Saturday, November 6, 2021

If diseases are investing in their SEO then so should you 🤣

In this newsletter you’ll find: 👇

💌 Re-engaging your email list – Part 1.

💊 Customized vitamins with care/of.

📈 Conversion Rate Tips from Oddit.

🚨 Only 48 hours left to save $1,000 on Scale School!

👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe so you never miss out. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

Re-Engaging Your Email List - Part 1

Many brands are spending most of their time and $$$ on new customer acquisition, when it’s roughly five times more expensive to acquire a new lead than it is to retain an existing one.

They’re leaving one valuable resource of their existing audience completely untapped:

📣 Inactive or unengaged email subscribers. 📣

A percentage of your list will eventually stop engaging with your emails. It’s just a reality.

But if you don’t have a plan to re-engage these inactive subscribers, you’re missing a huge, inexpensive opportunity to win back customers.

Not only that, your email metrics, sender reputation, deliverability, and ESP costs will all take a hit, too.

Never fear, DTC Fam. ✋

There are tried-and-true email strategies that, when used together, can help you:

• Win back customers at a fraction of the cost.
• Maximize email engagement and potential revenue.
• Maintain healthy "list hygiene," and thus improve your sender reputation and email deliverability.

And over the next few newsletters, we’ll be breaking down each of these strategies in a comprehensive three-part series!

📧 Part 1: Re-Engagement Campaigns.

📧 Part 2: Winback Flows.

📧 Part 3: Sunset Flows.

By weaving each of these into your brand’s email program, you’ll be able to re-engage your list, win back customers, and lower costs. 💥

Today, we’re dropping Part 1: Re-Engagement Campaigns! 👇

Re-Engagement Campaigns are targeted emails sent to a segment of unengaged subscribers, with the goal of getting them to re-engage.

According to the Pilothouse email team:

"A Re-Engagement Campaign can be very complex, but at its heart, it’s really simple – the goal is to figure out who these people are, how long they haven’t been engaged for, and what your goal is to get them back in the fold. Those things are really important for how you craft your message."

⏲️ When to send a Re-Engagement Campaign:

Typically you’ll want to send a Re-Engagement Campaign when subscribers haven’t engaged with you in a period of time.

Typically, "unengaged" means a subscriber hasn’t:

• Clicked a link in an email
• Visited your website
• Made a purchase

The timeline you choose depends on your personal brand and product, but most brands will consider a profile unengaged if they haven’t done any of the above in 30–180 days.

⚠️Notice "opened your email" is not on this list!

The iOS 15 update will skew open rates for Apple Mail users, so unless you want to segment out Apple users, we recommend no longer using opens as an engagement metric.

📓 The structure of a Re-Engagement Campaign:

The main goal of a Re-Engagement Campaign is to get your subscriber’s attention and give them a reason to engage with your emails again.

The Email Team at Pilothouse recommends the following structure, delivered in 1–2 emails:

1. Re-introduce your brand.
2. Remind them why they signed up for your list.
3. Offer them something valuable (or tease value that’s coming).*
4. Include a clear CTA to manage their email preferences or unsubscribe. While this might seem counterintuitive, it’s always better for someone on your list to unsubscribe than to mark you as Spam or remain unengaged!

*Brownie Points: Use onsite data to tailor your offer! 🥰

• Have they visited blog posts or content pages on your site? Consider sending free, valuable content.
• Have they viewed a product, but haven’t purchased lately? They may be primed for a free gift or discount.

Even if you don’t have access to this data, you can try testing both types of re-engagement offers to see what works best.

You may also want to separate purchasers from non-purchasers and send different offers to each.

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Thanks to Klaviyo, we’re getting an inside look into Beyond Yoga’s holiday tactics, including how they:

• Segmented their way to success
• Used "daily drops" to increase anticipation
• Incorporated email data to personalize offers for customers all month long

👉 Read about Beyond Yoga’s secrets to Cyber Weekend success (and what they’re doing differently this year).

(Pssst, it’s not too late to incorporate these strategies into your holiday campaigns. 😉)

Re-Engaging Your Email List – Continued

💡 Examples of Re-Engagement Campaigns IRL:

9 Clouds’ re-engagement email does a great job of reintroducing the brand, and delivering a valuable piece of free content to get the subscriber re-engaged.

If you think your list is primed for an offer, you could use a strategy like Pinkberry and re-engage them with a free gift.

Or, if it fits with your brand, send a straight-up discount or sale like H&M (just be cautious of training your subscribers to only engage with discount offers).

😬Wait… What if I haven’t been emailing my list?

