Email marketing still works. We won’t reiterate all the proof points, but this article from Inc. is a good review. And we all know email marketing works because virtually every brand in America does it in one way or another. We wouldn’t all still be doing it if it didn’t play a critical role in the marketing ecosystem.
The question we should really be asking ourselves is: how can we make email work better?
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How can we boost click-through rates and conversion rates? For retail, the average click-through rate is at or around 3%, with a huge variety in offer redemption, conversion, and cost from retailer to retailer.
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How can we add more demographically-relevant names to our email database, either by capturing email addresses from existing social followers or by attracting net new consumers to our email list?
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How can we boost the effectiveness of this critical, tactical marketing effort in a way that will feel fresh and new to our biggest fans, occasional customers, and potential customers?
I was talking to a SVP of Marketing last week at a national apparel retailer who has been a client for about a year, and he shared some pretty amazing figures with us that might answer these questions for some B2C national brands.
Before we started working together, this retailer was regularly sending out promotions and marketing messages to its consumer database of 7.5 million consumers. They normally experienced click-through rate (CTR) of 3%, and of those 225,000 people who click through, roughly 5% redeem the email offer with an average order value (AOV) of $85. So this SVP I was talking to knew he could count on any given email campaign grossing about $956,250 at an acquisition cost of $3.11 per purchaser. Not bad.
Last year after lots of internal conversations about boosting email effectiveness, his Director of Email Marketing approached him with the idea of a Quikly campaign. They’d seen a competitor use Quikly and wanted to add Quikly to an already-planned summer campaign. Since they already had their next email campaign planned, they were able to leverage the Quikly mechanic in a matter of days, inviting existing email subscribers to opt in to the campaign for the opportunity at a few larger rewards and the same incentives that were being offered in the original email promotion. Here’s what happened:
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Click-through rate increased from 3% to 5%
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Redemption rate skyrocketed from 5% to 20%
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Average order value increased from $85 to $100
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Total gross revenue increased from $956,000 to $2,750,000
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Acquisition cost per purchaser decreased from $3.11 to $2.44
All of this ROI occurred before even looking at the number of new customers they acquired (via the social sharing mechanism built into Quikly) and the incremental revenue produced immediately and lifetime value by those new customers. They added tens of thousands of new, demographically relevant customers and knocked all their KPIs out of the park.
All by doing exactly what they’d always done, but with Quikly. Here's how the numbers broke down:
If you oversee email marketing and would like to find out how this could work for your brand, shoot us an email at hola@quikly.com, or watch this demo for more details on how the Quikly mechanic works in retail, for CPG brands, or for QSR and fast-casual restaurants.