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 might 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 folks’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 lots of the conventional progress channels: natural social, paid adverts, influencers and associates, and PR. However as a substitute 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 enables us to give attention to 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 lately, however I feel somebody signing up on your e mail record is an intimate factor. It’s the closest many people will ever be to our prospects, and I don’t take that frivolously 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 preserve shopping for from us for years to return.
We don’t simply promote in our emails
The normal means 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 a little bit otherwise, now possibly 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 needed to personalize our e 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 matters 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’ll be able to spend much less time worrying about your pores and skin, you release headspace to speculate elsewhere within the stuff you love. So, our emails typically speak concerning the science of fine skincare, tackle developments and debunk myths, and interview impressed people on considerate matters, 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 info bolsters our open and engagement charges throughout the board. These instructional emails typically have decrease unsubscribe charges and might drive 10 to twenty % greater click-through charges than different sorts 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 are able to seize their consideration even when inboxes grow to be particularly crowded throughout peak promotional durations.
It takes extra work to offer beneficial content material as a substitute of simply touting our merchandise, however we lighten the load for our small staff by doing a variety of content material repurposing. For 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 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 a little bit additional time ensuring that the majority touchpoints have some ingredient of personalization.
It’s not all that onerous to do, particularly in case you have your tech stack set as much as ingest all the information you’ve about who you’re emailing. For instance, after we are emailing prospects about gross sales or new merchandise, we wish 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 just’ve repurchased our cleanser X many occasions, and we’re so appreciative of that. We expect you’d actually get pleasure from our subsequent product.” This exhibits subscribers that we’re taking note of 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 a variety 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 acquired a word straight from the founder, and lots of people will reply immediately to those emails. Whereas the preliminary e mail blast isn’t truly one-to-one, we at all times be sure that to answer to anybody who writes again in order that they know we’re actual folks behind the scenes and that we actually do hear them. Nearly nobody unsubscribes from some of these emails, they usually 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 e mail record 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 give attention to essentially the most engaged and the least engaged.
For essentially 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 reduce a listing of what we contemplate our greatest prospects (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 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 % greater than different promotional emails (typically 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 record by emailing everybody, however the actuality is simply a portion of your record goes to stay energetic and impactful, and those that don’t can truly damage you in the long term. We usually solely ship emails to individuals who have engaged with one in every of our messages up to now six months, making exceptions for larger moments that may have a greater probability of re-engaging a lapsed subscriber.
Once 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 people (as soon as we’ve unsuccessfully tried to re-engage them, in fact), we’re capable of preserve and even enhance our metrics general. No person desires to surrender on an e mail subscriber, however it’s essential to suppose extra holistically than that concerning the well being of your program record as an entire.
We measure towards our personal benchmarks to be taught what works for our prospects
On the subject of 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 finest practices and benchmarks, and people are nice beginning factors, however on the finish of the day, it’s important to work out what works for your model and your prospects—which means crucial benchmark is your individual.
Once 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 acquired to testing. We examined smaller parts like topic strains and ship occasions. We examined larger parts like how continuously folks needed 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 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 on your model, however in case you’re prepared to place within the effort to experiment and pay shut consideration to how your viewers responds, it would repay in dividends.
