The Pennock Knockdown: Unlocking 7-Figure Growth: Email, SMS, & Marketing Hacks to Scale in 2025
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Erin is a creative email marketer, founder, mom of 3 and avid adventurer! She spent over a decade in corporate beauty in eCommerce online marketing, buying and account management for prestige players including Sephora.com, Ulta.com, Nordstrom.com, and Beautylish.com amongst others. She has had the opportunity to work with over 80+ beauty and wellness brands and loves building her client partnerships more than anything. When not working on and in the business, she can be found in the outdoors, hiking, camping, or golfing, with her husband, daughter, sons and dog.
Brands Mentioned
Transcript
Nikki Lindgren:
Welcome to another episode of the Pennock Knockdown, a podcast where we unpack key strategies and tactics for digital marketers. I'm excited to have Aaron Lopez on the show today. Aaron, welcome.
Erin Lopez:
Thank you, Nikki. I'm excited to be here.
Nikki Lindgren:
I'm excited to have you. So, Erin is the founder of Ivy and Co Studio. And Erin, I'll kind of kick it over to you to walk us through what led you to create the agency consultancy and what you guys specialize in.
Erin Lopez:
Yeah, sure. So, Ivy and Co. Studio is a boutique studio. We focus solely on growing owned marketing channels, namely email and SMS marketing. We typically only work with beauty and wellness brands, though we also work with other lifestyle clients, some food and bev, but primarily beauty.
And the reason being, I come from a beauty background. I spent over a decade in corporate beauty and e-commerce, online marketing, buying, and account management. I worked for Sephora.com. I managed different categories of brands, including color cosmetics, fragrance, and nail.
I also spent some time at Under Estee Lauder and managed retailer.com accounts for a makeup brand called Becca Cosmetics. But in my time, I've worked with probably over a hundred different beauty brands across my career, maybe more than that actually.
Nikki Lindgren:
Wow, and how long has Ivy and Co Studio been around?
Erin Lopez:
I launched the business in 2019.
Nikki Lindgren:
Okay, so six years in. Congrats. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, we can kick it off with a question I love to start: What do you have in your bag or what kind of brand within the category you specialize in are you really enjoying products from or consuming?
Erin Lopez:
Yeah, it's got my chest. Sure. Okay, well, I just purchased from this brand called Ever Eden. And it's actually a clean skincare and haircare brand, but for kids and preteens and tweens. And I purchased it for my nine-year-old daughter, who is dabbling in skincare, her friends her age are all kind of also dabbling in skincare and aspiring Sephora shoppers.
So, my cousin told me about this brand and she bought it for her daughter, who's the same age, and I was really just excited by their positioning. They're clean, non-toxic, and it has really, really cute packaging—a surprise when it arrived.
Nikki Lindgren:
It sounds like it.
And how is your daughter liking the product? Is she into it?
Erin Lopez:
Well, she hasn't received it yet, but I will keep you posted.
Nikki Lindgren:
Awesome. Great. Cool. So, Ever Eden, we'll add a link to that in the show notes just so people can go check out the brand Erin is talking about. And I think the Gen-Alpha landscape is really developing. So awesome to hear about another clean brand in the space. Cool. So we like to utilize this time together on the show to talk through playbooks and tactics that are either trending or on their way out. And so kind of kick it off with what you have found within either your own agency or some of the clients you're serving running email and SMS marketing that you believe has really performed well, probably in 2024. I know we're at the beginning of 2025, but yeah, give us a little bit of a look back of what worked well in 2024.
Erin Lopez:
Okay, yeah, well, I will speak about my own business, but this also applies to brands and my clients, I'd say, as well in a way. So, I'm gonna chat about how I niched down my business into pretty much one primary vertical, which is beauty and prestige beauty.
I'm not sure it's necessarily a marketing-specific tactic, but it encompasses marketing. And I niched down my business. So in 2019, when I set out on my own, I actually originally didn't want to work in beauty anymore. I was coming off just a very burnt-out career in corporate.
And I set out to just work with any brand except in beauty. It turned out that my expertise and my network, they still just wanted beauty services and so I ended up retaining a lot of brands within beauty again. It worked out though because I realized I love the industry. I have an affinity for beauty. I myself am a Target customer, so I find it very easy just to speak to that customer in all of the deliverables that I'm working on for my clients.
Since I'm talking to myself. And it's just a really fun category. So it's ever-changing, it's dynamic, there's so much innovation, there's so many new brands and players. So it is just a very fun vertical to work in.
Nikki Lindgren:
Yeah, makes sense. And then flipping gears a little bit to the types of initiatives you're running for brands and for the beauty clients you're working with, any big ah-has from a performance perspective in 2024 around things you expected to work and work quite differently than you had maybe projected?
Erin Lopez:
Yeah, so 2024 was interesting. I think a lot of brands experienced high growth in the beginning of the year. And then as the year progressed, there were definitely headwinds and challenges, just total e-commerce clients, the economics, etc.
Beauty's in a unique position in that there's always new players. It's so fun and innovative, but on the flip side, again, there are always new competitors popping up. A lot of my clients double down on retention. So, keeping tactics to try to keep their current customers engaged and converting for their second and third and beyond purchases.
