From the second I began my firm, Motif Skincare, I knew I used to be coming into a crowded market with excessive buyer acquisition prices. It will be difficult to compete with influencers and bigger manufacturers with regards to fueling new buyer discovery. As such, the first purpose was to create merchandise that actually made a distinction in folks’s routines—merchandise they’d uncover and wish to purchase repeatedly—and to focus our advertising efforts on fostering that hyper-loyalty.
This isn’t to say I don’t do any top-of-the-funnel advertising. We make the most of lots of the conventional development channels: natural social, paid adverts, influencers and associates, and PR. However as a substitute of utilizing channels like social to solely push gross sales, we root our technique in retention advertising, specializing in e-mail signups as a purpose. This permits us to deal with constructing a relationship with prospects over time, turning e-mail right into a high-impact channel that boasts over 50 % open charges and drives a big proportion of our income.
Model emails can really feel so impersonal nowadays, however I feel somebody signing up to your e-mail listing is an intimate factor. It’s the closest many people will ever be to our prospects, and I don’t take that frivolously as a founder. Listed here are the methods I’ve prioritized a personalised really feel to my e-mail advertising so my prospects really feel valued—and wish to hold shopping for from us for years to return.
We don’t simply promote in our emails
The normal approach of approaching e-mail advertising as an e-commerce firm goes one thing like this: Discuss your product, flip the script and speak about your product somewhat in another way, now perhaps supply a reduction to your product, and so forth. I’m the primary particular person to unsubscribe from emails that really feel like they’re bombarding me, so I all the time wished to personalize our e-mail technique with content material our prospects are excited to learn.
What that got here all the way down to for us is leaning into content material round subjects associated to our house as a lot as we speak about our merchandise. We wish to be a significant vacation spot for patrons as they navigate their skincare journeys, however we additionally wish to interact them in a broader dialog round progress and potential—as a result of when you’ll be able to spend much less time worrying about your pores and skin, you release headspace to take a position elsewhere within the stuff you love. So, our emails typically speak in regards to the science of excellent skincare, handle tendencies and debunk myths, and interview impressed people on considerate subjects, all of which makes nice e-mail content material.
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Educating e-mail subscribers that we’re going to be a dependable supply of helpful and provoking info bolsters our open and engagement charges throughout the board. These academic emails typically have decrease unsubscribe charges and might drive 10 to twenty % greater click-through charges than different sorts of emails, which helps enhance engagement metrics throughout the board. When prospects see us of their inbox, they’ve come to belief that we’re sending them one thing price studying, so we really feel assured we are able to seize their consideration even when inboxes turn out to be particularly crowded throughout peak promotional durations.
It takes extra work to offer helpful content material as a substitute of simply touting our merchandise, however we lighten the load for our small crew by doing numerous content material repurposing. As an illustration, if our social media supervisor is making a slideshow round a skincare matter or working with a specific influencer, we take into consideration how that content material may very well be expanded or reframed into an e-mail. This creates constant messaging throughout channels and helps draw prospects deeper into our funnel.
We make prospects really feel like we’re emailing one-to-one
Personalization is the north star for succeeding at retention advertising. As a substitute of a one-size-fits-all method, we’ve discovered an edge by spending somewhat further time ensuring that the majority touchpoints have some aspect of personalization.
It’s not all that arduous to do, particularly you probably have your tech stack set as much as ingest all the info you could have about who you’re emailing. For instance, after we are emailing prospects about gross sales or new merchandise, we wish to reference the context of their prior relationship with us. Once we launched our second product, the Brightening Serum, we reached out to people with messages like: “We observed that you just’ve repurchased our cleanser X many occasions, and we’re so appreciative of that. We expect you’d actually take pleasure in our subsequent product.” This exhibits subscribers that we’re taking note of them as particular person prospects, which fuels loyalty and retention.
Generally, personalization is so simple as making it really feel like we’re emailing them individually. We ship numerous plain textual content emails: Unformatted emails that hit our prospects’ inboxes and appear to be I actually sat down and typed a message for them. It’s significant for our prospects to really feel like they received a word straight from the founder, and lots of people will reply straight to those emails. Whereas the preliminary e-mail blast isn’t truly one-to-one, we all the time ensure to answer to anybody who writes again so that they know we’re actual folks behind the scenes and that we really do hear them. Nearly nobody unsubscribes from some of these emails, they usually are inclined to have greater than common engagement charges due to their intimate-feeling nature.
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We section our most engaged and our least engaged
Segmenting our e-mail listing to solely ship sure messages to sure cohorts is one other facet of our personalization technique. There are such a lot of methods to divvy up your subscribers as a model, however we wish to deal with probably the most engaged and the least engaged.
For probably the most engaged, we search for methods to reward them. At any time when we’re going to run a sale or launch a brand new product, we minimize an inventory of what we think about our greatest prospects (primarily based on each buy habits and engagement) and ship them a first-to-know marketing campaign, giving them entry to the deal earlier than anybody else has it. We usually use these plain-text emails I discussed above and focus the messaging on constructing goodwill with these prospects whereas making them really feel valued. These are by far the best-performing touchpoints we ship, with open and click-through charges which might be upwards of 20 % greater than different promotional emails (typically over one hundred pc greater) and the very best conversion charges we see throughout our program.
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We additionally section out our least engaged subscribers by not emailing them. It’s tempting to maximise your listing by emailing everybody, however the actuality is barely a portion of your listing goes to stay energetic and impactful, and people who don’t can truly harm you in the long term. We typically solely ship emails to individuals who have engaged with one in every of our messages prior to now six months, making exceptions for larger moments that may have a greater likelihood of re-engaging a lapsed subscriber.
Whenever you constantly ship to disengaged subscribers, it alerts to inbox suppliers that your emails aren’t related, and over time, this may end up in extra of your emails touchdown in spam. By eradicating disengaged people (as soon as we’ve unsuccessfully tried to re-engage them, in fact), we’re in a position to keep and even enhance our metrics general. No one desires to surrender on an e-mail subscriber, but it surely’s vital to suppose extra holistically than that in regards to the well being of your program listing as a complete.
We measure in opposition to our personal benchmarks to study what works for our prospects
On the subject of e-mail advertising or any advertising technique, it’s so tempting to imitate what everybody else is doing. You’ll find countless content material round finest practices and benchmarks, and people are nice beginning factors, however on the finish of the day, it’s a must to work out what works for your model and your prospects—which means a very powerful benchmark is your personal.
Once we began constructing our e-mail program, we drew a line within the sand exhibiting the place our engagement metrics had been sitting after which received to testing. We examined smaller parts like topic traces and ship occasions. We examined larger parts like how ceaselessly folks wished to listen to from us and how much content material they resonated with most. With every take a look at, we checked out how our viewers responded and used that to tell and iterate our broader technique.
Alongside the way in which, we inevitably tried issues that simply did not work, however we additionally took some huge, out-of-the-box swings that paid off. It takes time to determine the fitting retention technique to your model, however if you happen to’re prepared to place within the effort to experiment and pay shut consideration to how your viewers responds, it would repay in dividends.