Here at Good & Gold, our mantra when it comes to content strategy is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. Sounds pretty simple...but it’s not. Content can be “delivered” in many ways (via organic search, paid search, social media, email, etc), and each of those marketing channels requires its own set of overlapping tactics.
We believe that email is one of the most effective content delivery systems—direct, action-oriented, customizable, and immensely measurable. And by taking full advantage of the data and technology available on most email platforms, you can be absolutely sure that you’re delivering the right content at the right time, every time.
We have no shortage of thoughts about how to optimize your approach to an ongoing email newsletter using a data driven approach to template design, A/B testing, audience segmentation, and more. We can ensure that your audience is receiving your content and engaging with it. But how do you develop a strategy that drives engagement and revenue on an ongoing basis? In one word: automation.
First, it’s important to note that the true beauty of email automation is that it’s automated—once your system is set up and optimized, you don’t have to touch it. Your email platform is working 24/7 in the background, engaging your customers with tailored communication and driving revenue while you focus on other parts of the business. In other words, it’s well worth the up-front investment of time and energy to develop and implement a powerful email automation system.
Now, on to the overview: Unlike standard, one-off email campaigns, automations are targeted emails that are triggered when specific people meet the pre-defined criteria you set. For example, you could send an automated follow-up message to a customer when they buy something from your store for the first time. Or you could send a friendly reminder to a customer if they add an item to their shopping cart but don’t complete their purchase. Or, you might send a coupon to all of your customers on their birthday. Most email platforms offer a standard set of automation types with built-in triggers, but you can also create custom automations tailored to your business needs and customer behavior.
Once you’ve chosen your automation, developed your content, and set your sending criteria, your email platform will automatically manage your subscriber queue and email sends.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll summarize the four automations that we consider essential to any e-commerce business. But keep in mind that automations don’t apply exclusively to e-commerce—whether you’re marketing content, services, or products, there are automations that will help you engage with your audience. It’s also important that though automations are data-driven and not manually dispatched, they can feel very personal because they respond to individual actions and behaviors. So, take care to craft well-designed emails with clean, crisp copy and a friendly, unintrusive voice.
The simplest form of automation is also the most important: Welcome people to your world! Greet new subscribers with an introduction to your brand, your values, and a sense of what they can expect from your emails to come. This is also a great opportunity to encourage followers to become customers by sharing a promo code for their first purchase. Your welcome message should be friendly, concise, and authentic to your brand. If you have lots of content to share with new subscribers, your welcome message can also be expanded into an “onboarding series” that includes a sequence of tips and resources sent over a span of time.
With an average 40% open rate, the abandoned cart email is one of the most effective automations, and a must for any e-commerce business. After all, you’re reaching out to a person who was on the verge of making a purchase to nudge them over the finished line...it’s hard to find a higher-intent customer than that.
Here’s how it works: six hours after a customer abandons their online shopping cart without completing their purchase, send an email to encourage them to return to your store. Throw in a little extra incentive by including personalized product recommendations, or a coupon if they complete their purchase. (According to MailChimp, campaigns that include product recommendations generate an average of 31% more revenue than campaigns without them.) This email can also become a series of reminders over the course of a few days.
Once a customer has made their first purchase, it’s time to focus on retention: active, loyal customers are vital to your growth, and retaining existing customers is much more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Enter the first purchase automation, designed to keep new customers solidly within your orbit. Quite simply, you’re thanking customers for their purchase—but it’s also important to invite their feedback and encourage them to consider additional purchases, often with a discount. Generally, the first email in this series would send an hour after purchase—if they don’t make a second purchase, another email would send 10 days later, and then another 20 days after purchase.
As we mentioned above, customer retention is vital to your growth. But inevitably, certain members of your audience will disengage over time for all sorts of reasons, many of them beyond your control. Those customers aren’t a lost cause, and they shouldn’t be neglected...they should be won back. Your re-engagement automation should be designed to win back customers who haven’t purchased anything from your store within a specific timeframe.
A standard re-engagement series might include three emails, one sent 120 days after last purchase, the next sent 120 days later, and the next sent another 120 days later. We recommend openly acknowledging why you're contacting them, and taking care to showcase new products and offer an incentive for making a purchase. Let customers know that you miss them, and that you value their feedback and engagement. As always, be clever, be authentic, and be clear about the purpose of your communication.
Now that you’ve got the basics, it’s time to build and implement those automations! And as always with email marketing, look at your reports frequently, address your weak spots, and build on what’s working. If one automation is working but another is falling flat, take a close look at the successful campaign (or series) to document and build on your recipe for success. And remember: No two audiences are the same, so your email strategy is unique to your business. Keep building, keep measuring, keep learning...and repeat.
We have a long-standing relationship with Bernardo 1946, partnering to drive success on their digital marketing channels with excellent results and ROI. We recently revamped their email marketing channel—read on to see how we knocked it out of the park!
In less than 3 months, we increased Bernardo’s email campaign-driven revenue by 106%! The brand was looking for an email strategy to increase engagement and revenue within Klaviyo. By designing an email system that reflected their sophisticated, timeless brand and leveraged thoughtful subscriber segmentation, we built an immersive ecommerce experience that benefits both the consumer and the brand.
We developed a multi-channel paid media strategy around seasonality, allowing us to deliver a return on ad spend close to 1,000% even in historically slower months. Bernardo needed to stand out in an overwhelmingly crowded footwear market, drawing attention to the quality and craftsmanship of its heritage brand while also appealing to modern digital shoppers. The brand was also hoping to drive consistent seasonal revenue, with a focus on conversions for both iconic best-sellers and newer footwear designs.
