Case Study: Increasing Email Revenue By 425% In Under 60 Days For A 7-Figure Store Previously Burned By Two Agencies

CASE STUDY

Increasing Email Revenue By 425% In Under 60 Days For A 7-Figure Store Previously Burned By Two Agencies

Niche

General-Products Store

Size

7-Figures

200%

Boost In Campaigns Open Rates

169%

Boost In Flows Open Rates

No promotions or sales ran

425%

Boost In Email Revenue in Under 60 Days

HIGHLIGHTS

Challenges

Needing to solve emails not being opened and landing in spam
Not having a campaign strategy and only relying on automations
Needing to find ways to grow the subscriber list

Solutions

Implementation of our deliverability solution
Creation of a weekly themed email and 2-3 more campaigns per week
New pop-ups to strategically grow the subscriber list

Results

425% increase in email revenue
200% boost in campaign open rates
169% boost in email flows open rates

The Mission

Scaling a general store eCommerce business to 7-figures per year is no easy task.

Sure, it gets easier as you find product-market fit and a profitable advertising channel to scale.

But with rising advertising costs one channel is not enough.

Our client had worked with two email marketing agencies before – hoping to unlock full Klaviyo’s growth potential – but had little to show for it besides outrageous bills and headaches.

At the moment of auditing their account, they had 8 automated flows turned on. Yet they were only generating 8% of their revenue through email.

That's where we came into action.

As we always do with new clients, we started our project following our 4D Phases: Discovery, Design, Deliver and Dissect.

Let's dive in...

Phase 1: Discovering The Problem

Sections:

Initial Audit
Understanding The Business
Understanding The Numbers
Understanding The Customers
Understanding The Journey

Initial Audit

We started with an audit of their Klaviyo account to get an overall idea of their current performance.

At this point we had our thoughts already, but we don't skip ahead until we've followed all the steps to get to the root of the problem.

Understanding The Business

Although there are hundreds of different niches in eCommerce, we can sum up the underlying drivers of growth in a simple formula:

Revenue $$$

# Of Customers

Purchase Frequency

Average Order Value

We use email to push these levers in different ways:

Lever 1: Number of New Customers

This is the top-of-funnel strategy, and it starts by converting site visitors into buyers. We do this through advanced pop-ups and optimized long welcome sequences and abandon sequences.

Then our segmented campaign strategy is constantly supporting the goal of driving the first purchase for non-buyers.

Lever 2: Purchase Frequency

Here's where email shines. The cost to reach a person through this channel is virtually zero.

First, we leverage automated behavioral sequences as much as possible to keep relevancy (and sales) high – in some cases implementing over 100 emails across flows with different styles of messaging: education, engaging content, brand-building, UVPs, storytelling, promotions, subscription pushes, community-building and more.

Then, we send laser-targeted campaigns leading customers to their next logical purchase while keeping engagement high.

Lever 3: Average Order Value

After organic traffic, email marketing is usually the 2nd highest AOV channel. There are many tactics we use to improve our client's AOV:

Upsells: selling them a better version of the product
Cross-Sells: selling them a complimentary product
Bundles: selling them a combinations of products they might have not tried otherwise
AI Product Recommendations: leverage artificial intelligence for product recommendation ideas
Tiered Offers: pushing them to spend over a certain threshold to unlock something (a bonus, free shipping, etc)
And more (to be covered in another article)

Understanding The Numbers

Then, we put the Engineering part of Email Engineers to work.

At this stage we'll crunch the numbers to get answers to questions such as:

Which products have the highest CLV (customer lifetime value)?
How can we promote them?
Which product combinations are proven to work? So we can create cross-selling flows and campaigns that boost CLV.
How much time should we wait to trigger an automation?
What’s the behavior of our best customers?
What makes them different?
How can we model them?
How can we lead all customers toward that behavior?

With this, we're confident we're creating a strategy based on numbers and not guesses.

Understanding The Customer

After we know which levers we have to push to grow our client's business, we dive deep into understanding their customers' motivations to buy.

Skip this step and everything else falls apart.

The only way to connect with your customers is by getting inside their heads.

Here we take a 360º approach and research what their customers are saying and what the competition's customers are saying, and send surveys if necessary.

