Your Email List Is a Goldmine

Hey there! 👋

Converting online visitors into loyal subscribers might seem as hard as transforming lead into gold, wouldn’t you agree? Alchemy – that’s an age-old story…

Old School. ⁤What’s today’s eCom alchemy?

Converting casual browsers into loyal subscribers — using one of the most leverage-building ways to market to your audience, through email. Email marketing has an ROI of $39 for every $1 spent on average, making it incredibly efficient for promoting your brand.

It’s not only efficient, but extremely accessible – you can check your email in any situation, at any time of day or night, and nearly everyone checks their inbox at least once per day. Knowing this, we understand that email marketing has great reach, especially in the world of eCom.

So let’s examine a case study of an eCom brand that saw a revenue growth of 167% with the help of email marketing – Jones Road Beauty.

Case Study – Jones Road Beauty 🏆

Jones Road Beauty, led by Bobbi Brown, had to contend with endless eCommerce competition – all with an ever-shrinking email list. Her eCommerce brand, Jones Road Beauty, was struggling to turn website visitors into loyal subscribers.

That was until they pivoted & started to make use of email marketing, using one of the more popular tools, Klaviyo. It was thanks to this integration that Jones Road Beauty saw the crazy revenue growth of 167% during the season of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), and email marketing alone contributed 38.4% of all BFCM revenue generated in 2023 – isn’t that ridiculous?

If you want to see more of their statistics, click here to read the full case study.

But we want to show how you can emulate their success, step-by-step. Let’s get into how Jones Road Beauty saw crazy success with email marketing & how you can do the exact same (we’ll also dive into the only email marketing tactics you need to know about!)

How You Can Emulate Their Success 🧙‍♂️

1️⃣ Sow the Seeds of Curiosity Early

Jones Road Beauty created a massive buzz by giving away the details of their Black Friday offering 4 days before, which was a complete 180 from their normal one-day notice.

🟥 Start dropping your offers’ hints early on to create anticipation

BFCM (Black Friday & Cyber Monday) is one of the best periods of time for eCom stores, but if you can’t strategically time your messages to your buyers, you can’t leverage this yearly golden opportunity.

If you want to learn more about the exact strategies you can implement to make a lot of money this November, click here to check out our post on customer activation during BFCM.

2️⃣ Segment & Personalize  

Strategic segmentation ensured their emails spoke to each and every one’s specific interests and preferences.

It showed Jones Road Beauty what actions each potential customer took and how to take them further down the funnel – all while making them feel special & heard. Segmentation lets you personalize at a very large scale.

In particular, for prospects who completed the Miracle Balm Shade Finder quiz but hadn't made a purchase, Bobbi Brown’s team sent out personalized messages about exploring various shades to discover their ideal match. On the other hand, VIP repeat buyers received messages focused on the idea of gifting their favorite products, ensuring the content was both relevant & personalized.

🟥 Use segmentation wisely to connect with every reader on a deep & personal level

3️⃣ Analytics For Precision

With analytics, you can see exactly what resonates with your audience and what doesn't, allowing you to split test and optimize for what works.

Open rate dropping? Split test subject & preview lines. Open rate over 24%, and yet the click-through rate is under 2%? Split test body copy & offer. There’s a plethora of elements to split test, and analytics can let you see what works, and what doesn’t.

By diving deep into the data, you can uncover hidden patterns and insights that can allow you to craft hyper-targeted campaigns that truly speak to each customer.

🟥 Leverage analytics for your campaign fine-tuning & for targeting your audience even more precisely 

We now know from Jones Road Beauty’s success that good timing, segmentation, personalization, and paying attention to analytics can all help,

And Bobbi Brown’s success story is nothing short of magical, but it doesn’t give us everything we need to nurture our email list…

❓ What are the most effective strategies for optimizing email marketing to drive success for an e-commerce brand?

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The Magic Behind Growing Your eCom Email List ✨

Before we get to the specifics, we must understand that to grow an email list — we must capture our customers' emails. This can be done efficiently in the following ways:

1️⃣ Create an Enticing Sign-Up Form

Sign-up forms typically fall under one of these types:

• Embedded forms - live on your site as a static form with an email field and a sign-up button

• Pop-up forms - they “pop up” in the middle of the screen, which catches attention and disrupts

• Full-screen forms - cover the entire browser window. These usually are the highest converting but are the most intrusive & disruptive.

• Fly-Out forms - they “fly out” from the top, bottom, left, or right of the page and hover for a short while or when a site visitor scrolls to a certain point on the page.

All of these form types are proven to convert well, but what matters more is what the form says to the reader, rather than how it appears on their screen.

To make your sign-up form irresistible, add the following to it:

1. A Discount for entering their email

2. A clear field to enter their email

3. A quick survey that only takes a second to fill out, and could help the brand send more personalized messaging later on

4. A silly, quirky (crazy?) question that sets your brand apart

“Want your high school crush to love you TODAY? 

Get your FREE Love Potion - Enter your email here”

You best believe the alchemists knew their sign-up forms.

And here’s an unhinged example from DW Coffee:

2️⃣ Implement Interactive Quizzes

Interactive quizzes are awesome - they are fun, easy to complete, and allow for further personalization & segmentation!

An example from Fitbit:

Quizzes are especially powerful for helping customers narrow down their options - which also streamlines the process of buying something technical, like a Fitbit watch.

Answering a few fun questions is much easier than understanding the geeky data and finding what’s best for you — the goal is to make the purchase of any product as frictionless as possible for the potential buyer.

Quizzing intrigued buyers to find the best fit for their needs in a simple &fun way is crucial.

3️⃣ Back-in-Stock & Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails yield an impressive 45% open rate, converting 10.7% of lost shoppers back to buyers - it’s one of the best ways to recapture potential sales.

Here’s a great abandoned cart email from Bluemercury:

And back-in-stock emails are perfect for when a product isn’t available right now - this way the buyer gets notified when it’s back!

Even the best alchemists run out of love potions – that’s why we need to remind our beloved customers when they’re back in stock (in a non-pushy way).

Here’s a lovely example of a back-in-stock email from London Bridge:

And if you want to know more about the best types of checkouts (specifically on Shopify), click here to read our post.

Congrats, you’re now an email alchemist 🧙‍♂️

You are now armed with all the spells you need to grow your email list, keep customers engaged & in love with your commerce! But knowledge without action is nothing.

You need to put it to work – email marketing tools like Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Drip, and ActiveCampaign make that easy. They all mostly share the same features, just check the pricing plans & pick the one that fits your budget & needs!

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Thanks for reading and supporting E&U (Ecommerce & Unicorns)

Daniil from ECORN