

and that and the other and I've spent a fortune and I've got nothing back

because they don't actually understand how to do it properly

and to get the segmentation and all that stuff that you do.

I can run a £30 million a week, so supply chain, but I, I can't

do this. That's why we work together, isn't it? This is it. Exactly. Yes.

Yeah. But it's really hard for small businesses sometimes to be able to make that

leap of faith and say, you know what, I'm going to have to spend some

money on somebody else doing something for me and I'm going to

have to spend some money on an ad campaign but I want

to know that it's being done right and I'm not just burning

through my. Whatever it is. Even if it's £50 a day, which,

you know, could return £500 in sales if they get it right, couldn't it?

But yeah, yeah. So what would you give as advice to

people when it comes to the sort of the remarketing and

the paid ads and all that good stuff, which is

again another fear factor because it's spending money. Whenever

someone comes to me with a request to talk about

paid ads, that is the number one thing they'll say, I have

spent X amount hundreds, thousands of pounds on

Facebook ads and I've seen nothing. I'm not getting my return,

I blow my budget, et cetera, et cetera. I literally hear

that all the time. I would certainly recommend again, if you can talk to a

professional, get someone to help you from the early stages do that. But at a

very basic level, if you have some budget to spend on

paid ads, the first thing I'd look at is probably retargeting people that have

been on your website that have abandoned car again, people that are

warm to your brand and are aware of you are far

more likely to buy than someone that has never heard of you. So

that's kind of where you start. That's like your low hanging fruit. I'd

certainly also recommend from a paid ad perspective rather

than going for getting people to purchase

from you using your ad campaigns because you can set up things like,

you know, purchase objective, lead objective. There's all sorts of different stuff you can do

with Facebook ads. In particular, actually use Facebook ads to build your

email database so you can get like email subscribers for a

quid. There or thereabouts. Whereas you could pay

10 times that, upwards of 10 times that, to try and get someone to purchase

from you. So if you see like from a budget point of view, like how

beneficial that's going to be, spending a few hundred pounds on generating

a few hundred subscribers that you can then nurture on email,

they're yours. Then you can do with them as you wish

rather than pumping loads and loads of money into meta to try and get

purchases. Got a small budget, that would be the best thing to do. That would

be where I would start for sure. You're going to see a much better

return on your investment, return on ad spend. You are on,

on cold traffic and competing with bigger retailers online. When you're online

and you're spending money online for ads, you're effectively in an auction.

Those are spending more, are going to get seen via your smaller budget.

So just really bear that in mind and think about what you're doing.

Well, I'm going to throw a bit of a question out there which we'd not

previously discussed, so I apologize in advance.

Go for it. What would you tell me to do?

Okay, so if you're generating leads for Retail Champion. Yeah.

Because there must be people out there who have got service businesses as well.

This is not my area of expertise whatsoever and it

just be really interesting to have a few top tips that you might give to

people like me. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of scenarios that

pop into my head instantly. One is the lead

generation scenario that I've just mentioned. So perhaps on LinkedIn,

obviously you're looking in a B2B space. You could provide some sort of

lead magnet, a download to an exclusive podcast. 10 tips

on selling in retail in 2026. Just pulling something out the air

there, but something that's going to be super, super valuable to the people that you're

trying to talk to. Get that email in for a few

pounds and start to again, nurture them in the back end on email.

So you've spent that little bit of budget getting that person into your world and

then your email marketing is doing that for you on the back end.

Conversely, you could get people to sign up for

a podcast, like a live podcast or a live training session,

which I personally have found really, really effective in the

past few years in terms of lead generation and converting people

into a client. Doing face to face. Yes. Seminars, again,

very, very relevant to the people that I'm speaking to. Has generated clients

for me previously in the B2. Yes, we use B2B space.

