How a commemorative jewelry store got from 10% to 27% email revenue and drove a 13x ROI with Hustler Marketing

Highlights

Hustler Marketing’s impact on SilverCut’s email stats in a year.

(Comparing May 2020- 21)

Flow Revenue:

3.5x

Campaign Revenue:

4x

Email Subscribers

2x

“Hustler Marketing is a professional and well structured company that quickly and efficiently assists with our email marketing needs.”

– Emil Norlander, CEO, SilverCut

About
Silvercut

Founded in 2019 by Emil Norlander, Silvercut is a custom engrave jewelry brand that eternalizes loved ones by turning their photo into a beautiful piece of silver jewelry. The company prides itself on working with highly talented craftsmen, each of whom are dedicated to creating Silvercut jewelry. They use a mixture of traditional techniques and modern technology to ensure that the jewellery will be worn and enjoyed for a lifetime.
“Our goal has always been to build a business that puts quality and customer service at the heart of everything we do. Since 2019, we have helped over 100,000 customers remember their loved ones through bespoke silver jewelry – with each unique piece lovingly designed by hand.” – Emil Norlander, CEO

The SilverCut Email Marketing story

While the Silvercut team had a flourishing, if challenging system to acquire new customers through paid ads, social media, and organic content, they still looked for a structured, streamlined, and ROI-friendly way to tackle the following problems.

1

Keeping customers in loop
Keeping in touch with the customer at every stage
A custom handmade product mandated keeping in touch with their customers at every stage of the product of their order such as order placed, order in production, order fulfillment status and dispatch status with a streamline approach.

2

Driving Repeat Purchases
Driving repeat purchases.
A custom handmade product mandated keeping in touch with their customers at every stage of the product of their order such as order placed, order in production, order fulfillment status and dispatch status with a streamline approach.

3

Creating Stickiness
Creating brand stickiness
Though SilverCut has a unique product, it has to ensure that it can create a brand that’s memorable, creates loyal customers, and stays relevant through a fast changing environment in ecommerce where copycat brands abound.

Meeting Hustler Marketing, the email marketing experts

Before Silvercut handed us their email marketing service mandate, the store did not have an email marketing program in place. A post-purchase flow was tested but abandoned due to low conversions. The store agrees that they were probably missing a chunk of their revenue by not starting their email marketing program sooner.

“When I started working with Silvercut I knew that their brand had an emotional connect with the customers. That is why we based our whole strategy in trying to touch our customers’ hearts, building a brand and not just offering promotions. We always have to remember that Silvercut wants that every special moment they have can be immortalized and that Silvercut is much more than just a product, the brand really cares about making their customers happy and we need to express that while working on email marketing strategy. “ – Paola, Account Manager, SilverCut

Kickstarting an email marketing program for Silvercut

Soon as we were brought in, our team got into high-octave mode and made the store their own. We started from an audit of their current email marketing (none), researching the competition, the industry and the product itself, defining customer personas formed the foundation before we actually started working on creating their email marketing strategy and building out the flows.

Setting up the email flows:

At the heart of every great email marketing program lies a technically sound, well-researched and well tested flow strategy. ‘Flows” in email marketing world usually mean a series of automated emails that trigger when a specific action takes place on the store.

Unlike our other stores, where we usually start in a chronological order and build a robust welcome flow, for SilverCut, we started with the Post Purchase flow because keeping recent customers updated and satisfied about their order was a priority for Silver.

We initially started with 5 essential flows and then ramped up to these additional flows within a few months

After a while, we were also thinking of ways to build the brand and to generate more revenue. A good idea was to do the win-back flow and the re-engagement so we can reach old customers that could be still interested in the brand and wanted to be on the loop. Also, we send the customers a unique “Production Progress Follow up”, where we send them updates on their order to build the anticipation. Of course, their opinion is important so we add a review request flow that encourages them to leave feedback on the website.

For the first 6 months of our work, the Flows we set up alone drove an average of 8% of the store’s total revenue.

Flows' contribution to store revenue

2020

(May – Dec)

Flows

8%

2021

(Jan – April)

Flows

27%

Top 3 Flow Strategies that got these results

Constant adjustment and refinement of the flows:

As the store grew from 33,000 subscribers in May 2020 to almost 3x that by April 2021, the contribution of flows increased exponentially.

We went from an average of 8% to an average of 27% flow contribution to overall store revenue within the first 10 months of working with the store. We constantly tested and revised flows as needed. Sometimes with as many subject-lines and creative variation as 5 for a single flow email!

After a while, we also refreshed some of the flows and improved both copy and design. We checked the content, the angles, the offer and number of emails and made improvements and adjustments as needed.

