With an average of $36 return on every $1 spent, email marketing is a critical digital tool. That’s why we often say that businesses without an email marketing strategy are leaving money on the table.
When we were approached by a compatible ink and toner company with ~$7 million revenue, only $1 million of which came from email marketing, we immediately saw worlds of potential.
Sending our email strategy to print
The company was looking to upgrade their e-commerce presence and optimize marketing efforts to capture more business from site visitors. When it came to email, they were starting from square one, without any email strategy or flows in place.
Enter eAccountable in October of 2021.
To start with, we planned to immediately implement welcome flows, predicted purchase flows, abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows.
The purpose of these automated flows is to re-engage customers, often by leveraging site visitors’ behavior to help them find the product they’re looking for and/or complete a purchase. The flows are sent on a pre-arranged timeline, and can be configured to send based on a customer’s behavior.
Welcome flows are a fundamental necessity of good email marketing strategy. They introduce new customers to the email list and create opportunities to delight them early on.
Abandoned cart flows are for customers who added products to their electronic cart, showing purchase intent, without completing the purchase. The emails remind them and sometimes give an added incentive to buy.
Browse abandonment flows target customers that viewed product and/or category pages without adding items to their shopping carts.
Predicted purchase flows rely on historical behavioral data gathered from customers’ site visits. They use algorithms to guess what customers might want to buy next, then present these opportunities to them through email. For example, a customer who rebuys every three months could be sent encouraging emails on that timeline, including potential upsells.
Of course, email flows are only as good as their performance. We ran A/B tests on subject lines and calls to actions (CTAs) to make sure we were choosing the best version of each campaign to share with the ink and toner brand’s email audience.
Re-engaging and retaining customers to increase revenue
First up, we had to optimize the brand’s e-commerce presence. We successfully integrated them from Magento 1, an older, end-of-life version of this open-source e-commerce platform, to Magento 2. We then facilitated two rebrands of their email templates.
The new email strategy saw big returns right out of the gate. By November 2021, we had increased sales +61% month-on-month (MoM).
We then needed to show we could sustain this big jump. By August 2022, we had maintained a +28% revenue increase (Google Analytics attribution).
In addition, we implemented a “win-back” campaign with the goal of re-engaging inactive email subscribers —- those who had not opened an email from the company in one year.
This is a personalized email from the company founder giving readers the opportunity to unsubscribe if they’re no longer interested. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the fact is, disengaged subscribers drag down the health of your email marketing strategy. The more disengaged subscribers you have, the more it will dilute your open and click rates. That’s why it’s often better to pare down the list so you can focus on engaged subscribers.
The calculated risk paid off for our client: The campaign re-engaged 11% of subscribers to help drive retention and success across other flows.
Take it from us — sometimes the simplest subject lines can make the biggest difference!
We also know this doesn’t feel simple to everyone. If you could use some expert help optimizing your email strategy, reach out to us today.