Marketing

Newsletter #2 - Emailing: Generate 30% of your sales with emails 🗝

Julie Cauville

February 22, 2023

Last week I talked about my experience as marketing manager of an e-commerce brand with Thomas, the founder of EmailClub. I proudly told him that at the time, I was generating 20% of sales with emails.

A humbling moment for sure... he said that an effective email strategy would drive a 30% (😅).

He challenged my email strategy and told me everything I could improve. So, I compiled all his valuable tips to help you make email marketing one of your best acquisition levers!

It's easier than you think ⤵️

PS: to motivate you, I got you a little gift at the end of the email 🎁

Two golden rules to catch the interest of your contacts 🪝

1. Only write to interested people!

Your customers won't react the same way to your sales arguments! This is true for both physical stores and emails

To improve the CVR of his emails, Thomas reminded me that it was necessary to start by segmenting his contacts.

Better segmented contact bases, enable you to send more personalised and relevant content to improve your CAC.

Two essential rules to get started:

An active base (your loyal customers 😍): these are the contacts with whom you have the most interaction and to whom you send almost all your emails (promos and pure content). You can also use it to get reviews, send surveys, etc.
An inactive base (the most sceptical 🧐): the contacts with whom you have almost zero interaction and that you removed from your active base. Thomas recommends reactivating them with product launch emails or special offers (about one email in 10).

_{📖 Need a quick refresher on email lists?}

Here's a very complete article by Thomas on how to segment, acquire, leverage, and clean up your e-mail lists! Read the article

Segmenting your lists also helps to infiltrate (almost) every inbox.

2. Make sure they read you!

Email marketing has its own algorithm ⚙️

Good news: it's much easier to crack than Google's.

In 83% of cases, 'not delivered' emails are linked to a bad Sender Score.

Ranging from 0 to 100 (a score < 70 being considered bad), it defines your reliability as a sender based on your recipients' behaviour towards your emails (spamming or junk mail, number of unsubscribes, etc.).

Hence the importance of segmenting your bases!

_{💡How to calculate it?

‍}_{I use the}_{Senderscore.org}_{tool to calculate it for free.}

‍

‍Thomas gave me 2 additional indicators of a failing email:

an open rate below 20%,
more unsubscribes than orders after the email is sent.

The ultimate checklist for successful emails ✅

Here are 5 tips to make the most of each email you send!‍

☑️ Always check everything before sending: links, spelling, alternative texts...

☑️ Optimise your emails on mobile: 43% of your customers consult their emails on mobile, and 80% of users buy on this medium.

☑️ Mix the formats and themes.

_{💡 Get rid of the writer's block syndrome!}_{Here are my}_{2 tips to get inspired}_{:
-> subscribe to your competitors' newsletters,
-> use the NewsletterMode tool to go faster!}

☑️ Subject line is key: the open rate of your email depends on it, no matter what it contains. List your Leads Magnets and use them to arouse the curiosity of your customers.

☑️ Always A/B test: objects, formats, sending times, CTA position... The more you test, the better you can analyse your contacts' behaviour, and the more effective your strategy will be!

_{💡Tip to analyse your results}_{To more easily track the performance of my emails and understand what my audience likes and doesn't like, I list all my tests on}_Whimsical_(the_Miro_{tool also works great) with screenshots of my results.}

The 2 most profitable emails 💸

1. Order tracking emails

Post-purchase emails have an open rate of around 75% (compared to 19.7% on average for marketing emails). Brands that leverage this channel as a marketing tool generate up to 8% higher conversion rates!

For example, Unbottled integrates vouchers into their follow-up emails to generate additional sales! ⤵️

_{💙 Bigblue Tips}_With_Bigblue_,_{you can easily personalise your follow-up emails and provide your customers with a great experience, even after they have placed their order!}_{Read more}

‍2. Cart abandonment emails.

By optimising this channel, Thomas recovers up to 20% of abandoned carts and in a 100% automated way!

Even though I was quite shy about this practice, he advised me to combine my emails with SMS, ideally creating sequences of 3 emails for 2 SMS.

To save you time, I'm sharing the sequence he uses for pure conversion purposes:

Email 1 (15 min) / SMS 1 (30 min): a short urgent message that sends your customer back to their basket.
Email 2 (1 to 2 hours) / SMS 2 (1 day): a reminder of the advantages of the product or your mission + addition of a first promotion (to be defined according to your strategy and margins)
Email 3 (1 day): specify that this is the last email + add a 2nd more attractive promotion.

_💡_{Guarantee your brand image}

_{To mitigate the intrusive aspect of cart abandonment emails, I advise you to configure your sequences according to these}_{3 criteria}_:

_Trigger_{: cart abandonment at checkout,}
_{Filter 1}_{: your customer has accepted your marketing emails,}
_{Filter 2}_{: they have already placed at least 2 orders.}

You know everything!

I hope that all these tips will be useful to you and that you will keep me posted on how they've worked for you. (I always reply).

Oh, and if you ever want to dig into the subject, I'm sharing a free email marketing cheat sheet here (and a surprise 🎁)

Get the playbook for free!