If I asked you what’s a project you’re really proud of, one that has made a change in your client’s business, what would you choose?
I’ve asked a few colleagues to tell me their biggest achievement, and learned a lot from their stories – even the different nuances of what we define as success.
We’ve been instrumental in launching an innovative tablet device that went on to net millions of dollars in sales for the client. All awareness and pre-sales were generated via email, and we managed this for our client. Makes me think we should work on commission!
Doug Dennison
CEO & Co-founder MailNinja
While we generally work with clients who have some basic email program in place and are looking to improve it with professional help, on occasion we will work with companies completely new to email marketing. It was a client in that situation where our work made a significant difference in their overall business performance.
The client had minimal social media presence, and we first worked to bring up that presentation to a professional level, while also launching an email marketing program that would build brand loyalty. In just a few months we built a subscriber base of several thousand, and implemented automations to encourage personalization, such as product preferences and birthday offers. Open rates for campaigns typically range from 40-50%, with special offers seeing open rates of over 70%.
Today we have a more evolved email program that includes ecommerce integration, including post-order follow ups that have a 69% open rate, a 15% click rate and continue to generate ongoing revenue every month with no effort on the part of the client or our agency. Best of all, since beginning to work with us, the client has seen an average growth rate of 25% in their sales, with increasing numbers during the pandemic, thanks to our strong and consistent communications program that has kept customers coming to their door in a safe, healthy manner.
MaryAnn Pfeiffer
Digital Marketing Strategist 108 Degrees Digital Marketing
I do a lot of automation, welcome series, and follow up series. A client who sells an online course on Roberts Rules of Order had a 27% increase in her course purchase due to the follow-up series we put into place.
I built a 1-year drip campaign for potential buyers and potential sellers for a busy San Diego Real Estate Broker. We educated his readers about the processes of buying or selling a home and all the minutia involved with it. His appointments for potential listings went up 10%. He was elated because it’s challenging to get those listing appointments without direct referrals.
Amy Hall
Email Marketing Strategist and Certified Mailchimp Partner and Consultant Amy Hall
Mercedes-Benz was my client in the late 1990’s and we used email marketing to highlight the European Delivery Program. Someone clicked the email and bought a car online. As far as we know, it was the first car ever sold online. More recently, I’m proud that we’ve instituted re-sends to non-opens for many of our e-commerce clients and those are now generating 30-40% of overall revenue from email marketing. Those are huge revenue gains from something that is very simple to set up!
Adam Q. Holden-Bache
Director of Email Marketing Enventys Partners
Our biggest email accomplishments are when we see a significant amount of revenue made from one email campaign. We once set up a simple welcome series for an e-commerce brand that, according to Mailchimp stats, has made them over $38K. Just from that welcome email. That is one of our favorites. There is nothing better than seeing our work help a small business grow and it always reminds us that email is powerful.
Emily Ryan
Co-Founder and Email Strategist Westfield Creative
My biggest achievement is a combination of automated processes. On the website you can fill in a form (made in Gravity Forms) to receive a quote for several products and numbers. The mail you receive gives you the exact quote, with the right product, pictures, and price.
This information is transferred to Mailchimp and collected into several merge fields. These merge fields will be used for newsletters, specified for the interesting products (if you didn’t order yet). The results? You’ll receive a personal email within 5 seconds, with a button where you can place the order (right type, numbers, etc.).
This year it sent around 5000 automated quotes and has an average conversion rate of 42%. Without any human interference (except the customer).
Nick Beuzekamp
CEO and Founder Online Marketing Bonaire
A few stand out for me. Taking a national retailer from basically $0 per month from email to $1.5 – $2Million per month. To do this required being able to send a lot more email and do better segmentation.
Having audience engagement of a list go from 47% to 87% over 12 months through a re-engagement campaign.
My biggest achievement though is STILL being a specialist email marketing agency.
Glenn Edley
Director & Email Strategist Spike
A few years ago I was hired by the owners of an online sex toys shop; when I started working for them, they were really low in traffic, with Google penalties for duplicate content, a lot of legal constraints on advertising, several UX issues to fix and no mailing list.
We started with a radical redesign of their content strategy, in order to align the quality and tone of voice of the texts to the high positioning of their merchandise (not cheap gadgets, but luxury design-made, supersafe objects); we defined the brand personality as cool, funny and free, finding the right testimonials and experimenting with branded content and guest posts.
In the meantime, we started building the mailing list, using very good content as lead magnets, such as an illustrated Zodiac with good advice for sex life or a course on pelvic floor health; and we set up a weekly newsletter that essentially tried to sell the 2 or 3 featured products of the week using humor, funny GIFs and references to the super-good content we published on the blog.
The newsletter was sent on Monday afternoon, to challenge the reputation of Monday as the worst day for email marketing: but we knew that our audience would appreciate having a laugh after the hardest day of the week, and we were right, with open rates > 40% and repeat sales that exceeded the expectations of our client, email channel being the no.1 driver of sales in Analytics.
It was definitely one of the funniest projects I’ve worked on, and we really stretched the power of the integration between regular email campaigns and email automation. Coherent strategy and excellent execution were the key to success.
The mailing list (and sales) continued to grow by word of mouth and organic spread of our contents; then, after a couple of years, we left, because our clients decided they could make it by themselves, which was not true; but this is another story 😉
Alessandra Farabegoli