CASE STUDY
809K Extra Revenue In 12 Months With Ecommerce Email Marketing
Brand Story & Challenges
Our client operates in the print-on-demand niche with beautiful “paint your own images” products. This rapidly growing DIY & personalization niche can be highly lucrative. Their primary audience is in the US, mostly female, and in the 25-34 age range.
Eugen, the founder, initially came to us because his fellow ecommerce store owner friends also work with us with a store that we, unfortunately, cannot name out of respect for their privacy.
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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$755 revenue from flows
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$0 revenue from campaigns
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0.24% extra monthly revenue from email
After Budai Media
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$55,920 revenue from flows
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$16,840 revenue from campaigns
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14% extra monthly revenue from email (after just one month of work)
How We Helped
This is a screenshot of their numbers for the period October 10 until November 11 in 2019.
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$755 revenue from flows
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$0 revenue from campaigns
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0.24% extra revenue from email marketing per month
And here is what it looks like after one month of working with us:
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$55,920 revenue from flows
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$16,840 revenue from campaigns
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14% extra monthly revenue from email
How did we do it?
The usual.
We set up the most essential flows for Eugen:
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Abandoned Cart
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Browse Abandonment
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Welcome Flow (for popups)
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New Customer
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Returning Customer
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VIP
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Win-Back
On top of this, we set up four segmented popups using Optinmonster and sent ten email campaigns. One thing to note is that since this is a business in the art niche, you might think the emails were super fancy. The thing is, they weren’t. Yet.
When you have a store that doesn’t really have the proper email marketing infrastructure yet, the best thing to do is employ the 80:20 principle.
And focus on the most important things that will make you money. And so we set up the emails with the existing design elements the client already had, and decided to optimize more later on.
So once we were already working together for a few months we decided together with Eugen to upgrade the design of the emails and make them look like this:
Oh sorry, wrong image.
I was supposed to upload this one:
We call it the Ferrari design. And we use this process quite often. It happened before that a merchant would come work with us and ask us to make every single email look very fancy and have all of these difficult offers tied into the overall strategy.
And we have tried this before, but the end results are usually suboptimal.
It always takes a lot more time and involves confusion. The best thing to do is focus on the most important things at first and then test+optimize later on. Most of the time it takes 2-3 months for the emails to start showing their full power.
But for this store, they started doing well INSTANTLY.
One thing to note is that the second screenshot did come in November, which is usually the best month of the year in eCommerce. The next few months were much quieter for the store, and the total revenue fell to $85,000 in January:
Then it went back up in March 2020.
It’s hard to tell what the reasons might be, here are a few factors that could impact this:
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Stronger front end Facebook ads
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News about Coronavirus
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Easter
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Random upswing in consumer behavior
At this point we also implemented Recart Messenger marketing and SMSBump messages for Eugen to strengthen his omni-channel presence, so now we had:
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Facebook (using ads)
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Instagram (paid)
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Messenger (On mobile devices this is considered to be a different app than Facebook)
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SMS messages
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Google (Adwords)
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Email
If you already have these channels implemented, have a think about these:
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Push notifications (PushOwl for instance)
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Pinterest marketing (if you need help finding a great Pinterest marketing specialist, we have an excellent partner)
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TikTok
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Twitter (especially in the US)
Back to the case study. And actually, speaking of case studies:
The Recart welcome popup we used for Eugen’s brand did over $161,000 in revenue, which was 18% of the store’s total revenue.
And just to clarify: I don’t mean “we did 18% of the store’s revenue”. No. This one welcome flow did. It was two messages and a popup. If you would like to find out more about how we did this, click here. The store’s revenue was about $200,000 on average per month after that.
At this point, Eugen and our team decided to take the brand to the next level by implementing our improved high-tier design package for emails in September 2020. The ones I showed you earlier. Let’s take a look if these had any instant impact:
Before high-tier design in August 2020:
After we implemented high-tier designed emails in October 2020:
And November 2020:
One thing to keep an eye out on is the revenue from Campaigns. Because this is the part of email marketing that does not get directly impacted by swings in traffic, it leverages the existing email list by broadcasting messages. And it is, therefore, a good measure of the value of your subscriber base.
Here is the revenue we generated just with campaigns (not flows) in 2020 Q3 and Q4:
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August: $12,419
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September: $13,513
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October: $16,272
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November: $31,549
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December: $19,772
So apart from November, the revenue numbers were quite similar. This brings me to my next point. We did so many A/B tests with high-tier designed emails and plain text emails. And the emails that were just plain text often had better click rates. Which means that you could argue that there is no point in having a Ferrari design for your emails.
However. There is a reason why Nike, Adidas, and Gymshark all have heavily designed emails because the truth is that it is really difficult to measure brand equity. And the long-term impact it has if your emails look extremely premium. So I will leave it up to you to decide what you think.