THE CLIENT'S SITUATION
A US-based family-owned beauty store asked us to help them implement our email marketing strategy in order to increase their revenue by at least 20% in three months.
The company is proud to have only handmade products made of vegan and all-natural ingredients. The products have high-end luxury packaging and the price point is still affordable to the average American.
They not only wanted to increase their sales with our proven email strategy but to stay loyal to the values of the brand they represent.
OUR CHALLENGES
The big challenge was clear: could we achieve the expected 20% revenue increase after three months or not?
Another challenge was to warm up the email infrastructure properly at the beginning because the client didn’t do any email marketing before.
Plus, this project was different from previous ones because we needed to create high-quality design work for the emails.
Our previous clients had more need for good copy but the audience for this client was more demanding in terms of high-quality appearance.
OUR PLAN
Since the client asked us to implement our whole email marketing strategy, the Budai Media team exactly knew what to do next.
This business didn’t have any email marketing set up except the abandoned cart sequence with a software tool.
Firstly, we wanted to set up time-triggered pop ups on the website to get more subscribers to grow the email list fast.
As our next step, we wanted to set up automated email sequences and to start sending out three email campaigns every week.
We had to take care of activating the most engaging sequences first, then the rest, and then starting to send the first campaigns to the engaged segment.
Why?
Because if we’d started sending emails to the whole list, our email would have ended up in the spam folder fast.
HOW WE HELPED
The client only had the emails of the previous customers, so we had to find out how to grow it fast when we started working together.
List importing and building website pop ups
The company didn’t use any email software tool before we started working together, so our first move was to set up a Klaviyo account and import the list into the tool.
As the next step, we used OptinMonster to set up time-triggered pop ups on the website.
We tested a lot with the pop ups and found the perfect timing to avoid affecting the conversion of the website negatively.
Plus, the client asked us to create highly personalized pop ups, so we created product-specific and holiday-themed pop ups.
OptinMonster also gave us the opportunity to use tags in the copy of the pop ups, so the visitor could see his or her name in the copy or the name of the actual day of the week in the pop up.
2. Setting up the right automated email flows
Right after creating the popups, we created welcome email flows to get sales from the subscribers.
The client wanted us to use a discount and to educate the new subscribers.
So we mixed the two in three welcome emails. As we always do, we separated the subscribers from mobile and desktop/tablet.
After turning on the popups and the welcome flow, we activated the flows with high engagement (open rate and click-through rate).
We stopped the tool the client used for abandoned cart emails and set those up in Klaviyo, and we also set up these:
Browse abandonment emails
Re-engagement emails
Win-back emails
VIP membership emails
First-time customers emails
Customer review emails
Selfie contest emails
Let’s be honest here, the number of possibilities is limitless.
3. Warm-up process and spam rate testing
Since the client had never sent out any email campaigns to the list of the previous customers, we had to be careful about sending emails.
When someone sends out a large number of emails from an account to many recipients and the audience doesn’t open and click the emails, the spam filters tag the sender as a spammer and it takes time to regain the good reputation.
In order to prevent this issue, we started sending out the flows having high engagement first such as the abandoned cart or the new customer flows.
Then, we sent out four warm-up campaigns to the email list. Those who opened one of the four emails got into the engaged segment and the non-openers went into the unengaged segment.
The engaged subscribers received more email campaigns later and the unengaged ones received a maximum of one per week.
Then we sent even more emails to the engaged and fewer to the unengaged to separate them more. After one month, we suppressed the unengaged segment who didn’t open any emails in the first month.
Simultaneously, we made a spam test every week. With this tool, we could monitor the percentage of the emails that ended up in the spam folder on different email platforms.
We got a lower and lower spam rate every week until we reached 95% inbox rate, so only 5% of the emails landed in the spam folder.
Regular campaigns
After we suppressed the unengaged segment, we activated every automated email flows.
The last one was the re-engagement flow because it usually has the lowest open and click-through rate.
Also, we started sending out the regular promotional and content emails to the email list while it grew larger with the website pop ups.
END RESULTS
As you can see in the picture, we generated an extra 30% revenue for the store in the first three months, which was beyond the expectations of the client.
We automated the lead capturing to grow the email list and cleaned the list from uninterested subscribers.
By doing this, the deliverability rate increased to over 90%, so we ensured that only highly engaged people received our emails.
We did this aligned with the core values of the brand using the great work of our designers.
CONCLUSION
A US-based skincare brand wanted us to build a complete email marketing plan for their online webstore and increase their revenue by at least 20% after three months.
We set up time-triggered website pop ups to grow the email list of the company and imported the emails of existing customers.
We built the first automated email flows and activated the ones with high engagement level.
Then, we sent out warm-up campaigns and frequently monitored the inbox rate of the emails.
Fewer and fewer emails went to the spam folder, and in the meantime we cleaned the list of unengaged subscribers after four weeks.
Finally, we activated every email flow and started sending regular email campaigns.
The revenue of the company increased by 30% in the first three months while we relied on the high-quality work of the designers.