6x Your Ecommerce
Email Open Rates
Keep a 200k+ List Engaged for the Long-term
Send with PurposeThe Client
The client featured in this case study supplies high-quality bicycles, engine kits, and biking accessories – plus premium eco-friendly electric bikes. Dedicated to providing the ultimate ride to their wide customer base, they deal with factories directly to offer the lowest possible prices.
This bike store wanted to provide a reliable and positive customer experience, deliver eco-friendly alternatives to typical motorized bikes, and build better relationships with their target audience.
And, above all, generate healthy revenue to secure store longevity.
But, a huge proportion of their 200,000+ list wasn’t engaging at all. The number of subscribers opening their emails was incredibly low.
We’ll be delving into each new strategy we put in place – and the positive impact that followed. Less pressure was felt by our client, and they no longer had to struggle with an overwhelming list they didn’t know how to optimize.
BikeBerry
bicycles, engine kits & e-bikes
- List200,000+ subscribers
- IndustryBicycles, engine kits & eco-friendly electric bikes
- GoalA reliable, positive customer experience and healthy revenue for store longevity
The Challenge
A very important metric as of 2020, opens were the first statistic we looked at. They were sitting low with an average of just 3.24%.
Due to the size of this store’s list, we knew there was a huge opportunity for improvement.
We quickly identified where the problem lay after discovering the email strategy our client was using.
It’s easy to assume that the more people who receive your emails, the more likely you’ll see higher engagement and conversions.
So, sending blanket emails to the entire list seems like a good idea.
But a list of this size needed to be segmented. Without doing this, you’ll likely experience:
- Fewer subscribers opening your emails
- Decreased engagement
- Low deliverability over time
The more unengaged people who ignore each email, the more emails that end up in the spam folder.
And that’s what was happening to this store.
The Solution
We immediately segmented our client’s entire list based on engagement. The more engaged a subscriber was, the more emails they would receive.
This resulted in a huge open rate increase of over 7x. The number of people opening this store’s emails shot up from 3.24% to 29.1%, with daily click-through rates of up to 15.5% – considerably higher than the average.
We also accelerated our client’s open rates with regular A/B testing.
Focused on subject lines, we never sent a single email to an entire segment without testing at least two subject line variations first.
Once we had a clear winner, this would be the subject line sent out to the remaining segment.
This guaranteed that only the most effective variation would be sent to the majority of recipients – and heavily contributed to the dramatic increase in opens we achieved for this store.
A Content Switch Up
There was still a huge unengaged proportion of their list, and this needed to be tackled fast. If emails were never being opened by these subscribers, this rendered them useless.
We focused on two main re-engagement strategies:
- Educational content
- A 6-month re-engagement project
We quickly realised our client was consistently sending the same type of emails.
The only emails their list ever received were coupons or product-focused content. This became boring and predictable, and was one of the core culprits for such high non-engagement.
What did we do?
We added essential variety into this store’s emails. Our new emails included a healthy balance of:
- Educational content
- Specific product top tips & how to’s
- Sales campaigns
- Blog post promotions
This allowed our client to provide a different type of value to their audience.
Eye-catching subject lines and unique content led to higher curiosity for future emails, and much higher opens as a result.
Let’s take the new welcome series we created. The second email within the series generated a 52% increase in the number of people opening – increasing from just 17% to 26%.
While more of a long-term process, this strategy paved the way for store longevity, better customer relationships, and more sales in the long-run.
The Ultimate Re-Engagement Strategy
There was still a large chunk that remained unengaged due to the size of our client’s list.
Offering different content wasn’t enough, and we needed to put a more targeted strategy in place.
We did this with a 6-month re-engagement project and increased the number of engaged subscribers by 1/3. This amounted to around 60,000 people.
How did we do it?
This project focused on sending a targeted giveaway email to all unengaged subscribers.
We identified all unengaged list members and ranked them from most engaged to least engaged.
We began sending our giveaway email to the most engaged segment in small chunks – heavily testing as we went.
When it was time to send to the least engaged members (i.e. people who’d barely opened any of this store’s emails for at least a year), this high degree of testing meant we had the best possible version ready to go.
This careful planning meant solid deliverability throughout the entire 6-month period, higher engagement, and more opens.
The Future
Since we reworked their entire email marketing process, this bike store has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of subscribers opening their emails. They’ve also developed a much stronger relationship with their target audience as a result.
They now have a lot more breathing space, fully focusing on scaling their store – and making important steps for the future.