CASE STUDY
39% Extra Revenue For A DIY Store From Email, Messenger & SMS In 4 Months
Brand Story & Challenges
This brand owner saw our previous results we generated for another DIY / POD store. He felt that his store was ready to be taken to the next level with ongoing retention marketing. It’s all well and good to have flows set up that brings in money automatically until a certain point.
In July 2020, they had 9% extra revenue generated from Klaviyo flows. For the record, these flows were actually set up by us a few months prior, when the store was a bit smaller. As you can see, their total revenue was in a healthy position (income was relatively stable in the preceding months as well) to invest in customer retention.
Which is where we came in...
The first thing we did was warm up the list with trust-building content emails.
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“What to expect”
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Blog emails
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Content about famous artists (which resonated with the target audience)
Apart from this, we also set up Recart and SMSBump automation and campaigns to ensure our omnichannel presence.
It’s been proven that companies with omnichannel engagement strategies retain the most customers. This means that only focusing on one marketing channel is actually no longer enough to keep your customers in most cases.
Eugen Schulz, Ecommerce CEO
“I was referred to Budai by an e-commerce business owner friend of mine. Email revenue is $295,000 in the last 90 days and climbing.
They seamlessly integrated the different back-end marketing tools and we even tried such things as a postcard campaign. They also take care of the high inbox rate of emails.
Budai Media is a world-class team who take pride in their deep knowledge and drive great ROI on their monthly retainer. We're amazed by this team.”
Before Budai Media
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9% revenue from Klaviyo
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$227,062 monthly store revenue
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Only one marketing channel
After Budai Media
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39% from email, messenger, and SMS
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$372,283 monthly revenue
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Over 4 different marketing channels
How We Helped
Here is what happened after one month:
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9% from email in total
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7% from flows
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1% from campaigns
Not that impressive, right? “Only 1% extra revenue from campaigns? No thank you.” Transparency is essential, especially in case studies. A lot of ecommerce brand owners believe that after paying for an email agency, they will instantly get 20-30-40% extra revenue.
The thing is, sometimes this does happen! But marketing is not an exact science. You cannot predict what will happen. The thing you have to understand is that it takes some time for us to research your target audience, get the tone of voice right, and warm up the list.
In August, we only sent four emails, as the onboarding process was taking place in the middle of the month.
Here is what happened in September:
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14% from email in total
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8% from flows
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6% from campaigns
This was our first full month working with this store. We sent ten email campaigns, most of the content and trust-building variety. It still doesn’t look that spectacular, we know. For whatever reason, emails often take 2-3 months to start really performing.
And there are a few reasons for this:
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Your list needs to get used to emails
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There is an element of trial and error with new accounts
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Our copywriter and designer need some time to get to know your email list
In the meantime, we were also taking care of the messenger and SMS marketing.
October 2020:
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18% from email in total
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11% from flows
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6% from campaigns
The campaigns’ revenue stayed roughly the same. But the flows’ revenue increased. This brings up an important point about email marketing. We see many store owners comparing one month to another, maybe after changing the person that is managing their emails. To be honest, we understand why.
You want to compare the numbers, and the percentages seem like a logical way to do this. But at the end of the day, your store’s email marketing performance will depend a lot on your traffic and front-end marketing strategy. Especially the flows.
So we have to take these numbers with a grain of salt. In October, the entire ecommerce industry was booming, right before Black Friday. No one really knows the main reason. It just happened.
With that being said, though, one thing we do is look at each store’s account in detail and try to test and optimize stuff continuously.
Here are a few questions we ask during this audit:
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Are any of the flows performing worse or better than expected? If yes, why?
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How are the open rates?
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What about click rates? Any way to improve them? If yes, create an A/B test!
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Does the number of Abandoned Cart emails being sent make sense in relation to the traffic we are getting?
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How is the engagement on our campaigns? Should we send to more engaged people?
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Or can we get away with sending to more people? This would mean lower expected engagement but higher revenue potential.
Here are the Recart Messenger & SMSBump stats for October 2020:
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Over 700% ROI on SMS
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And a substantial 24k USD+ revenue from Messenger (almost as high as our email revenue, which was 27k in total)
THE END RESULT
Let’s take a look at November 2020:
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15% from email in total
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9% from flows
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6% from campaigns
It seems like the numbers are stagnating. “Guys, why do you share this case study if you did not even improve the numbers?” Point taken. Let’s take a look at the numbers a little closer, though. The store’s total revenue in October was $156,722. This number more than doubled in November to $372,283. And the percentage from emails stayed the same.
Over 56k in total from Klaviyo, 34k from flows, and 22k from campaigns.
So the total email revenue actually looks like this:
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July = $20,390
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August = $19,469
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September = $22,454
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October = $27,993
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November = $56,085
Just for reference, here are things you can buy for $50,000:
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A hot air balloon
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Two and a half top-tier jacuzzis
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Fifty thousand five hundred and five songs on iTunes
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Or give a massive bonus to the hard-working email agency they work with
These are all great options! We will leave it up to our client what to do with it.
On top of this 56k revenue from email, here are the numbers from Recart and SMSBump.
Look at that 87k+ income from Recart. Yeah. That was a pretty successful Black Friday campaign for this store. This means that email + messenger + SMS accounted for over 39% of this store’s monthly revenue in November. It took some time but we got there.
The Conclusion
This case study is not about one of our best results for sure. It usually takes less time to get our retention marketing machine going, and it gets bigger percentages. And a few of our previous case studies will show that. But we still wanted to share because we want to balance expectations for our future clients.
Sometimes it takes time to get the emails really going. And your list quality matters a lot.
Since then, we’ve had to do some proper list cleaning for this client because they had a lot of people on their list who never actually wanted to be notified about our deals.
Hope it was helpful to see the month-to-month progress of this project.