So, what do you guys think about the prospects of email marketing, especially during those holiday seasons? Is it dead or still afloat? Has it been working for you lately?

Here’s the thing: Now, we all know that most people’s inboxes are drowned in fantastic offers during the holiday season. And your email can easily be lost in this flood.

How do you get yours to stand out?

On the surface, it should be very, very easy to make people buy, right? It’s the shopping season and everyone’s got their wallets and bank rolls out.

Wrong!

For e-commerce store owners and managers, it gets very tricky because you have to find a way to be visible enough.

We can tell you this for certain because we worked with a client for one 4^th of July shopping season!

And we helped them generate $28K from 4^th of July flows.

But, make no mistake; it wasn’t easy and we had to overcome several challenges:

As we said earlier, inboxes are flooded with promos during the holiday season and standing out becomes a tall task.

The noise of sales pitches can easily drown out yours and makes it difficult to optimise CTRs.

Our client also had great expectations from us just like anyone else which meant that we had to do better than just par for the course.

Then, there were a couple more challenges with the product.

Firstly, the product was not really meant for return-buyers. Our past experience of providing the best deals to the best return-buyers always provided the best sales results. But, this time it was different.

Secondly, the product was also not fit for VIP customers. Plus, the client had only around 1k VIPs.

What did we really do?

We figured out a strategy that will produce results to meet the client’s expectations, which we will talk about… in just a moment.

We had one thing going for us, though: We had kept the subscriber base engaged through our regular newsletters. They always got good, relevant content which matched their interests. So, the obvious choice was to first work with these engaged people.

As usual, we turned to Klaviyo and used its advanced segmentation and customisation capabilities.

Klaviyo can produce excellent design flows and campaigns which are great to create personalised brand experience through email, and some of you know that.

So, here’s the strategy we used.

• We first segmented the engaged people into 3 segments.
• The first one was the Extra Engaged Segment. This group was a special segment of people who opened multiple emails in recent weeks and several times.
• The second segment was The Regular Engaged Segment. These are the people who engaged with the store at least once in the last 60 days. These guys received a lower discount than the other two. We expected decent revenue from them because they had the numbers behind them.

We didn’t have much expectation from the third one, the VIP segment, as the product was really not for them. But, still…

The second part of our strategy was all about sequencing email flows.

Remember, we said that it can get very tricky. Here it comes.

The frequency of sending out mails has to be increased because holiday sales seasons inundate inboxes with lots and lots of promos.

So, you’d think that the natural thing to do will be to send blasts to your whole mailing list without any segmentation. And you won’t be too wrong because so many others do the same. Why shouldn’t you?

Well, because you have a couple of big brothers watching and their names are Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. And if you don’t obey their rules, then your open rate will drop to less than 10% because most of your emails will go to spam.

So, how do you work out who and what to send, how many emails to send and when to send and still stay out of the spam folder?

For our client, we built an email flow logic based on our carefully segmented list and when required, we made subtle changes in re-sent emails.

The first thing we did was to create 3 promotional flows, one for each segment.

Next, we came up with a sequencing method which was the same for all the segments.

It went like this:

We’d sent an email offer, didn’t see any action on that day, so we’d resend the same a day after.

Still no action, send the first follow up email, no action, resend the same a day after.

Now we are hoping that something will happen!

But no!

So, we’d send the second follow up, wait for a day, and resend a day after, if there still wasn’t any action.

And when someone did buy something, we’d sent a Thank You note.

This helped our client to maintain his good deliverability rate.

And the other thing we did was to ensure that the Extra Engaged Segment felt special and gave them a deal that was not available to anyone else.

Something to this effect:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And what did we achieve after doing all this?

$16K from the Extra Engaged Segment, $11.5K from the Regular Engaged Segment and less than $1K from the VIP Segment (which we had expected) in 6 days.

 

 

 

 

What this tells us that email marketing is alive can work wonders if you take the time and effort to carefully segment, create great copy and attractive designs.

But knowing how to sequence your email flows (so that you stay out of spam too) is vitally important and if you are not very sure of it, just let us know at Hustler Marketing.

We’ll be happy to take care of it for you!