On the email side and SMS side, we do a lot of different tactics to try to improve customer retention. Anything from flows to audience segmentation, different targeted campaigns, adding in more personalization where we can. So that pays off. I think always examining your customer retention and their CLV and trying to improve those specific KPIs ongoing always pays off.
There are, I saw a lot of new technologies out there to try to help with loyalty in general for an e-commerce company. And those are, I'd say, a mixed bag. They show a mixed bag of results. But in general, I'd say always focusing on retention for email is a great tactic. So that still works regardless of what year we're in.
Nikki Lindgren:
As it relates to the mix of emphasis on email versus SMS, has that landscape changed?
Erin Lopez:
Yes, it has. I think brands now have picked up SMS consistently, so brands who didn't have SMS three or four years ago definitely now likely have an SMS plan in place. Thus, the appetite is still varied. So, SMS is still a great way to drive engagement in real time, get key messages to the customers. It's excellent for transactional messages.
It's interesting because the appetite for SMS has not changed though, from my clients. Most people feel inundated now from the amount of messages they're receiving just from a personal perspective. So, when they're working on their brand marketing, then they actually don't really want to double down on SMS. It's still a steady stream of, okay, let's keep it consistent, but not over-send.
Nikki Lindgren:
I think the point that you clarified that's worth repeating is SMS does better for those direct sales, like transactional communications, but like you wouldn't be using SMS necessarily for education or founder story or anything that could particularly be longer.
Erin Lopez:
Yeah, nothing long-form, but anything that the customer you want the customer to know immediately. So, like all of your shipping and order confirmations, notifications, key promotions. That's a great message to send. New product announcements or anything related to treating your SMS subscriber like a VIP. Because they have such a personal— you have such a personal piece of information from them.
Nikki Lindgren:
So you kind of talked us through a couple of things that you're thinking about for Ivy and Co Studio, some things that you're thinking about for your brands. How does this bring you into some lessons or new strategies you'll be deploying going forward?
Erin Lopez
One is, I think this year clients are refocusing on acquisition. Usually, that happens, I'd say, beginning of the year. You would know better, actually, Nikki, but I find that that's in general true. So, what I find then that supports acquisition, we're looking at adding more personalization for clients. Things like targeted product recommendations and campaigns and flows. Letters from the founding team or from the brand teams to certain audiences. Pulling out like a more engaged customer or subscriber, sending them unique content, really trying to be thoughtful about what messages are getting into the inbox to try to cut through the noise of all of the other marketing messages from competitors. So, that continues to be... a very expansive strategy, especially with the rise of so many different AI tools available now. I think it's just going to become even more advanced.
Nikki Lindgren
And then you're correct in that many brands, after they've gotten through their holiday and Q5 rush of new customers, they're continuing to kind of double down on acquisition of those new customers, but they're also should be really focused on getting that repeat customer from holiday and Q5 as quickly as possible. Is Q1 a good time, like if someone only has one time a year to dedicate to optimizing email flows and SMS flows, is Q1 the time to do it or when do you recommend doing it if they can only do it once?
Erin Lopez
Thank you.
Yeah, Q1 is a great time, certainly, because you have almost the entire year then to get in shape for your next big holiday season. And you can have then the insights top of mind from your past holiday season to try to make adjustments for the rest of the year.
So, yeah, I'd say anytime before the middle of the year is a great time to relook at how your performance is and where you can make optimizations.
Nikki Lindgren
What are you doing with brands when you find that the customer lifetime value—let's just call it the one-year lifetime value, because I know lifetime value beyond that is kind of hard to quantify—when it's lower than a brand wants and they're aiming for email to solve it, like, what position does that put you in? And then when does it work favorably versus when it might not work favorably?
Erin Lopez
Hopefully, they don't put all of their bets on email to solve lifetime value because that's not the most realistic expectation. There's so many other retention tools that come into play outside of email. But if we are trying to improve CLV, there are ways that we approach that.
So, one, audience segmentation: targeting your, maybe your higher customer lifetime segments with certain pieces of email content, SMS, versus a lower lifetime value customer. There's also ways to approach flows. So, do they have—we focus a lot on the kind of initial nurturing flows, most brands do—but then there's all of the rest of the lifetime of your subscriber. Are there appropriate re-engagement flows set up? Or sun-setting flows? And then that time in between your initial 30 days of interaction with the brand up until they become lapsed, all of that time in between there should be consistent communication to continue to engage that subscriber.
So, there's often just big gaps of communication in that specific, like, middle window of the lifetime of a subscriber. Those are, say, the couple main things that we're looking at if tasked with CLV.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, that's exciting to think through. And yeah, to the point earlier of email and SMS isn't the only way to figure out how to retain a customer. But it's definitely a piece of the toolkit that sometimes does get overlooked just due to bandwidth of in-house teams or partner teams and stuff. Thank you for walking through that. Anything else from a going forward perspective? I do want to ask about what you think is emerging and what the real trends of 2025 are going to be and they don't have to be specific to email and SMS. But before that, I just want to make sure we've closed out 24 and I didn't want to move too quickly for you to answer other tactics you're changing as a symptom of things that happened in 24.
