Email Marketing Is Not Dead

Low Gravity Solutions (LGS) was hired to start the email marketing program for one of the largest [musical] drum sellers and distributors in the U.S. They have a thriving retail location, tons of website traffic and sales, and are integrated with other 3rd party marketplaces. Despite all of this, they had no formal email marketing plan except for an abandoned cart email. In this 2-week case study, you’re going to see how we switched email platforms to Klaviyo and:

• recovered $15,300 in lost revenue with a single abandoned cart sequence
• increased the recovery rate from 1% to a mind-blowing 11.8% for some emails (8% on average)
• added an additional $3,000 of income by using the abandoned browser sequence
• our methodology and plans for the future.

You can see that even though you’re doing almost everything right, things can still get drastically better when you put your trust in the right hands.

Email Marketing Before Low Gravity Solutions

This client knows the power and value of collecting email addresses and had been doing it for multiple years. They were using MailChimp and even had a few segmentations in their audience for better targeting. However, they weren’t really using the account correctly, and because they are so high volume, they regularly exceeded MailChimp’s API capabilities and could not connect their e-commerce store. The owner would contact his list around the holidays for sales events, and he would email his local segment whenever there were special events.

But there was no strategy, no schedule, and no automations. To make it worse, because the integration with Magento never worked (their e-commerce platform), they couldn’t track sales from those one-off campaigns or have any idea of what, or anything, was working.

Magento abandoned cart

To their credit, they were using the built-in Magento abandoned cart functionality. They stuck to a pretty generic template, repeating the same email for 3 days after the platform detected an abandoned cart. This abandoned cart still managed to recover $4,800 per month over a 44 month period, with an abandoned cart recovery rate of 1% over that same period. So, those are the benchmarks Low Gravity Solutions needs to beat.

Email Marketing with Low Gravity Solutions

Using Klaviyo abandoned cart sequences

Before we could get to the abandoned cart sequences, we first needed to transfer off of MailChimp and get on a more reliable, better-performing e-commerce email platform. That meant transferring his entire MailChimp account over to Klaviyo and integrating it with Magento. As soon as that was done, we immediately started building out the most important e-commerce automation (or Flow as Klaviyo calls it): the abandoned cart series.

 

A/B testing and giving life to the emails

Klaviyo has amazing built-in A/B, split testing capabilities so we wanted to test our strategy against theirs. As I mentioned earlier, they used the same email template for all 3 emails in their sequence. Not only that, but they were quite generic, had no voice or personality, didn’t connect with the clients, and had a very long disclaimer apologizing if they received this email by accident or because of a technical glitch. We recreated these emails exactly in all of the “A” versions.

We went in and created magic with the B-versions by analyzing their customers and creating an ideal customer avatar, stripped the Ben Stein monotone voice, adjusted for today’s financial and pandemic climate, were not apologetic for them receiving the email, and most of all, we removed the 10% coupon for coming back and completing their purchase. “WHAT?! Remove an incentive?!” Yes.

Split-testing results and more refinement

After just 1-week, the results were so conclusive that we were losing money by continuing to test any further. The A-versions were performing so poorly that anyone that was receiving them could have actually converted if they would have received ours instead.

At that point, I also implemented a split in the flow based on the total value of the cart. If talking directly to your ideal customers is good, talking directly to those that are spending a lot vs. those that are spending a little is even better! The mentality of someone buying a $9 pair of drumsticks is different than the mentality of someone buying a $5,000 drum set.

Abandoned Cart Success

Recovering $15,337 in 2 weeks

The first thing we can see is that our abandoned cart sequence has obliterated the control metrics. We needed to recover $4,800 at a rate of 1% in a month.

We’ve already exceeded that by over $10,000 in just 2 weeks and increased the recovery by an additional 7%!

I hesitated to claim the $15,000 as a victory for LGS because sales do not always paint the full picture. However, I realized that the exact same products with the exact same probabilities of being abandoned existed before we started too. It’s not like they were only offering low priced products before we showed up, and then they started offering high-priced products. No. The previous abandoned cart sequence had the same opportunities and the same probabilities of recovering these exact items as well. Therefore, the amount of sales is one of the true metrics (especially when you remember that we tailored our emails and copy specifically for high-valued customers).

Abandoned cart recovery rate increases by 7%

Even though sales are great, the true value of an abandoned cart is the recovery rate. Shopping behaviors can change from month-to-month and greatly depend on income levels, especially in the current global climate. Sales are also affected by traffic. The more traffic you have, the more sales you make, the more money you can claim in your success.

But recovery rate is independent of all that. It is quite literally a simple calculation of the number of people that receive your emails and the ones that end up buying because of it. Whether you have high-priced products or low, high traffic or not, recovery rate only focuses on the effectiveness of your emails.

An average recovery rate is between 3% and 5% depending on several factors. But our current rate after two weeks is an astonishing 8%. I’d even claim it’s better than that because if you look at the first email, they’re recovering over 11%. It’s normal for them to drop with each subsequent email in the sequence in general, but especially if you’re capturing 11% in the first one, no one needs to see the second.

The Rest of The 2-Week Email Marketing

Abandoned Browser

After the abandoned cart series, the abandoned browser series is next in line for most important. These emails go out to people that have looked at products in your online store, but then decided to not do anything else. If your customers’ contact information is in the Klaviyo system, Klaviyo can identify when they’re browsing, what they’re looking at, and then send them emails.

Because they didn’t have this capability before, we have no benchmarks to beat. Any additional sales because of this flow (or any flow hereafter) is 100% additional value being provided by Low Gravity Solutions.

In 2 weeks, that was an additional $3,000 just for “doing nothing.”

You can also see the recovery rates aren’t quite as good as the abandoned cart, but 6% is still well above the industry average. Not to mention, the open rates and click-through rates are ridiculously high. That might not lead to direct sales right now, but it is growing the brand’s reputation for having kickass content and in the background, growing the domain’s trustworthiness (to stay out of people’s SPAM folders).

Purchase follow-up thank you

At the time of these screenshots, this flow had only been activated for about 5 days. Not only that, but we purposely do not try to upsell or cross-sell to the customers at this point. This is just another touch-point to stay top of mind with the customers. If they buy something, great. If they don’t, we have other opportunities coming. Lastly, these flows are not even completely built out yet, but I didn’t want to miss any chances to talk to our customers and wanted to get this implemented quickly.

1-year anniversary from their first purchase

This one is unlikely to be a massive income-generator, but it is a valuable automation to have. We implemented it now because it’s relatively fast and easy to do so. If it only ever makes one sale, that’s one more than before.

Email Marketing Performance Overview

Low Gravity Solutions generated a total of $18,584 in just two weeks. In those 14 days, we contributed 6% of their total 30-day revenue.

These sales and recovery rate numbers are our most important metric when LGS reports back to the client, but they aren’t the only thing that we currently excel at. Here are some more traditional numbers that email marketers are used to seeing:

• Open rate around 60%
• Click rate around 28%
• Spam rate at 0%
• Unsubscribe rate less than 0.7%

 Up next for this client…

We have more standard e-commerce automated emails that we still need to implement. We need to refine almost all of them to be more specific based on products purchased, lifetime value, number of repeat purchases, and a few other key metrics that are collected by Klaviyo. And as soon as we get all of them cranking away as well as these automations above, then we can focus on campaign strategies that will feed these automations even more.