Impressed? We are too! To browse our services, see our certifications, and learn more about how our work can help take your brand to the next level, click here.
Keeping your audience both engaged and compliant is one of the most important keys to a successful email marketing program. Doing so ensures you’re reaching people that are interested to hear (and purchase) from you. There are three main steps to maintaining a compliant and engaged audience:
Re-engagement should happen continuously, but the exact timing will depend on your audience size, email campaign cadence, and outside factors. In this article, we’ll go over best practices for these three very important steps!
When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very strict privacy and security law passed by the European Union, was announced, marketers everywhere scrambled to ensure they were compliant. Soon after, California followed suit with the California Consumer Privacy Act (‘CCPA’), which is a similar regulation to GDPR. It’s rare, but now that we know how to refresh consent, we’re prepared for if anything similar happens in the future.
It’s recommended to regularly check-in on marketing regulations changes so you aren’t stuck flat on your feet when a change in consent regulations does happen.
Depending on the specific standards you are subject to, like the GDPR, the exact steps you need to take will vary. You may need to send a re-permission campaign (getting people to give their consent again), maintain a double opt-in standard, or store information securely. You’ll want to check the laws that are relevant to your audience, which depends on factors like your industry and where in the world your customers are making purchases from.
Taking these steps is important not only because it’s the law, but because at the end of the day, you want to ensure you’re targeting people who are interested in hearing from you and doing business with you. This is essential to using email as a relationship-strengthening tool with your audiences instead of it becoming a nuisance.
Unengaged audience members drag your KPIs down – it’s a simple fact. Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to, you guessed it, re-engage your unengaged audience members. Here are a few key guidelines we follow when running these campaigns for our clients:
Keep It Simple:
Grab Attention:
Send Only to Un-Engaged Members:
There are a few ways to go about this, and your platform is a great place to start. At Good & Gold, we use MailChimp and Klaviyo, both of which have great templates for creating an email and a relevant segment as a jumping off point.
Your final step will be to archive (or “sunset”) users that don’t engage, even after you send that super-enticing last campaign. Those who do not interact with emails for a prolonged period of time are unlikely to start engaging again and will drag down your KPIs, so it’s best to part ways on good terms! Some platforms have this worked into the automated flow, and some require a manual process – you’ll want to check with your specific platform for their recommended best practices on how to do this.
Remember, staying compliant and maintaining an engaged audience results in a happy audience that’s more likely to make purchases – and that means a happy marketing team and a growing business! It’s a win-win…win!
Over the past year, we've had the privilege of working with LOTS of wonderful clients on their email marketing programs. And though email marketing strategy is about much more than design, we love the process of developing and executing great design systems for email. For us, the challenge of creating something eye-catching and compelling within a notoriously restrictive system is hard to beat. Scroll on for a gallery of email templates we created this year.
In many cases, less is definitely more for email design. We've found that simple and consistent emails using native HTML render perfectly on all clients and convert well.
👍 Pros of simple templates:
We use highly branded emails to leverage well-established and recognizable brand systems. These often require a bit more pre-production work, as they typically require lots of custom assets to make an impact.
👍 Pros of branded templates:
This year, we've also designed some great templates that use a mix of native HTML and custom assets. In our opinion, this is a great approach, as it allows us to showcase strong brand systems without losing the flexibility afforded by HTML.
As digital marketers, we navigate technology changes all the time. For example, now that Apple has released new privacy features in iOS 15 and Mac OS Monterey like Mail Privacy Protection, we know it's essential to understand how those features will impact email marketing holistically.
Will Apple’s update make tracking harder? Sure. Will it make your emails any less great? Nope. Since we recently answered your SEM questions, let’s explore Apple Mail Privacy Protection and ways to prepare for it.
If you're unfamiliar with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection update, it's basically a privacy feature that hides your IP address to block a sender from tracking your location, what you do online, and seeing if you've opened their email. It also prevents a sender from seeing the device you use to open their emails.
While this sounds like a metrics nightmare for email marketers, privacy updates like these are generally positive in the long run, making it important to adapt.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection features only affect Apple Mail users, and those who’ve toggled the feature within the Mail app. So, for now, you can still track anyone using the Gmail app or others outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Depending on how many of your subscribers exercise their privacy, the impact may vary. This update will, however, cause metrics like open rates, clicks per unique open rate, geolocation, device usage, or anything else captured by IP address to become less reliable or inflated.
Beyond reporting, Apple’s privacy update could change how you manage segments, resends, A/B tests and automations. For example, automations or resends triggered by non-openers will be a no-go for people using Mail Privacy Protection. Similarly, A/B tests based on open rates like subject lines will become slightly skewed for these users. But remember: open rates aren’t going away. They’re just becoming a little more mysterious or inflated. Metrics like clicks—not clicks per unique visitor—continue to be reliable.
The best place to start is taking a look to see how many of your subscribers use Apple Mail. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do that, here’s how in Mailchimp, and here’s a reporting refresher for Klaviyo.
Once you have a good sense of how many subscribers are impacted, it’s time to do a little platform housekeeping to anticipate shifty metrics. At Good & Gold, we took Mailchimp’s advice to:
As daunting as this sounds (or reads), we’re approaching this as an opportunity to continue doing what we do best: create highly engaging emails that generate revenue.