Email marketing works like a charm when you already have multiple automation working for you in the background. There are multiple reasons for an eCommerce business to rely heavily on Email Marketing for example:
- It keeps the audience engaged
- It helps in ORM
- It helps in personalized communication with the audience
- It is one of the most engaging forms of communication with the client
- It mostly requires a one-time effort. It’s Set-it and forget-it.
In this case study, I am going to discuss how I scaled email marketing automation and achieved the following
- Over €70,000 in revenue from email marketing
- €17 ARPU (LTV) from email marketing and highest of all across other online channels
- 18% of the overall revenue share across all online channels
Here are some of the screenshots
In the above screenshot, you can see that Average Revenue Per User based on the Lifetime Value from Email Channel is €17 which is the highest of all. If you compare the same to other channels, the closest channel will be Direct traffic, with ARPU(LTV) of €7, almost 60% lower to the Email traffic. That gives a solid reason to focus on email marketing.
Page Contents
Setting Up the Basic EMail Automation
The first step in Email Marketing was to set up basic automation. These automations were:
- Welcome Email Series
- Abandoned Cart Emails
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Monthly Newsletter
- Unsubscribers Email
You can add more to your basic automations of course. After we were done with the basic automations. The next step was to build up a strategy to keep the flow of email addresses alive at the top of the funnel.
Generating Fresh EMail audience
I am not going to list out the exact strategy that we used to keep acquiring the new email addresses but here are a few examples from different industries that might help you:
- eBook download for the food industry such as recipe eBook download, Food storage eBook download, etc.
- Course details for the education industry such as program brochure download, program appointment booking, open house attendants, etc.
- DIY for home decor
- Useful guides for cosmetics such as skincare guide, DIY guide, best practices, etc.
- Quiz & contest apply to almost all the industries
- Calculator (home loan, car loan, education loan, payday loan, etc.), followed by a Guide for business industry
- Blog email subscription for most of the industries
After we had everything smooth and running at the top of the funnel, it was time to move to intermediate automations.
Fresh Audience Email Series Tips
First email
Introduce them as a part of your brand and what your brand stands for. It would be nice to build some brand trust. Some examples for some industries would be:
- Your brand relationship with non-profits & donations
- Soft links to some of your PR coverage
- Soft intros to customer testimonials
- From where you source your raw materials etc.
Second email
You can also introduce soft gamification at this stage such as
- You earned these many points and how to use them wisely
- Referral programs
- What your user can expect in the next email.
Third email: Hard introduction
- Start talking about your products, store, USP of your products, etc.
- Your welcome email series can go up to multiple emails depending on your store, purchase lag, and how established are you as a brand.
Analysis Tips for Fresh Audience
- At the basic, you can create a GA goal based on submission events and analyze different sources.
- If you are using some third-party tool such as Mixpanel, use the first-click attribution to analyze the event
- In GA, you can also use the model comparison tool to see how fresh email audience is doing in comparison with other new users acquired from other channels
- You can further optimize doing A/B testing or MVT on the LP using Google optimize or VWO etc.
- Use an analytics tool to find out the purchase lag for the email welcome series to further optimize your email series.
Intermediate Email Automations
Intermediate email automations help you further improve your email automations. However, they also require some intermediate implementational skills and depend on the capability of your email platform. Here are some examples of the intermediate Email automations that we setup
- Searched on the website
- Generic Follow-Ups
- Reminder to Repurchase
- Engagement tagging
- Re-engagement Emails
- Generic follow-ups
- The audience who searched on the site – Based on the products visited/ Category visited
- Audience added a product to the wishlist
- Someone opening a particular hook in the monthly newsletter based on feed
- Comments reply email and opinions about other open questions
- Audience visited blog about a particular product category
These automations requires very pin-pointed planning in terms of what kind of email at what frequency you want to send out to the users. Here is a screenshot of the Reminder Email campaigns. The reminder email may consist abandoned cart reminder, a reminder to repurchase, a reminder to a one-time offer, etc.
Analysis Tips for Intermediate Email Automations
In order to prioritize the above automations, you can use GA and other tools to get a lot of data to make your decision easier.
- Use a search query report in GA to find out how many audiences use the search option on your website.
- You can create custom dimensions & metrics in GA using your blog data-layer to find out on what types of blogs, users are engaging the most.
- Probably, you have multiple authors writing for you, you can even find out whose content is the most engaging
- Create a funnel report in FB & google ads and see which campaign is being assisted the most by email automations
Advanced Email Automation (Winners)
These automations do not only depend on your email platforms but also depend on how much data you have about customers. Here are some of the email automations that we setup for advanced emails:
- Generic Reminder to purchase email series based on last bought date and last product bought.
- Cross-sale and up-sell based on the above data
- Audience with a high lead score based on different metrics such as Email opens (based on email types), link clicks, website visits, etc.
- One-to-one emailers such as anniversary, birthday, etc.
Making Data-Driven decisions
RPS – LP – Campaign Trio
I used this Trio to all my sale-based Email campaigns to measure the impact. You can also add another metric to it called “ECOM conversion rate”. But I relied more on the Revenue Per Session value because email is a more personalized approach and it resonates better with the ARPU and LTV.
Email Audience Engagement Metrics
The above analysis gave us enough insight into what campaign should drive what audience and where on the website.
Learnings
- Fresh Email audience revenue per session is equivalent to that of Facebook MoFu & Google non-branded search campaigns. That’s why we shifted our approach from FB acquisition to email marketing
- Engaged audience revenue per session is equivalent to that of organic, branded paid search & direct traffic audience.
- Winback audience revenue per session outnumbers all the audience and is of the highest quality. Also, 3X of the fresh EMail audience.