Erin Lopez
Yeah, I think one, I sort of mentioned it already, but really trying to be meaningful about the content. I find that that's a theme amongst brands that we are talking to clients or other brands outside of our portfolio. There's this sense of just so much, just an overload of marketing. And brands still really want to provide education and nurture the relationship of the subscriber. So, I find that that's a theme, just a common theme now.
It makes sense because there's just so many channels, it seems like, even with TikTok and still with Meta in the inbox, there's just... there's, I think, the fatigue of messages. So, I really feel like brands will try to be thoughtful about their messages and how they're speaking to their customer. And I think that's outside of email, that's across all marketing channels.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, I think 2025 is a big year for community and strengthening the bonds they have with existing customers or fans and followers of brands already. So, great to hear that that's what you're seeing and planning for on your end too. I read a headline today that product development is the new growth marketer because so much of what we're talking about today is the person going to come back and be a high-value lifetime customer for a brand or not.
Does tie back into product development. And so, yeah, in your consultative work, what are you doing beyond email and SMS to kind of help move businesses forward?
Erin Lopez
We, yeah, I love that that's the current headline. That's always been the case for beauty. Definitely. Always new product drives the business forward. But for us, we'll also, similar to product development, we'll try to advise on maybe assortment updates or changes that could support email, certain promotions, nothing like a completely new product, but maybe that's virtual bundles or other incentives outside of just a blanket discount.
Because a lot of our clients are non-promotional. So, they don't want to offer 25% off, you know, week over week, month over month. So, we'll provide promotional strategy and other ideas that could maybe drive not just the email channel forward, but their other channels as well. I myself have a background in e-commerce marketing too. So, I always love having the opportunity to provide copy recommendations for clients too. We work so closely with product copy and brand copy that sometimes it's nice for our clients just to have a more distilled version of their current copy too.
Nikki Lindgren
We talked a little bit about predictions already, so I'm not gonna ask you more predictions or how you're using learnings going forward. What I would love to know, because you're dealing with marketers in-house on the brand side that are looking for agency partners like yours, has the criteria or mindset of the buyer of your services changed over the last six years since you've been in business? What might they be looking for different now than they were earlier on in your career at Ivy Inco Studio?
Erin Lopez
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say brands now are much more savvy in email and own marketing channels than ever before. Klaviyo, our ESP that we specialize in, is actually relatively new. So, back in 2019, many brands were still on Mailchimp, and we used to do so many Mailchimp to Klaviyo migrations six years ago, and now that's just not the case. Since then, brands are up and running on Klaviyo and now they're trying to understand how to level up the channel. Whether that be in any aspect of Klaviyo or, like I mentioned before, utilizing their tech stack in Klaviyo and SMS. So, I find that clients and brands are just craving more advanced strategies and how to target their audience in a better and smarter way.
Nikki Lindgren
Do remember the early days of your agency and at the same time working with brands on the paid and SEO side who were in the migration phase from Klaviyo or SendGrid, SendinBlue, who knows the names of all the old ones, over through Klaviyo. So, I can relate to those days as well.
Erin Lopez
Yeah. Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren
If you're talking to a brand that is maybe at $250k a year, $500k a year, and they're really trying to grow to their first million, what are the couple of tools that you would say, "Make sure to get this done this year"? What are the programs that you think, holistically for them for marketing, are really necessary for them to get to that next rung on the ladder?
Erin Lopez
So, I will say get the foundation of email set up. You don't necessarily need SMS, but the foundation of email automated series and flows running for you in the background, that is always step one for me. But simultaneously, you can't have a successful email program without top-of-funnel. I am. We actually won't work with any clients that don't have top-of-funnel marketing activations on. So, email really can't grow itself. It can't grow its own subscribers.
So, I always recommend, if you're a new brand, invest in top-of-funnel just to get brand awareness and client acquisition, customer acquisition prospects. Make sure that that's really running efficiently. And then also, I mean, you have to pay attention to point of conversion. So, make sure the website's optimized because all that top-of-funnel traffic that gets down to bottom at checkout, you need to actually make a sale.
Nikki Lindgren
If you were giving advice to your younger self early in your career, probably when you started your early jobs in beauty, what advice would you give yourself?
Erin Lopez
I would say to just remember to trust your gut instincts. It really will lead you in the right direction, even if you resist it. There's so many instances when I looked back and I remember my gut instinct was to go a different way and I ended up getting there, but in a very difficult or roundabout way. And I wish I just had listened to that in the beginning.
So, it still applies, and sometimes you can push your gut instinct away, but try to listen to it.
Nikki Lindgren
Erin, it's been great having you on the show today. I'd love to have you shout out how people could get in touch with you and learn more about your email and SMS services.
Erin Lopez
Thank you. I've loved being on this and chatting with you today. You can find us at www.ivycostudio.com, or on Instagram, same name, @IvyCoStudio, or just email me. I'm Erin@IvyCoStudio.com.
Nikki Lindgren
Thank you so much for your time today, Erin.
Erin Lopez
Thanks, Nikki.
