An FMCG brand in the food and beverage industry had an email marketing database of over 30,000 subscribers, and were sending regular communications. Their revenue from email accounted for around 50% of total D2C sales from their website, but sales had been falling for around 8 months.
They came to us to fix it. These are the headline results we achieved within 2 months:
- Increased conversion rate to 90% above industry average
- Increased revenue from email by 67%
- Increased revenue per recipient from 32p to £5.49
- Achieved an average open rate of 88.67% (up from 46.81%)
Here’s what we did…
Performance analysis
We started with a deep dive into their email marketing performance data. This gave us a clear understanding of what was and wasn’t working, what KPIs they should be monitoring going forward, and what actions to take to increase email revenue.
From this analysis, our key findings concluded that:
- The brand was doing no relationship building/nurturing with their list. Although they were emailing regularly, they were only ever contacting subscribers when they wanted to sell. This was harming their engagement, and they were missing out on a valuable opportunity to turn their most loyal audience into superfans, to leverage word-of-mouth marketing.
- Offering too many discounts was devaluing their brand and harming their sales – engaged subscribers were waiting for the next discount code to make a purchase, which was impacting cash flow and profit margins.
- Despite sending regular sales messages, 89% of their list had never made a purchase with them online. This reinforced our finding that they weren’t doing enough to nurture their subscribers and give them a reason to buy.
- 58% of their list was no longer engaged, and this was leading to a higher than average spam score – which would become a problem for the brand when Google implements their new spam regulations (senders who are frequently about a spam threshold of 0.3% will not be able to send to Google emails – including Workspace, from February 2024).
We cleaned and re-engaged their list, bringing their engaged and very engaged subscribers up to 90%.
Working with their in-house marketing coordinator, we developed a new list-building strategy and a strategy for competitions and collaborations – which was their primary list-building method but was leading to low quality leads and high spam scores, due to lack of follow-up nurturing.
We also implemented a number of design changes to ensure brand consistency across all types of automated emails, added in social proof (awards they had won, supermarkets they were stocked in etc) to the footer of all emails, and began including a short line to remind subscribers of how they got onto the list – to help reduce unsubscribes and spam reports.
Going forward, we built them a new email marketing schedule, so that they would be able to implement the 70:30 ratio of content designed to build and nurture a relationship, and content designed to sell.
We segmented their list based on previous engagement and purchasing behaviour, and incorporated this into the strategy to ensure that each segment received highly-relevant, conversion-optimised content and targeted offers that reflected where they were in the customer journey.
Building a high converting welcome sequence
The first email you send to a new subscriber is statistically the best performing in terms of open rate and engagement, if it’s automated to send on subscribe.
You’re contacting them at the exact moment they are opting-in to hear from you, when they are highly engaged, and it gives you the opportunity to welcome them to your brand and control the narrative as they become a warmer lead.
76% of consumers expect to receive a welcome email immediately after subscribing to a list, so not sending one is likely to break trust with your new subscriber.
Based on the findings from our initial analysis, we knew that this brand needed to do more relationship building before asking for the sale, and the welcome sequence is the perfect place to do this.
Their previous welcome sequence was too complex and too sales focused. The first email had a very high unsubscribe rate of 4.5%, suggesting that there was a mismatch between subscribers’ experience and expectations of the brand online, and the experience created in the welcome email.
The brand were incentivising subscribers by offering 10% off first order – a common lead magnet for FMCG brands, but the welcome sequence was too heavily focused on pushing the discount and not on giving people a reason to buy. Only 15% of subscribers were using the discount code, so we knew we needed to do more to warm leads up and get them ready to purchase. The discount itself wasn’t enough of an incentive.
The first 2 weeks of being on your list are statistically the highest engaged part of the subscriber lifecycle. With this in mind, you can afford to send more emails during this time than you normally would, but only if they are highly relevant and engaging.
Our client’s original email sequence was running for 4 weeks, so we cut this down to 5 days, one email per day. We focused on telling the brand story, bringing the benefits of the product and tasting notes to life with beautiful imagery, descriptions and content, and layering in the brand impact and values in a way that created a sense of community and involved the subscriber. We also leveraged personalisation throughout the sequence to increase engagement.
After A/B testing best-performing subject lines, we were able to increase the welcome sequence open rate to 71.6% (a 50% increase in performance).
We increased the click rate from 2.45% to 17.9%, and increased the placed order rate by 1,663% – putting them in the top 1% of FMCG food and beverage brands.
Our work left them with an incredibly high performing, highly engaging welcome sequence they can use to nurture their customer base long term.
Optimising their abandoned cart sequence
E-commerce brands lose $18 billion in sales revenue per year because of cart abandonment. An automated abandoned cart sequence is the perfect opportunity to win back the 70% of consumers that fill their basket but don’t check out the first time.
The brand we were working with had a placed order rate of just 1.06% on their abandoned cart sequence and a revenue per recipient of 98p.
They were sending 3 emails as part of the sequence, which is industry best practice. However, the first email was set to a time delay of 4 hours after the cart was abandoned. The second email was 20 hours, and the third was 3 days.
Within 24 hours, people will have forgotten, changed their minds or purchased from somewhere else. Research shows that to increase conversion significantly, all 3 emails need to be sent within 24 hours, with 1 hour seeing the highest conversion rate.
We used A/B testing to optimise the sequence for open and click rate, re-wrote the emails based on the successful sales messaging already tested in the welcome sequence, and adjusted the sending schedule in line with research-backed optimum send times.
As a result of our optimisation, placed order rate increased by 35.71%, from 1.06% to 4.17%. Revenue per recipient increased from 98p to £1.33 – a 293.4% increase.
Bringing them above industry average
- Prior to working with us, their average open rate was in the 48th percentile (meaning that they were performing better than 48% of FMCG brands in their peer group). Within 5 weeks, we were able to move them into the 86th percentile – meaning that they are now performing better than 86% of their industry peers.
- Their average click rate was in the 45th percentile. In 5 weeks, we moved them to the 77th percentile.
- Most importantly, their conversion rate was in the 16th percentile at just 0.04%. We brought this up to the 90th percentile, achieving a conversion rate of 6.5% and putting them in the top 10% of FMCG brands.
Our strategy and optimisation increased their revenue per recipient from 32p to £5.49.
Revenue per recipient tells you how much spendable revenue you’re getting from each subscriber on your list. The higher your RPR, the more each member of your list is worth, which also has an impact on your advertising budget.
In less than 3 months, we increased their email marketing revenue by 67%.
If you would like to see similar results, book a free consultation call.
