With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, there is no better time to talk about how critical email and SMS marketing are to sustaining revenue year-round. We consistently see that this power duo, if strategically paired with the right evergreen marketing strategies, plays a pivotal role in building and nurturing customer relationships, enhancing brand loyalty, and, ultimately, driving revenue growth for our clients.
In one example, earlier this year, a jewelry brand sought our assistance in transforming its business model to focus on D2C. Through comprehensive lifecycle marketing, we acted swiftly to set the stage for economic growth. The results? A 329% revenue increase within just two quarters.
Here’s a quick look at how we did it.
Part 1: The Right Marketing Automation Platform
We first prioritized migrating and warming their existing customer base from their previous Marketing Automation Platform to Klaviyo, a platform with dynamic content, personalization, and robust testing capabilities. Their Shopify integration allowed us to create dynamic, personalized workflows, closely monitor user engagement, and expand our client’s suite from basic welcome and abandoned cart automation to full-funnel personalized automation. These efforts resulted in an impressive 223% increase in revenue, with a 39% higher click rate and a remarkable 812% lift in conversion rate in their new SMS and email-integrated welcome series.
Part 2: The Value of Longitudinal Testing
A one-size-fits-all approach falls short in today’s marketing landscape, and testing to find the right way to create a personalized, frictionless experience for your customers is critical. We’ve found the key to fully understanding your audience lies in testing across all your owned lifecycle channels: email, chat, and SMS in particular. We recommend longitudinal testing conducted over multiple touchpoints throughout entire workflows as it yields a rich dataset that provides deep learnings about your customers, informing a strategy spanning the whole marketing mix.
Part 3: Harnessing Evergreen Automation
When it comes to email marketing, we find almost all new clients are dramatically under-utilizing automation. According to GetResponse benchmarks, even trusty standby welcome emails are incredibly powerful, generating four times as many open and ten times as many clicks as other email types. Automations such as abandoned cart reminders and customer reengagement messages consistently outperform ad-hoc campaigns for revenue growth and stability. Developing automated email and SMS workflows creates a foundation for sustained revenue growth – and, importantly, enables flexibility for your team during peak seasonal moments to focus on and develop campaigns to promote sales and respond rapidly to key moments.
If you’re an e-commerce brand, here’s a quick checklist to know whether your lifecycle marketing is in the best position possible for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- Are you using the right Marketing Automation Platform to enable automation and proper testing? (Take a look at your other tools while you’re at it to make sure all your technology is fully serving you!)
- Are you employing experimentation strategies to their fullest impact through longitudinal testing across email and SMS? (And is your team using those test results to make data-backed decisions?)
- Are your programs leveraging automation to deliver the right message to the right person at exactly the right moment in their customer journey?
If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, are looking to grow revenue and increase customer retention, or you have a favorite automation you want to chat about, reach out! You can find me at melanie.buck@crometrics.com. Good luck; we hope you knock all your holiday revenue goals out of the park!