Email Campaign
Absolute New York is a cosmetic company. As designers working in a startup, we are not tied to our titles, but are open to wearing multiple hats. This time, I had an opportunity to pitch in a project to increase the revenue with promotional emails. I collaborated with the Marketing team for this project.
Role
Team
Anthony Award
(Marketing)
Myself (Design)
UX Research,
UI Design
Duration
4 Weeks
Background
Our design team creates about 15-20 promotional email designs for the Marketing team every month. It takes minimum of 2-3 months to half a year to prepare a product launch and run a campaign. Design and Marketing spend good amount of time developing ideas and refining strategies. However, compared to the amount of time we spend developing concepts and ideas, the revenue promotional email produced has been extremely low.
What is preventing our customers from purchasing products when they already put an effort into opening the email? Is it the design? Or is it something else? Are we bringing any value to our customers with these emails? I wanted to utilize what I have learned from the General Assembly to improve these emails. Anthony, a digital marketing coordinator, and I decided to team up and run a campaign to see how much revenue we can bring up in March compare to February.
Goal
Understand and tackle what is preventing customers from clicking the emails and purchasing a product and help customers to engage more.
Research
We studied emails from the last 6 months and analyzed the statistics. For the past 6 months, the average of opening rate was about 32% and the average of click rate was 12%. However, the average ordering rate was only 0.7% which was very low compared to the other two rates.
Through UTM parameter provided by Klayvio, email marketing platform, and heat map trial we were able to track user’s performances and gathered few insights.
Product price range is from $4 - $10 in average. However, in order to have free shipping, users must purchase more than $25, which makes users to purchase more than they initially thought.
To be qualified on free shipping, users do look around the site to add products, however, majority of users end up leaving.
How might we
create more value for customers and lead them to purchase our product when they visit the website via promotional email?
IDEATE & DESIGN
Adjusting free shipping price range was out of our authorization, so alternately we decided to focus on how might we bring users back who left the items in the cart.
Hypothesis
Users are not placing an order because of shipping cost. If we provide more value to customers that beats shipping cost of 4.99, users will place an order.
A / B Testing
I and Anthony decided run A/B testing and observe what email leads users’ clicks the most. I roughly sketched the layout of emails and came up with what needs to be focused in each of the emails. After few of discussions, we fianlized to do three emails concepts as below and see which gets the most engagement.
Reminding email to not forget about what they left in the cart.
Product recommendations / Bestselling items.
Providing unique discount code
TESTING A
We Miss You
TESTING B
Product Recommendation
TESTING C
Unique Discount
Result
For two weeks, we automated emails to be sent out to users who clicked on the promotional email and added products in the cart, but didn’t made any purchases.
All three emails did increase the click rate as well as revenue, however the most engagement was made with email that has recommend the products.
ITERATE & REFINE
What’s interesting is that the click rate of the ‘special discount only for you’ email was higher by 3.6% than the ‘best selling / what we recommend email. However, the order rate of ‘discount email’ was lower. Why so? Anthony and I analyzed user’s behavioral performances and found as below.
Users find negative experiences when they try to use the discount code but there’s a minimum amount of order of $4 to be qualified for the discount.
Users bounced out of the website when they realized they were disqualified for free shipping due to the discount.
Not only did we eliminate the minimum amount order for the discount but also decided to take one step further and questioned -
if we use all three designs as a follow-up, will it increase even click rates and revenue?
Instead of sending one follow-up email, we decided to send a ‘reminder’ email as the default follow-up email to be sent out to users who added items to the cart but haven’t checkout for a few hours. Then if users don’t check out on another day, Anthony has generated have ‘best selling’ email automatically and lastly ‘discount’ email a day after.
Final Result
After running the campaign for 4 weeks,
it has increased the click rate and the order rate has risen to 18.6%.
We were able to track users’ behavioral performance that users purchased with adding more items by 4% than purchasing only what they left in the cart.
