How did Birk help our client achieve 8x ROI in Email Marketing?

Email Marketing has been a highly effective channel for our client, the Neighborhood Plant Store (NPS). NPS most loyal customers wait closely for the weekly email drop, and commit to a buy collectible plants as soon as they see the product drop on email.

This sounds easy, but it was not immediately apparent to us before deep diving into email data. When Birk first launch email campaigns for NPS, we observed a high open rate (50%), but a low sales conversion. How did we help NPS grow their email marketing performance from 2x ROI to 5x - 8x ROI?

3 steps to improve email marketing ROI

1. Email planning and consistency

Just like working out, consistency is key for email marketing. Birk helped NPS standardize the email format and layout as well as email cadence. We planned content sections a few months ahead and communicated the plan to all stakeholders. This served as a baseline plan that we can update and optimize at a later date.

This step is critical. Without an overarching baseline planning, it would have been difficult to develop continuous tests on different components of email newsletters.

2. Collect and analyze data

Having accurate data is critical for us to understand how NPS customers interact with each of our email newsletter. To collect data, we inserted tracker links to each clickable button, and then tracked the aggregate link engagement and sales performance on Google Analytics. In addition, we dived one lever deeper, and collected data on products sold for each button clicked in each email layout section.

With these data in hand, we developed an automated analytic process using FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) to select products that are in stock and historically performed well in email newsletters. The result was phenomenal. The result of the FME engine alone usually yielded at least 4x ROI.

3. Double down on cash cows and trim out underdogs

With continuous testing on products and email sections, we found that the email sections that worked the best was New Arrival, and "rare" was the keyword that our customers were really looking for. We realized that most of the products sold are a certain type of collectible products. With this knowledge point, we doubled down and increased coverage for these products, while eliminating email sections that do not perform.

Is your email marketing program optimized? Let us know how we can help!