How an Online Retailer Increased Email Sales by 72 Percent in 2009
By Anna Johnson on February 15th, 2010Online retailer, Motorcycle Superstore, saw sales derived from its email marketing increase by a massive 72 percent in 2009 compared with the previous year. How did Erick Barney, VP Marketing, and his team do it?
According to a recent MarketingSherpa case study, Motorcycle Superstore achieved the 72 percent increase in email revenues through good, old-fashioned testing and hard work.
Here are the seven (7) tactics underlying the online retailer’s email marketing success:
1. Use a variety of email formats
Motorcycle Superstore found that by using a variety of email formats – HTML, plain text, long, short, etc – the online store was able to raise the attention and interest of subscribers. Note that this goes against the conventional email marketing wisdom of using the same, ‘tried-and-true’ email format. In reality, it comes down to what will appeal to YOUR audience. If they respond better to variety, then variety is the way to go.
2. Personalize subject lines
Motorcycle Superstore found that in an A/B split-test of subject lines, the subject line that included recipients’ first names achieved a 22 percent open rate, whilst the non-personalized subject line got a 16 percent open rate. On that basis, going forward, the company began using more personalized subject lines.
I would, however, caution against using someone’s name in every single email subject line. Again, this is something you should test, but we’ve observed that if it’s done too often, personalization results in decreasing open rates. For its part, Motorcycle Superstore still mixes up its emails, which avoids the risk of personalization becoming stale.
3. Test days of the week
Motorcycle Superstore tested the days of the week it sent out emails and found that although open rates were highest on Thursdays, sales were highest on Mondays and Tuesdays. This is an important distinction to keep in mind: you want to do what maximizes your primary metric e.g. your conversion rate, not what maximizes secondary metrics such as your open rate or even click-through rate (depending on what you define as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’).
4. Segment your email list based on behavior
Motorcycle Superstore segmented its email list based on such criteria as products purchased (e.g. dirt bikes, scooters, etc) and types of activity e.g. shopping cart abandons, click activity and purchase history. By tailoring emails to the online store’s email segments Motorcycle Superstore was able to develop a better relationship with its email list which led to better results.
5. Regularly clean your email list
By regularly cleaning the company’s email list e.g. by removing subscribers who hadn’t purchased for a year, Motorcycle Superstore managed to save $30,000 in its incremental email marketing costs.
It may seem blasphemous to remove subscribers from your list, but the reality is that they are most likely to buy from you or otherwise be responsive when they have just joined your list and their responsiveness steadily declines from there.
Having said that, we all know of – and perhaps count ourselves as – people who have bought from an email marketer months or years after first joining their list. It may take a year or so for you to engender such people’s trust – or, indeed, for you to promote an offer that actually appeals to them – so you may not want to be too hasty in removing subscribers.
Here at Kikabink News the approach we take is to apply a different approach to different email subscribers. For instance, we are much more aggressive about cleaning lower quality lists (e.g. lists comprising subscribers obtained from, say, co-registration). In this case we will customarily remove subscribers who haven’t opened our emails over a certain period of time.
6. Optimize your landing pages
According to Motorcycle Superstore, testing and improving landing pages was a major reason behind the 72 percent increase in email sales.
Basically, you want to ensure that if someone reads an email offer and clicks on the relevant link… then their expectations are met when they arrive on your landing page.
For example, if you are offering a ‘two books for the price of one’ offer in your email… then the headline, copy and imagery on your landing page should immediately repeat the offer and not, for example, make a different offer such as “50 percent off”.
7. Create a Facebook fan page and generate fans
After embedding a Facebook icon in its emails, Motorcycle Superstore saw the number of its Facebook fans jump from 3,000 to over 11,000 within 6 months. While the online retailer is still unclear about all the benefits of having a Facebook fan page, Erick Barney believes it has fed into the increase in email sales.
