When Garik, the founder of Eco-Stylist came to use asking, “could email make a difference for me?” We answered with a resounding YES. In this email marketing case study, you will learn why email marketing is vital for this client and how we used data to make this a great platform for Eco-Stylist.
Why Email Marketing is Vital for a Directory like Eco-Stylist
For Eco-Stylists, and other directories, email marketing can make a huge difference for three reasons.
1 – Trust & Retention
Since Eco-Stylist is a commission-based directory, they don’t have their own products or an embedded store on the website. So to use the directory, customers have to seek out Eco-Stylist, then use the directory to find a product, and then be taken to a third party to place their order. Why wouldn’t they just use Google to find their sustainable products? Trust.
Eco-Stylist’s existence relies on the trust of their audience. While this is a true statement for every brand, a directory is particularly susceptible to losing revenue when they lose trust OR don’t retain their audience. Email marketing allows the directory to prove their trustworthiness and stay top of mind to drive customers back to the website when they’re searching for something special.
2 – Data
Eco-Stylist was having difficulty proving that spending time on email marketing had an impact on return visitors or sales. This made sense to us because not having an on-site store means that revenue, return customers, and conversion rate are almost impossible to track. Another issue is that because the sales are on a third party site, all of the sales traffic leaves the directory website, so tracking potential drop-offs and sales traffic flow isn’t possible.
Because of this, we have to rely on the data that we can gather. In this project, that is open and click rate. We also decided to put affiliate links directly to directory websites within emails so that Garik could look at additional data in his affiliate commissions sites and see whether the unique links drove lead traffic.
3 – Sales
An email inbox is an intimate place where you have a person’s undivided attention. This is especially true when it comes to talking to an audience that is dedicated to sustainability. This type of group doesn’t impulse buy very often – so Eco-Stylist needs a way to get their affiliate’s products in front of their audience as much as possible to get repeat traffic and sales.
Our Method
When we started, Eco-Stylist was using MailChimp. It was quite outdated with several lists that had fallen fallow. The first thing we did was reach out to all of the previous lists and try to engage everyone.
Then we migrated all of the “engaged subscribers” Eco-Stylist to a new email platform: Klaviyo. We use Klaviyo because the platform allows us to get accurate data on engaged subscribers and create segmentations that we know to offer the best long term results.
We started emailing the migrated list slowly at first, and ramped up to weekly sends over a couple of months. After 3 months, we removed the folks that were not engaged from the initial migrated list.
While we were warming up the lists, we also did a lot of A/B testing. We wanted to build a new lead generation offer that converted people into email subscribers that would be engaged with the ongoing content that Eco-Stylist shares. Then, we created welcome automation emails that systematically funneled new, highly engaged subscribers into the weekly campaign emails!
Email Marketing Case Study: The Results
Today, the welcome automation averages an open rate of 47.5% and click rate of 10.1%! This is PHENOMENAL. It ensures that the folks that sign up for the email list are welcomed to the brand AND that they enter the weekly campaign sends as highly engaged as possible.
This is very clear, as the regular campaign emails beat industry standards with average open rates above 45% and an average click through rate of 5.4%!
Every single one of those clicks is a highly engaged return customer. Each of those customers may not have found their way back to the Eco-Stylist website without email marketing.
You can find Eco-Stylist and their fantastic eco-fashion here: https://www.eco-stylist.com/
