From the second I began my firm, Motif Skincare, I knew I used to be getting into a crowded market with excessive buyer acquisition prices. It will be difficult to compete with influencers and bigger manufacturers with regards to fueling new buyer discovery. As such, the first aim was to create merchandise that really made a distinction in individuals’s routines—merchandise they’d uncover and wish to purchase time and again—and to focus our advertising efforts on fostering that hyper-loyalty.
This isn’t to say I don’t do any top-of-the-funnel advertising. 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, specializing in electronic mail signups as a aim. This enables us to deal with constructing a relationship with clients over time, turning electronic mail right into a high-impact channel that boasts over 50 p.c open charges and drives a big proportion of our income.
Model emails can really feel so impersonal nowadays, however I feel somebody signing up on your electronic mail listing is an intimate factor. It’s the closest many people will ever be to our clients, and I don’t take that frivolously as a founder. Listed here are the methods I’ve prioritized a customized really feel to my electronic mail advertising so my clients really feel valued—and wish to maintain shopping for from us for years to return.
We don’t simply promote in our emails
The standard approach of approaching electronic mail advertising as an e-commerce firm goes one thing like this: Discuss your product, flip the script and speak about your product a bit of in another way, now perhaps supply a reduction on your product, and so forth. I’m the primary individual to unsubscribe from emails that really feel like they’re bombarding me, so I at all times wished to personalize our electronic mail technique with content material our clients 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 area as a lot as we speak about our merchandise. We wish to be a significant vacation spot for purchasers as they navigate their skincare journeys, however we additionally wish to interact them in a broader dialog round progress and potential—as a result of when you’ll be able to spend much less time worrying about your pores and skin, you liberate headspace to take a position elsewhere within the belongings you love. So, our emails typically discuss in regards to the science of fine skincare, handle tendencies 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 galvanizing info bolsters our open and engagement charges throughout the board. These instructional emails typically have decrease unsubscribe charges and might drive 10 to twenty p.c greater click-through charges than different forms of emails, which helps enhance engagement metrics throughout the board. When clients 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 turn into particularly crowded throughout peak promotional intervals.
It takes extra work to offer useful content material as an alternative of simply touting our merchandise, however we lighten the load for our small workforce by doing loads of content material repurposing. As an example, if our social media supervisor is making a slideshow round a skincare matter or working with a selected influencer, we take into consideration how that content material might be expanded or reframed into an electronic mail. This creates constant messaging throughout channels and helps draw clients deeper into our funnel.
We make clients really feel like we’re emailing one-to-one
Personalization is the north star for succeeding at retention advertising. As a substitute of a one-size-fits-all method, we’ve discovered an edge by spending a bit of further time ensuring that almost all touchpoints have some component of personalization.
It’s not all that tough to do, particularly in case you have your tech stack set as much as ingest all the information you’ve got about who you’re emailing. For instance, once we are emailing clients about gross sales or new merchandise, we wish to reference the context of their prior relationship with us. After 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 occasions, and we’re so appreciative of that. We predict you’d actually get pleasure from our subsequent product.” This reveals subscribers that we’re taking note of them as particular person clients, which fuels loyalty and retention.
Generally, personalization is so simple as making it really feel like we’re emailing them individually. We ship loads of plain textual content emails: Unformatted emails that hit our clients’ inboxes and appear like I actually sat down and typed a message for them. It’s significant for our clients to really feel like they received a observe straight from the founder, and lots of people will reply straight to those emails. Whereas the preliminary electronic mail blast isn’t really one-to-one, we at all times ensure to answer to anybody who writes again in order that they know we’re actual individuals behind the scenes and that we actually do hear them. Virtually nobody unsubscribes from these kind of emails, and so they are likely to have greater 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 side of our personalization technique. There are such a lot of methods to divvy up your subscribers as a model, however we wish to deal with probably the most engaged and the least engaged.
For probably the most engaged, we search for methods to reward them. Every 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 clients (based mostly on each buy habits 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 clients whereas making them really feel valued. These are by far the best-performing touchpoints we ship, with open and click-through charges which can be upwards of 20 p.c greater than different promotional emails (generally over one hundred pc greater) 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 simply a portion of your listing goes to stay energetic and impactful, and those that don’t can really harm you in the long term. We usually solely ship emails to individuals who have engaged with considered one of our messages previously six months, making exceptions for larger moments that may have a greater probability of re-engaging a lapsed subscriber.
If you constantly 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 preserve and even enhance our metrics total. No person desires to surrender on an electronic mail subscriber, but it surely’s vital to suppose extra holistically than that in regards to the well being of your program listing as an entire.
We measure in opposition to our personal benchmarks to be taught what works for our clients
Relating to electronic mail advertising or any advertising technique, it’s so tempting to imitate what everybody else is doing. You will discover limitless content material round finest 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 clients—that means a very powerful benchmark is your individual.
After 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 received to testing. We examined smaller components like topic strains and ship occasions. We examined larger components like how regularly individuals wished to listen to from us and how much 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 way in which, 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 fitting retention technique on your model, however should you’re keen to place within the effort to experiment and pay shut consideration to how your viewers responds, it’ll repay in dividends.
