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 relating to 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 time and again—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 lots of the conventional development channels: natural social, paid adverts, 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 e mail signups as a objective. This permits us to deal with constructing a relationship with prospects over time, turning e mail right into a high-impact channel that boasts over 50 % open charges and drives a big share of our income.
Model emails can really feel so impersonal today, however I believe somebody signing up in your e mail checklist is an intimate factor. It’s the closest many people will ever be to our prospects, and I don’t take that evenly as a founder. Listed below are the methods I’ve prioritized a personalised really feel to my e mail advertising and marketing so my prospects really feel valued—and need to maintain shopping for from us for years to come back.
We don’t simply promote in our emails
The normal method of approaching e mail advertising and marketing as an e-commerce firm goes one thing like this: Discuss your product, flip the script and discuss your product somewhat in a different way, now perhaps supply a reduction in your product, and so forth. I’m the primary particular person to unsubscribe from emails that really feel like they’re bombarding me, so I at all times needed to personalize our e mail technique with content material our prospects are excited to learn.
What that got here right 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 purchasers 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 may spend much less time worrying about your pores and skin, you release headspace to take a position elsewhere within the belongings you love. So, our emails typically discuss concerning the science of fine skincare, handle developments and debunk myths, and interview impressed people on considerate subjects, all of which makes nice e mail content material.
Educating e mail subscribers that we’re going to be a dependable supply of helpful and galvanizing data bolsters our open and engagement charges throughout the board. These instructional emails typically have decrease unsubscribe charges and may drive 10 to twenty % increased 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 value studying, so we really feel assured we will seize their consideration even when inboxes change into particularly crowded throughout peak promotional durations.
It takes extra work to supply worthwhile content material as an alternative of simply touting our merchandise, however we lighten the load for our small workforce by doing plenty 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 might be expanded or reframed into an e 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 a substitute of a one-size-fits-all method, we’ve discovered an edge by spending somewhat additional time ensuring that almost all touchpoints have some component of personalization.
It’s not all that tough to do, particularly when you have your tech stack set as much as ingest all the information you’ve gotten about who you’re emailing. For instance, once we are emailing prospects about gross sales or new merchandise, we prefer to reference the context of their prior relationship with us. After we launched our second product, the Brightening Serum, we reached out to of us with messages like: “We seen that you simply’ve repurchased our cleanser X many instances, and we’re so appreciative of that. We expect you’d actually get pleasure from our subsequent product.” This exhibits subscribers that we’re being attentive to them as particular person prospects, which fuels loyalty and retention.
Generally, personalization is so simple as making it really feel like we’re emailing them individually. We ship plenty of plain textual content emails: Unformatted emails that hit our prospects’ inboxes and appear to be I actually sat down and typed a message for them. It’s significant for our prospects to really feel like they obtained a be aware straight from the founder, and lots of people will reply straight to those emails. Whereas the preliminary e mail blast isn’t truly one-to-one, we at all times make certain to answer to anybody who writes again in order that they know we’re actual individuals behind the scenes and that we really do hear them. Virtually nobody unsubscribes from all these emails, and so they are inclined to have increased than common engagement charges due to their intimate-feeling nature.
We phase our most engaged and our least engaged
Segmenting our e mail checklist 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 reduce an inventory of what we think about our greatest prospects (primarily based 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 sometimes 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 are upwards of 20 % increased than different promotional emails (typically over one hundred pc increased) 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 checklist by emailing everybody, however the actuality is just a portion of your checklist goes to stay energetic and impactful, and those that don’t can truly harm you in the long term. We typically solely ship emails to individuals who have engaged with considered one of our messages prior to now six months, making exceptions for greater moments that may have a greater likelihood of re-engaging a lapsed subscriber.
If you persistently ship to disengaged subscribers, it indicators 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 of us (as soon as we’ve unsuccessfully tried to re-engage them, in fact), we’re in a position to keep and even enhance our metrics general. No person desires to surrender on an e mail subscriber, but it surely’s vital to suppose extra holistically than that concerning the well being of your program checklist as an entire.
We measure in opposition to our personal benchmarks to study what works for our prospects
Relating to e mail advertising and marketing or any advertising and marketing technique, it’s so tempting to imitate what everybody else is doing. Yow will discover countless content material round greatest practices and benchmarks, and people are nice beginning factors, however on the finish of the day, you need to determine what works for your model and your prospects—which means an important benchmark is your personal.
After we began constructing our e mail program, we drew a line within the sand displaying the place our engagement metrics have been sitting after which obtained to testing. We examined smaller components like topic traces and ship instances. We examined greater components like how often individuals needed to listen to from us and what sort of content material they resonated with most. With every take a look at, we checked out how our viewers responded and used that to tell and iterate our broader technique.
Alongside the way in which, we inevitably tried issues that simply did not work, however we additionally took some large, out-of-the-box swings that paid off. It takes time to determine the fitting retention technique in your model, however in the event you’re prepared to place within the effort to experiment and pay shut consideration to how your viewers responds, it’ll repay in dividends.