The whole story comes together when

leveraging the paid social, maybe Google Ads,

LinkedIn, CRM. So as a bigger

picture, if somebody was ready to go all

in and make that leap of faith and say, you know what, 2026

is my year and I am just gonna go for it, how would

you put it all together? Yeah, absolutely. So it's, it's an

ecosystem, isn't it, of touch points, as you said. So,

yeah, like from a paid social perspective, if you're kind of using these tactics that

we're speaking about today as part of that ecosystem, certainly think

about putting ad spend behind like top performing content. That's a really great

one. If you're scratching your head over like, oh, what do I write in my

paid ad, what do I focus on? So on and so forth. Well, look at

your analytics, look at your social analytics. Look at even emails that have performed well

and put spend behind top performing content. Can I just interject there,

There's a lot of people that won't even know how to do that. Yeah. So

yeah, so yeah, they've probably got. All this information

about how their business performs online, but they don't actually know how

to tap into it. So that's probably, you know,

not wanting to make a blatant sales pitch. That's probably working with

experts like us. Well, you in particular and people like

Steph and Fran really is important because you

can't be an expert in everything. I mean, I pay an accountant because I can't

do my own accounts and as a small business owner we

have to tap into experts and sometimes we have to make that leap of

faith. And everything you've just said, I'm already sitting here thinking I haven't

got a clue. I wouldn't know how to do that.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's it, isn't it? And I think it's all very well,

like you said, sort of doing the delivery, the front end. I know perhaps you

know how to put an email marketing piece together. Of course you know how to

write a social post. But what happens

when you share that content? Like it's the analytics behind it, isn't it? Looking

at an email as your opens, you click through rates and subscribe rates.

Looking at benchmarks, you can easily get benchmarks online again from

like Klaviyo is a fantastic source of information when it comes

to industry benchmarks for email, for E commerce, I think

they release like a white paper every quarter.

So whatever vertical you're working in, be it fashion and

beauty, natural products and Whatever else it might be, they kind of have a

list of all the sort of benchmark stats available on

Klaviyo by industry that you can again, benchmark against. So you can see

is what I'm doing working, is it? Right. So certainly look

for those sorts of pieces of information and there's a lot of that online, so

it doesn't take too much to try and find it.

And I guess to wrap up so that we've got some key

takeaways from this. There's some quick wins and there's

some avoids and I think if you're a small retailer,

you could feel overwhelmed by this stuff. I mean, I feel overwhelmed

and I've been in business 23 years and I've managed to survive for 23 years.

But a lot of this stuff and the pace of change

is quite something. But I think if

I'm right in distilling what you've said, it's about

segmenting your audience and making sure you know who they

are and not being a one size fits all kind of

communication, using tools that help

you automate whilst also remaining human.

And if you're going to use ads and spend money

on advertising, you need somebody to help you to understand

how to spend that money smartly because otherwise you

could be spending a fortune and getting absolutely nothing back. That's

my summarization of what we said today. It's very

good. Yeah, you've taught me something. I love it

when I have these conversations because I learn so much, I. Still can't do it.

At least I know that what you're doing for me. Yeah, what you're doing for

me works. But what, what. Have you got any other,

like, hot tip, like the. If. If it was the just

one thing, what would you suggest?

Yeah, I think I've. I've banged the drum about this over the

past half an hour, but the big thing for me is

overall, no matter whether you're doing paid email,

social, whatever it might be, segmenting

your audience and thinking about who it is that you're speaking to and

creating those tailored communications around that person

is the most powerful thing that you can do. When you're looking at

segmenting on email, even two segments are better than one.

Don't blanket market to people when you're targeting

your paid ads, don't. I mean, broad audience targeting does

sometimes work with smaller budgets, but again, think about your demographic.

How old are they? What are their interests, what are they into? Where do they

live? And build out your Personas online

accordingly, getting smart about who

Your customer is really understanding them and creating those tailored

messages is worth its weight in

gold. Rather than thinking, oh God, I need to send an email out, so I'm

just going to quickly blast one out to everyone. You're just going to harm

your deliverability rates, subscriber rates

overall. So spend the time putting together a proper

plan, thinking about who it is that you're talking to will pay

dividends. So that would be my. My big sort of key takeaway.

It's brilliant because the actually, you know, back in the day when I ran conferences

and I just blanket emailed and I was like, oh, God, I've got to send

a weekly email, I was like, panic, panic. What am I going to say? And

actually, that is brilliant practical advice

and I'm taking away another one. That email

is gold dust. Email subscribers are

your future customers and getting the messaging correct

is. Is absolutely essential. So I'd

really like to thank you for such practical advice and hopefully a lot of

small retailers will benefit. Absolute pleasure. Yeah. And

I hope everyone's learned a few things today. So, no. Thanks so much for having

me on. Well, there was the magic marketing that works without the

panic, the stress or the wasted budget. I'm Claire Bailey, the retail

champion. I've been joined today by Sophie Walton and this is my been

retail reckoning.

Owns the floor.

Sam.