By the end we want to know:

What do they want to achieve with your product?
What makes them buy?
What's preventing them from buying?
What unexpected factor is convincing them to buy?
Why should they prefer you over someone else?
What are the main features they're looking for?
What are the underlying benefits?
And more...

For some businesses (such as lifestyle brands) we answer a different set of questions.

Understanding The Journey

The email marketing strategy should support the natural customer's journey as much as possible.

As the late, great copywriter Robert Collier said in his famous advertising book Robert Collier Letter Book: "Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind".

Emails should be relevant. That's why we first map out our client's customer's journey to clearly understand:

Where are they coming from?
What are the next logical steps?
What piece of information do they need to take that step?
What will happen after they take that step?
How can we make it easier for them?
How can we push the 3 Levers of Growth at this stage?
Are they a subscriber, a buyer or a customer?

Ideally we want to automate as many emails along their journey.

Behavioral-triggered emails have – on average – 11x higher revenue per recipient than campaign emails. Why? Because they're relevant – we already know the customer's context.

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow.

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call

Phase 2: Designing A Solution

Now comes the fun part.

Here at Email Engineers we always start by implementing the changes that will lead to the biggest returns in the least amount of time – the 80-20 if you will.

We turn our service into a source of profit and not cost.

After Phase 1, we discovered our most immediate course of action was nailed down to 3 key areas:

1. Growing the subscriber list.

2. Sending Campaigns To Specific Segments

3. Deliverability & Improving Inbox Placement

Let's analyze each one.

Phase 3: Delivering The Solution

#1 Improving Pop-Ups and growing the subscriber list

Before we partnered they were running just one pop-up.

That’s a big no-no.

We created a few more segmented pop-ups and optimized them by changing the creative, structure and messaging.

Changes in creative include making the pop-up more eye-catching.

Changes in structure include changing the number and order of the steps within a pop-up to maximize conversions.

Changes in messaging include making the copy more persuasive and enticing to the target audience.

These new pop-ups were also triggered smartly. And we A/B tested combinations to find winner combos.

These changes led to more people going through the flows. And thanks to the new messaging they had a cool-side benefit as well, which we discover later.

#2 Sending Segmented Campaigns

Because of a lack of time, at the moment of starting to work together they hadn’t send any campaign for months, and they were leaving tons of money on the table because of it.

To solve this we created a weekly newsletter that subscribers loved. This also helped create engaged customers, which is rare in faceless brands.

We also started sending 2-3 segmented campaigns per week, which were designed to work together with the flows in a way that they'd improve overall email sales.

This leads us to the next point.

#3 Improving Deliverability & Inbox Placement

Most brands suffer from low deliverability and they don’t even know it. This is especially true with Gmail’s 2022 update.

After analyzing their data we attacked poor deliverability with better segmentation and better content.

These changes were key.

By sending emails to the right people the email providers (Gmail, etc) will view you as a “welcomed guest”. This will improve the open rates of your flows. Flows with better open rates lead to better inbox placement, which leads to better open rates across campaigns and flows.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

The same goes for better content.

If you send emails people are looking forward to receiving, your open rates will raise, leading to another virtuous cycle.

Revenue Before Working With Email Engineers

Revenue After Working With Email Engineers

Results

Thanks to the combination of acquiring more subscribers & turning them into customers, sending segmented campaigns, and having the emails land where they can be seen, we managed to increase the email revenue by 425% within the first 60 days of starting the project.

This translated into more profitable scaling via ads, by improving customers’ LTV.

And this was only the beginning.

Phase 4: Dissecting The Results

Quadrupling the email sales was great, but there’s still room to improve the current flows and send more segmented campaigns each week.

What we did within the first 60 days was just the “80-20”, or what would have the most impact in the least amount of time.

Takeaways

You can have all the flows you want, but if no one is going through them then they’re worthless. They’re just one part of the email equation. This client had 8 flows enabled but was only generating 8% of revenue through email.

Segmentation is key to creating a deliverability virtuous cycle that improves the result of your entire email program.

Now more than ever stores with low AOV must leverage email marketing.

There's no other channel that will yield these returns on investment through all stages of the conversion funnel or customer journey.

Plus, they must focus their efforts on improving Purchasing Frequency as a way to keep Customer's Lifetime Value high and make up for high Customer Acquisition Costs.

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call