User Growth Case Study

Description

Our customer provides a way to create fully customizable photo products like books, cards, calendars, wall canvases and more. With their free online editor, you’re not limited to static pre-designed templates; you have the freedom to edit to your heart’s content.

Research done by Campaign Monitor in 2018, proves what we with User Growth keep on saying to our customers, email marketing is still the king of marketing with a 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent.

As a result, our client asked us to increase their email subscribers and build their marketing automation for their current and new to be acquired subscribers.

Challenges

• Revive an email list only used to getting promotional offerings instead of value-based content of around 500K subscribers and increase sales.
• Grow the email list with new subscribers that want to get inspired and look further than just the next promotional offering, an audience with who a long-lasting relation can be built.
• Use email as a way to engage the audience to grow monthly organic traffic on site.

Solutions

Our customer had built over the years a considerable email list with over 500K subscribers. However, this list was missing proper segmentation.

The list was only used to getting promotional emails (higher probability of being flagged as spam), and without any segmentation, there was no way to reach their customers at the correct point in their customer journey.

Our solution to the customer was based on three pillars:

1. Segmentation of the list with personalization tactics to deliver more relevant content to their subscribers based on their geographic location, interests, purchase history, and much more.

2. Change the content of the emails to become more than just another annoying promo email but to inspire its readers. As a company, you’re always stealing away time, attention and money from your competitors. These competitors are not always the competitors you might think of at first and as a result, this creates a potentially big opportunity with the content you’re creating for your customers.

For example, the competitors of Netflix are not just another set of streaming services, but they are competing with any other form of leisure, any entertainment. By looking into these indirect competitors, we were able to identify a niche set of content that we could use to inspire the readers.

3. Grow the email list significantly with new subscribers that are in the target demographic, women age 25-40, moms, householders that love to get original memories to life’s most beautiful moments.

Awareness

Clients in the current database we’re not aware of anything that the client offered except the occasional promo. This could be seen with the open rates of the email being at 7.2% (industry average 10%).

By introducing segmentation in the list, and changing the way content of the email, we managed to increase the open rates to a stunning 50.2%.

Acquisition

While email marketing can generate a solid return for any business if you’re not growing your email list if you do not have a robust email capture system in place you’re missing out on this enormous potential.

To keep on increasing the size of our client’s email list with relevant, high-value subscribers, we went back to the basics with their website.

Our client’s website had a significant amount of traffic but was not able to capture the audience to become part of their list.

We created:

• personalised Call-To-Actions (CTA’s) for each page on site;
• designed pop-up’s and slide-in, using time-based settings and on-site retargeting;
• exit-intent pop-ups on high bounce rate pages; and
• specialised landing pages (using Unbounce) with relevant lead magnets.

Activation

Some marketers often mistake the word “automation” and consider marketing automation as a robot that repeats the same task every single time.

Email automation provides many opportunities to personalise email content and more importantly, for our customers at a scalable rate.

75% of users expect a welcome email after signing up. If they don’t receive a welcome email within the first hour, 90% of subscribers go cold.

To activate your subscribers, you need to set up a proper welcome flow, and check-in regular with all your subscribers.

Some of the processes we put in place for our client:

• Creating more value-based, instead of promo based content.
• Engagement with a welcome drip campaign.
• Using social proof: embedding reviews from the customers’ Trustpilot.
• Personalised campaigns, based on the place of the customer within the customer journey, based on their interest, based on milestones (like birthday etc.).

Retention

Retention is the first step on your way to creating revenue.

The biggest impact here was made doing segmentation. We:

• Gave our readers more control, by letting them opt-out for certain types of email. This results in “soft unsubscribes”, but gives higher valued higher engaged audiences.
• Created retention emails to dormant subscribers, using friendly email copy we reminded them of what they were missing
• Asked for reviews/referrals from loyal customers. Asking for reviews brings the relation to the next level, by deepening the relation.

Revenue

As much as 75 percent of all online shopping carts are abandoned midway. That’s a lot of sales falling through the cracks that businesses could recover.

There are many things that interrupt the conversion process. But the main one is that so many things are competing for our attention at any given time. A simple Facebook pop-up notification could be the reason you lose a sale.

To increase revenue we started to send targeted sales messages on the right moments in the customer journey.

We used a combination of both email messages (abandoned cart emails) as well as push notifications on-site (using Push Crew) to increase.

Referral

People are only okay with referring your business, if they are truly happy and if you ask them at the correct time.

The best time to ask for referrals for our client is, of course, the moment the ordered product got delivered at your doorstep.

We used the Viral Loops product as part of our solution to get as many referrals as possible. Think of share a discount code with your friends, etc.

Impact

• Grew the subscriber list with over 1,000 subscribers per country per day in which the client was active. Resulting in a 60% list growth in four months.
• Increased email open rates from 7.2% to over 50%
• An increase in revenue from email marketing of 66%