For eg. The Welcome Flow was revised with a neater look, simpler copy and went from a single email flow to include a 3-email sequence across a 6 day period.
Heavy emphasis on the product quality
Each email, whether it was a transactional flow, a more relationship-led one, or a campaign, focussed on highlighting the superiority of craftsmanship of the product. Being a bespoke gift item that the customer bought once and cherished for a long time, it’s very important to them to be assured of its quality, craftsmanship and adherence to the customer’s expectations. We doubled down on our messaging, amplified it with visuals, animation, closeups.
Having a “Trust plaque” on some emails
Silvercut is without a doubt a unique brand, so we wanted our Unique Selling points to be very clear, well communicated, and easy to remember. That is why we added them on the footer to add them on every email, so the customer is aware of our purpose. Silvercut’s products and the company’s value and its process held a lot of strong value propositions and hooks that helped establish customer trust and contributed to a sense of doing the right thing when purchasing one of their products. These hooks included the product characteristics like the manufacturing quality, the craftsmanship, the cause Silvercut contributed to, and more.
Working an emotional connect
A silvercut jewelry is an emotional investment. Given that most customers bought these as an ode to their beloved pets or people, building this sentimental angle was very important. Being dog lovers ourselves in the Silvercut team, we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes, sometimes even in their dogs’s shoes, and focussed on positioning the jewelry as an “emotional investment” rather than buying another product. We also highlight the causes that Silvercut is involved with so the customers know that this brand has a purpose. Also, we share how the items are made and how the artisans create each jewelry in a personalized way with care which goes on to build a stronger sense of purpose for the buyers of these products.
Positioning the product as a gift for loved ones to drive repeat purchases
At the beginning, we saw that a lot of people bought the product for themselves because they wanted to immortalize a memory and keep their pets by their side. We realized that if somebody bought this for themselves and liked it, they probably would love to think of it as a gift for somebody that loves their pet or maybe for a friend that recently lost a pet and needs help in the grieving process. We started using some angles that promote that the product is great for a great gift for any occasion, while grieving, for pet lovers, best friends that want to have matching items, family keychains and so on.
Leveraging social proof
Silvercut enjoys glowing reviews from most of their customers. Customers love the product, what it means to them, their relationship with their pet, the quality of the product, and how good the service was. The brand takes customer satisfaction very seriously, and it reflects in its 100% satisfaction guarantee, which means that if the customer is not satisfied with their order, it will be replaced. This validation makes for great social proof and serves as a big hook for prospective customers. Most of the Flow emails include at least one customer testimonial, some form a narrative around the testimonials.

Email Campaign Performance

Campaigns’ contribution to store revenue

2020

(May – Dec)

2%

2021

(Jan – April)

8%

From an average of 2% contribution to overall revenue in 2020, to ramping up to 9% of overall revenue in 2021 so far, Email Campaigns just like flows, have come a long way.
Just like flows, campaigns too have leveraged the use of emotional connect, emphasis on product quality, social proof to drive results. We started with one campaign a week last year to doing upto 5 campaigns per week to now back to doing 3 campaigns a week. SilverCut ampaigns have had the leeway to deploy more creativity and leverage the following 3 hooks:

1. Occasion Marketing:

Occasions serve as jet fuel for ecommerce stores that focus on giftables. Since most Silvercut jewelry bought as gifts is occasion based, we fully optimised an event calendar to plan content around red letter days. Be it big days like Christmas or Mother’s day or even little-known days like World Puppy Day, National Prom Day and more, we built adorable messaging around all and drove good revenue from these.

2. Newsletters:

For non-event promotions, we used a combination of newsletters full of rich content, storytelling and establishing a deeper connection with the audience. The newsletters were sent as a flow to the whole list based on a few criteria.

Silvercut wants to nurture the customers and send them content that could be useful to them- for example, recipes that can be shared with their pets,  body language of the dogs, the behind-the-scene process of, designing the jewelry, tips and tutorials on taking care of Silvercut jewelry, and more.

3. Promos and offers

Even though the store does not rely on heavy promotions to drive sales, frequently playing around with different ways to promote existing discounts helped get us good results. Some of the promo tactics we deployed was offer “free shipping” days instead of flat discounts, and incentivise bulk purchases.
As Silvercut products are usually bought as gifts, we encourage the customers to buy 2 and get a discount. Also, from time to time we have run flash sales high on scarcity to induce a faster conversion.

Hustler Marketing's Impact on Silvercut Email Marketing

Silvercut derives an ROI* of 13x from Hustler Marketing which includes a 27% average store revenue from flows and 8% store revenue from campaigns, a stickier and more well-loved brand, a marked improvement in all email marketing indicators.

On our part, Silvercut is a brand that we enjoy working with and take immense pride in building along with the rest of their marketing team.

*ROI is calculated as client’s revenue from email – our fees / our fees 

“If you’re not focusing on generating repeat customers you’re most likely leaving up to 30% additional revenue on the table. Email marketing is a great way to re-connect with your customers and keep your brand in the top of their mind.”

Emil Norlander, CEO, SilverCut

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