Email Marketing Solutions

Five strategies that I used to grow overall revenue, revenue per recipient, open rates and click rates.

I’ve been working with a client in the food and beverage space for the past months. A loose leaf tea brand to be specific.

Their emails weren’t bad. But they were image heavy and promotion heavy.

So they needed a strategy overall and some help with copy.

I dove in and started working closely with their graphic designer and head of social media.

And in three months I was able to increase overall campaign revenue by 36%! From $82,644 to $112,477. (Comparing data from May 2022-July 2022 to May 2023-July 2023)

During this same time, I increased open rates by 142%, click rates by 30%, and revenue per recipient by 25%.

How?

By using these 5 strategies…

Strategy 1 – Send more emails

Ok… this one is pretty straight forward.

But I’ve talked with so many clients who are afraid to send more emails because they don’t want to spam their list.

Simply put, if you want to make more money with email marketing… you NEED to send more emails.

In 2022, my client sent 26 campaign emails from May – July. That’s just over 8 per month or about 2 per week.

In 2023 we sent 36 campaign emails from May – July. That’s 12 per month or 3 per week.

So you could do some simple math and show that in 2022 they made $3,178 per email and in 2023 we made $3,124 per email.

If you do NOTHING else… sending more emails looks like a pretty safe bet to make more money.

However…

HOW you send those emails is important. Because if you utilize the wrong tactics, there is a higher probability that you churn and burn your email list.

So that brings us to strategy two…

Strategy 2 – Provide more value

If you’re going to email more, (you are going to send more emails right…?) you can’t just bombard your list with deal after deal, discount after discount, and promotion after promotion.

When you ask more and more from your list without giving back… you’re going to churn and burn.

And end up with a dead list.

The solution? Focus on providing more value through emails.

We did this a number of ways.

• Product focused emails with different ways to brew and special cocktail/mocktail recipes
• Emails that linked to social media posts
• Educational emails showing the history and benefits of loose leaf tea.

We ended up sending about 1 value email for every 1 promotional email. (I’d love to be closer to 3-1, but we had to start somewhere)

As a result, we had about half of our emails with a much lower revenue produced, but it resulted in much higher performing promotional emails.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we didn’t send these emails to the entire list.

That’s why strategy 3 is so important…

Strategy 3 – Segmentation

Last year this brand used a 180 day opener segment for all campaigns.

Better than no segmentation, but this segment was too broad and included too many subscribers who weren’t really engaging.

So I focused on a couple more specific segments…

• 30-day engaged
• 90-day engaged
• Prospects
• Customers
• VIPs

I sent most promotional emails to the 90-day engaged segment and then most value emails to the 30-day engaged segment.

We also sent specific campaigns targeted towards our prospects to get that first sale and some other campaigns targeted towards prior customers and VIPs.

Proper segmentation is the number one reason that I was able to increase open and click rates.

But to optimize our segments, we had to first create…

Strategy 4 – 45 Day Campaign Calendar

Creating a campaign calendar is one of the most important things you can do for your email marketing channel.

When I started working with this client, they didn’t have one. They had a promotional calendar that they would reference and then try to create emails around those promotions…

But it was a “throw it together” at the last minute operation.

So one of the first things that I did was sit down with the team and go through the next 45 days. What promotions were we running, what new products were coming, and what did we want to focus on.

I then created a campaign calendar around those promotions.

This way we were able to start sending more value based emails, promoting the promotions better (more on that in strategy 5), and work as a team to get creatives done for each email.

We then met every month to review and to plan further ahead.

There will always be adjustments that need to be made. But when you’re planned out 45 days in advance… it’s a lot easier. 

Strategy 5 – Better promotional structure

Finally, strategy five. Better promotional structure.

Last year, this client would have a promotion and send one email. Maybe two if it was a longer one.

“Here’s the deal… come and get it!“

I added a few tweaks.

First, for any larger promotions we sent a “preview” email to our most engaged subscribers. 

Next, we paired up SMS messages for our opening email and our closing emai.

Lastly, we made sure to send a closing email for EVERY promotion. Whether it was a 24 hour flash sale or a week long discount.

For the longer promotions, we’d also send a few emails during the middle of the promotion that focused on providing value but had a soft CTA that directed back to the promotion.

Summary:

To review, here are my five strategies that I used to increase revenue from campaigns by $29,832.90…

• Strategy 1 – Send more emails
• Strategy 2 – Provide more value
• Strategy 3 – Segmentation
• Strategy 4 – 45 Day Campaign Calendar
• Strategy 5 – Better promotional structure

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