If you’ve been snoozing on your list and haven’t emailed them in a while (or maybe ever), you should still take efforts to re-engage them.

But keep in mind that they may not even remember who you are, or why they’re on your list. 🤔

So, in order to avoid scaring subscribers away (and landing in the dreaded Spam folder), you’ll want to send a softer, more personalized message.

The Pilothouse Team suggests using the following tips:

Email Style: Conversational, text-based email from the founder or someone at the company.

Message: Include a friendly reminder of why they signed up for your emails. Consider saying something like, "It’s been a while since we’ve last talked, but we still have something valuable to offer you."

Offer: Sending a discount in the first email isn’t recommended here, as it can come across as spammy.

Instead, you can tease a discount that you’ll send in a later email, or offer valuable content like a blog post, free download, or free service call.

CTA: Have them click a link or reply to let you know if they want to stay on the list/get the value.

Need inspo? 👇

This email from Typeform softly re-engages their subscribers by taking them to a library designed to give them ideas of how to use the service.

Obviously, the message of "we haven’t seen you in a while" wouldn’t apply if you haven’t actually been emailing them!

Trello’s approach could work if your subscribers initially signed up for a service, but haven’t heard from you in a while, or haven’t taken you up on your offer.

They also include a helpful Getting Started guide to help users that might have questions.

😟 What if they still don’t engage?

If subscribers don’t engage with your Re-Engagement Campaign, don’t worry!

You can further segment them, and add them to automated flows as a final attempt to win them back.

1. Purchasers: Add them to a Winback Flow (coming in Part 2).
2. Non-Purchasers: Skip the Winback and add them to a Sunset Flow (coming in Part 3).

And that brings us to Part 2 of this series: Winback Flows! Stay tuned – it’s coming soon.

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Conversion Rate Tips

The Oddit team is back with conversion rate tips for Jot – a killer DTC coffee brand.

Let’s jump in:

Oddit Tips:

Number 1: Be mindful of your design hierarchy –the product name is important, but not important enough to push key info downward.

We suggest reducing size drastically and pushing below product image.

Number 2: The Jot product is a game-changer –SHOW WHY!

Give users access to a secondary gif/video that shows the Jot product in action. It’s a new way to consume a common beverage, so take out the guesswork for people who don’t understand (see item 7 for clicked state).

Number 3: Once a user clicks the play button, let the .gif do a screen takeover without losing access to the page!

Number 4: Pull reviews together with your smaller headline and reduce your whitespace to create room for key content.

Number 5: Make actions easy to reach on mobile. If action buttons are short and in the middle, or too far to the left/right, they can be difficult to reach on mobile devices.

Make user engagement easy by ensuring key action buttons are full width on mobile.

Number 6: The risk-free trial you offer helps customers shop without stress –don’t let them miss it. Bring the guarantee directly below your buy now button

Number 7: Reviews (especially from recognizable people) can help build trust with users new to Jot.

Bring them up the page in some fashion and consider just pulling in a small version of the review. Just enough to pack a punch!

Number 8: If you’re only going to show 1 price on your product page, make it the lowest price! Jot is $18 per bottle when subscribing, so we suggest showing that rather than $24!

If you want these kinds of tips for your own site, start your own Oddit for free and improve your UX instantly!

Brand Spotlight

Looking for a health care product that’s catered to your specific needs?

Look no further, care/of has you covered! 💊🩺

Filling out care/of’s quiz provides them with the insights they need to deliver you daily personalized vitamin packets.

That means no more opening multiple bottles or battling with pill organizers. 👇

We’re loving care/of’s use of UGC and minimalistic designs. Check their Facebook ads library out here!

DTC Scale School

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M&A

📝 Software services firm Zendesk to buy SurveyMonkey parent for nearly $4B.

🥤 Coca-Cola buys full control of Bodyarmor for $5.6B in its largest-ever brand acquisition.

💰 Bolt seeking to raise $777M at up to $11B valuation.

👩‍ Women’s health start-up FemTec Health acquires Birchbox.

🔊 Have you heard our latest podcasts?

🧲 Wildstorming the Beauty Space – Glamnetic's Head of Growth Margaret Fortner Returns!

♻️ Learn how Fussy Deodorant Lowers Blended CaC with Cofounder Matt Kennedy.

🦷 Spotlight Oral Care Goes Viral on TikTok with Cofounder Dr. Lisa Creaven and VP Marketing Siobhan Nolan.

🧵 Cornering the $4.2B Quilting Market, with David Mifsud from Missouri Star Quilt Co.

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Kelsey Hess, and Rebecca Knight.

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