CASE STUDY
Taking Email Revenue From 20% To 29% In 30 Days For A 7-Figure Gift Brand Through New Flows & Campaign Segmentation
Niche
D2C Gifts
Size
7-Figures
45%
Boost In Email Revenue in 30 Days
20%
Boost In Open Rates
The Mission
Scaling a low-ticket product brand is hard.
You can't afford not having your backend sales channels dialed in.
Our client knew that.
And she also knew email was going to be the low-hanging channel for ROI.
But she didn't know what was needed to take their 20% email sales to the next level.
They were doing "everything they were supposed to do" – with a very solid automation foundation and ongoing weekly campaigns to their list.
But it wasn't enough.
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
x
Purchase Frequency
x
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.
Does that means we should just blast everyone on your list? Absolutely not. That's what we call "burning a list". And it leads to high unsubscribes, low engagement and landing on the spam folder.
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)
But what are the common elements behind all these tactics? First, your customers have to like your products, your brand and what it stands for.
Findings
After analyzing our client's business, we saw opportunities on improving all 3 levers of grow – using a combinations of the tactics we covered above.
In simple terms: get more customers, make them buy more and more frequently.
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? (repeat the questions above for each group)
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
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 want for our service to get paid by itself even before we've delivered the full project.
Sounds crazy, but we've done it multiple times now.
After Phase 1, we discovered our most immediate course of action was to improve and create new abandonment flows, and change their current campaign segmentation strategy.
Phase 3: Delivering The Solution
During the first month our flow strategy was to improve the copy, triggers and segmentation of one abandonment flow and create another one to complement the natural customer's journey for buyers and non-buyers.
These flows trigger on product and category view (a Salesforce event), and we choose the conditions and filters within based on product analytics.
On the campaign side, we created and started using new segments based on engagement and buying behaviour.
Here are 2 of the flows we implemented (blurred for privacy):
Abandon Flow 1
Abandon Flow 2
Results
Thanks to these new flows and new campaign segmentation strategy we managed to increase email revenue by 9% within the first 30 days of starting the project.
This translated into extra 5 figures per month for our client – with a return on investment of over 11x (and growing).
As a result of the new segmentation, open rates increased by 20% (relative).
And this was only the beginning.
Phase 4: Dissecting The Results
As you can see (we'll lend you a magnifying glass if you need one 🔎) there's room to continue improving these flows by a lot.
What we did within the first 30 days was just the 80-20, what would have the most impact in the least amount of time.
Takeaways
Brands 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
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