The email campaigns were old, outdated, and mostly neglected. Emails were sent irregularly at best.  For a leading car part manufacturer the brand presence was often inconsistent with their own brand guidelines.  Typically the email campaigns were in the low-20s.  It was time for a refresh and reignite an outdated and underutilized marketing channel.

CorkSport’s enthusiasts care both about power and style.  The brand need a some freshened up graphics and looks to improve the overall appearance.  Having the chance to lift the brand imagery was important. I focused both on brand style with car specific graphics, products, and large bold text.

Since email was inconsistent, the first thing I wanted to do is just remove emails that bounce.  I used an email sequence I picked up from working for a B2B client that asked for a meeting.   With a slight modification, I tailored the question to ask whether they still had their Mazda.  Then I followed it up with this question, “Have you been abducted by aliens?”  My suspicion was that most unopened emails probably meant they weren’t interested. I was correct on the majority of the emails, however, this second line of questioning grabbed some who were disinterested and reactivated them. In some cases, we even had people say respond with the fact that don’t have the car anymore.

Along with list cleaning I segemented customers to include car type.  This was important on marketing directly to the customers for product launches.  

Finally, we also had paying customers who were members.  I launched a monthly email campaign that focused on seeking membership renewals.  This campaign had a few goals.  The first was to get customers to buy again.  The other was to capture sales of customers who weren’t likely to renew. The third outcome was to reduce sales outbound calls in capturing these sales or customers who want to renew.

 Deliverability is always important.  I worked with the owner to get BIMI setup for website.  I need someone who had access to domain registrar and hosting in order launch this. This was important to help with branding and recognizability.  

Wish lists is a gold mine of information.  At times we would aim to mine customers who had made a wish lists. Since we had customers who saved content I would use this to send email to customers when out of stock products came back in. In addition, at punctuated times we would try to deliver offers and sales to specific groups.  

There were limitations to the system choices that CorkSport had with the ecommerce cart choice and their email provider.  I would’ve liked to create more automation around the products.  Primarily having a certain cadence of products after last purchase. Since many of these buys were long term planned buys, a timeline of repurchase would’ve been more effective to reactivate customers.

Outcomes

CorkSport’s open rate when I came on was in the low 20s.  After list cleaning and testing the open rate increased to low the 40s on average and oscillating between the mid-30s to the low 50s on the higher performing emails.  The CTR was between 7-15% depending on content and seasonality.  These numbers also had to do with the email list size and also on an effective email strategy.