From the second I began my firm, Motif Skincare, I knew I used to be coming into a crowded market with excessive buyer acquisition prices. It will be difficult to compete with influencers and bigger manufacturers on the subject of fueling new buyer discovery. As such, the first objective was to create merchandise that actually made a distinction in individuals’s routines—merchandise they’d uncover and need to purchase many times—and to focus our advertising and marketing efforts on fostering that hyper-loyalty.
This isn’t to say I don’t do any top-of-the-funnel advertising and marketing. We make the most of most of the conventional development channels: natural social, paid advertisements, influencers and associates, and PR. However as an alternative of utilizing channels like social to solely push gross sales, we root our technique in retention advertising and marketing, specializing in electronic mail signups as a objective. This permits us to deal with constructing a relationship with prospects over time, turning electronic mail right into a high-impact channel that boasts over 50 p.c open charges and drives a big share of our income.
Model emails can really feel so impersonal nowadays, however I believe somebody signing up to your electronic mail listing is an intimate factor. It’s the closest many people will ever be to our prospects, and I don’t take that calmly as a founder. Listed here are the methods I’ve prioritized a personalised really feel to my electronic mail advertising and marketing so my prospects really feel valued—and need to maintain shopping for from us for years to return.
We don’t simply promote in our emails
The standard method of approaching electronic mail advertising and marketing as an e-commerce firm goes one thing like this: Speak about your product, flip the script and discuss your product a bit in another way, now possibly provide a reduction to your product, and so forth. I’m the primary individual to unsubscribe from emails that really feel like they’re bombarding me, so I all the time needed to personalize our electronic mail technique with content material our prospects are excited to learn.
What that got here all the way down to for us is leaning into content material round subjects associated to our house as a lot as we discuss our merchandise. We need to be a significant vacation spot for patrons as they navigate their skincare journeys, however we additionally need to have interaction them in a broader dialog round progress and potential—as a result of when you possibly can spend much less time worrying about your pores and skin, you unencumber headspace to take a position elsewhere within the stuff you love. So, our emails usually speak in regards to the science of excellent skincare, handle traits and debunk myths, and interview impressed people on considerate subjects, all of which makes nice electronic mail content material.
Instructing electronic mail subscribers that we’re going to be a dependable supply of helpful and provoking info bolsters our open and engagement charges throughout the board. These academic emails usually have decrease unsubscribe charges and might drive 10 to twenty p.c larger click-through charges than different kinds of emails, which helps enhance engagement metrics throughout the board. When prospects see us of their inbox, they’ve come to belief that we’re sending them one thing price studying, so we really feel assured we will seize their consideration even when inboxes grow to be particularly crowded throughout peak promotional intervals.
It takes extra work to supply beneficial content material as an alternative of simply touting our merchandise, however we lighten the load for our small workforce by doing quite a lot of content material repurposing. For example, if our social media supervisor is making a slideshow round a skincare subject or working with a specific influencer, we take into consideration how that content material may very well be expanded or reframed into an electronic mail. This creates constant messaging throughout channels and helps draw prospects deeper into our funnel.
We make prospects really feel like we’re emailing one-to-one
Personalization is the north star for succeeding at retention advertising and marketing. As an alternative of a one-size-fits-all method, we’ve discovered an edge by spending a bit additional time ensuring that the majority touchpoints have some ingredient of personalization.
It’s not all that arduous to do, particularly if in case you have your tech stack set as much as ingest all the information you might have about who you’re emailing. For instance, after we are emailing prospects about gross sales or new merchandise, we prefer to reference the context of their prior relationship with us. Once we launched our second product, the Brightening Serum, we reached out to people with messages like: “We observed that you simply’ve repurchased our cleanser X many instances, and we’re so appreciative of that. We predict you’d actually get pleasure from our subsequent product.” This reveals subscribers that we’re being attentive to them as particular person prospects, which fuels loyalty and retention.
Typically, personalization is so simple as making it really feel like we’re emailing them individually. We ship quite a lot of plain textual content emails: Unformatted emails that hit our prospects’ inboxes and seem like I actually sat down and typed a message for them. It’s significant for our prospects to really feel like they bought a word straight from the founder, and lots of people will reply instantly to those emails. Whereas the preliminary electronic mail blast isn’t truly one-to-one, we all the time be certain to answer to anybody who writes again so that they know we’re actual individuals behind the scenes and that we actually do hear them. Nearly nobody unsubscribes from these kind of emails, they usually are likely to have larger than common engagement charges due to their intimate-feeling nature.
We phase our most engaged and our least engaged
Segmenting our electronic mail listing to solely ship sure messages to sure cohorts is one other facet of our personalization technique. There are such a lot of methods to divvy up your subscribers as a model, however we prefer to deal with essentially the most engaged and the least engaged.
For essentially the most engaged, we search for methods to reward them. Each time we’re going to run a sale or launch a brand new product, we lower a listing of what we take into account our greatest prospects (based mostly on each buy conduct and engagement) and ship them a first-to-know marketing campaign, giving them entry to the deal earlier than anybody else has it. We usually use these plain-text emails I discussed above and focus the messaging on constructing goodwill with these prospects whereas making them really feel valued. These are by far the best-performing touchpoints we ship, with open and click-through charges which might be upwards of 20 p.c larger than different promotional emails (generally over 100% larger) and the best conversion charges we see throughout our program.
We additionally phase out our least engaged subscribers by not emailing them. It’s tempting to maximise your listing by emailing everybody, however the actuality is just a portion of your listing goes to stay energetic and impactful, and people who don’t can truly damage you in the long term. We typically solely ship emails to individuals who have engaged with one in every of our messages previously six months, making exceptions for larger moments which may have a greater likelihood of re-engaging a lapsed subscriber.
Whenever you persistently ship to disengaged subscribers, it alerts to inbox suppliers that your emails aren’t related, and over time, this may end up in extra of your emails touchdown in spam. By eradicating disengaged people (as soon as we’ve unsuccessfully tried to re-engage them, after all), we’re capable of keep and even enhance our metrics general. No one desires to surrender on an electronic mail subscriber, but it surely’s vital to assume extra holistically than that in regards to the well being of your program listing as a complete.
We measure towards our personal benchmarks to study what works for our prospects
Relating to electronic mail advertising and marketing or any advertising and marketing technique, it’s so tempting to imitate what everybody else is doing. You could find countless content material round finest practices and benchmarks, and people are nice beginning factors, however on the finish of the day, you must work out what works for your model and your prospects—which means a very powerful benchmark is your personal.
Once we began constructing our electronic mail program, we drew a line within the sand displaying the place our engagement metrics had been sitting after which bought to testing. We examined smaller components like topic strains and ship instances. We examined larger components like how often individuals needed to listen to from us and what sort of content material they resonated with most. With every check, we checked out how our viewers responded and used that to tell and iterate our broader technique.
Alongside the best way, we inevitably tried issues that simply did not work, however we additionally took some massive, out-of-the-box swings that paid off. It takes time to determine the best retention technique to your model, however should you’re prepared to place within the effort to experiment and pay shut consideration to how your viewers responds, it is going to repay in dividends.
