Case Study
How to Optimize Email Automation for a 102% Leap in Sales Conversion
102%
Those are the three key tactics that helped MotoCMS, a growing provider of smart content management solutions, double their sales conversion from one of their email marketing channels.
Email marketing automation can get confusing very quickly. It often starts like this:
- You're an aspiring entrepreneur picking up every technique that promises higher profits. And one day you decide to try email automation. 'Cuz, you know, every marketing guru out there says it's a big deal.
- You buy a premium account of some email marketing service. 'Cuz, you know, your favorite marketing guru uses it.
- You read every best practice and every market report (you know, from the guru) you can find and stuff them all into your first email automation workflow.
- You hit the Start button and wait for those emais to bring your business to the Conversion Olymp.
Can you relate to that story?
If so, read on to find out how MotoCMS managed to optimize their email marketing automation by using three basic techniques.
The team at MotoCMS does not pretend to be marketing gurus. Nor do they claim to have some super special secret growth hacks guaranteed to boost your conversion rates by 500% in one week. But here's what they have to offer: a case study of a technique that actually helped them to gradually double their sales.
The purpose of this case study is to turn your attention to the benefits of:
- analyzing your own audience vs relying fully on market reports,
- giving up an "all-in-one" approach to writing email copy in favor of "one goal per email" approach,
- putting a good dose of manual work in your email marketing automation.
That's something MotoCMS has applied to reach the whopping 102% raise in conversion rate. And something you can try as well during your next business growth experiments.
Here's how the story started
As any growth-stage business, MotoCMS has to set priorities carefully and certain business directions get less attention than others, at least for some time. That's exactly what happened to one of the company's email marketing channels - autoresponders for website-driven trial users and customers.
The automation workflows have been put on the Suspended mode, and the company's Marketing Specialist Julia Blake was assigned to unpause it back in spring.
Basic performance metrics hovered above the industry-average rates, yet there was plenty of room for better results.
Each email chain has been restructured and rewritten to ensure 2x higher open rate and almost 3x higher click-through rate leading to the 102% increase in sales conversion rate.
The first step on the way to those results was fire up their email marketing oven with some demographic data.
They started from connecting what they knew about their audience with what they send to them
The main goal for the Trial email sequence is to move trial users to paid users. So everyone who registered for a free 14-day trial of MotoCMS used to receive 7 emails designed to welcome a new user and convince them in the benefits of buying a website template.
Here is an example of the very first email in this chain.
What's the first thing that you've noticed about this email? Yep, it's the dozen of links it contains. Sure, they're all useful links, but the number of choices here is kinda overwhelming.
"The Lesson #1 here is that you shouldn't expect anyone to do anything after reading your email if you have no idea of WHAT you actually want them to do" - Julia Blake.
Let's look at the essential problems with the original setup:
- Vague objectives for each email in the workflow.
- Lack of knowledge of the recipients' needs.
- No proper segmentation of the email list.
- Emails were too salesy.
- Mediocre email performance.
- It was a one-way communication with little to no feedback from the users.
The situation was pretty similar with the Client autoresponder.
Does this sound familiar?
Julia and her team started from asking the right questions and building a clearer messaging hierarchy in their emails to demo users and paying customers.
It's not that the marketers at MotoCMS knew nothing about their customers' sales needs. Quite the contrary, a lot of data are constantly coming from the customer service department, social media, and general traffic analytics. However, these loads of information have not been quite properly used for email marketing.
So the first thing that the MotoCMS team did to fix this was sending sales tracking data to their MailChimp account.
Pro tip: If you're using MailChimp for email marketing, it's a good idea to use hidden fields in the email signup forms on your website to group users based on how close they are to taking whatever action you want them to take. Kissmetrics shared a nice tutorial on how to implement automatic lead scoring in MailChimp.
Having conducted several surveys, a couple hundred direct calls, and a ton of analytical work, the team at MotoCMS came to the conclusion that pretty much formed their strategy for the trial autoresponder:
Whether a trial user enjoys the process of designing a website would be the single critical reason for them to buy a template.
From there, they focused on one goal per email
As seen in the example above, the company's original welcome email included multiple CTAs. This diffused the reader's attention, and few people clicked on the links.
Julia and her colleagues realized that they needed to guide their users' attention in a more consistent and simple manner if they wanted to nurture leads and move trial users to paid customers.
Once they figured out their audience's major sales needs and decided to transform the email series into an educational course, they started to cut the fluff from every email in the sequence.
The goal of this email is to guide a user through the process of editing a website header. Nothing more, nothing less.
The same tactic was applied to the client emails.
Pro tip: Before you write an email, define a single action you expect someone to do after they read it. Click the link? Learn how to do something? Write you back? The answer would be the goal of your email.
Last but not least, they kept it personal
Track & Segment
To newbies, automation may sound as something spammy and impersonal. This couldn't be farther from the truth, when done right.
In the case with MotoCMS autoresponders, one of the major goals was to improve personalization and develop deeper relationships with customers.
Naturally, to achieve this quite ambitious goal, the Moto team went further than just using the recipient's first name in the email greeting. It's engaging, relevant, and timely content they used as their main weapon.
But how do you make your emails wanted by your subscribers?
The answer is simple: track and segment!
As mentioned earlier, proper sales tracking was the first thing the MotoCMS team set up in their MailChimp account both for the lead nurturing and upsell email workflows.
This way MotoCMS got enough data to segment their lists and branch the automated email sequences based on that info.
The moment purchase is made, a user falls into one of the groups depending on the selected product.
Pro tip: Keep your automated drip campaigns simple. Unless you have a team of email marketing experts who can implement diagram paths with 50 variables in less than a day, limit your campaigns to time-based (email A send 1 hour after subscription, email B sends 2 days after email A and so on) or ones with up to 2 conditions (email A sends 1 after subscription if a subscriber belongs to the X segment and does not belong to the Y segment).
How Can I Help You?
In order to make their automated email chains work as additional communication and feedback collection channels, Julia and her team added two special emails to each sequence.
The users on the Trial automation list received a friendly "How can I help?" email in the middle of the 14-day free trial period.
The replies to this email go straight to the support officer it's sent from. This way, each user can quickly find help if they're stuck with something.
Hey There!
At the same time, a survey email was added to the Client email chain. Its main purpose was to inform the company whether it's an end user or a web developer on the other end of the screen.
Pro tip: Add a personal "Hi, how can I help?" email early in your autoresponder chain, or add a P.S. to your very first welcome email asking your recipients to share their single most difficult issue they are currently struggling with. This way, you will get an evergreen source of valuable information about your customers so that you could always optimize your emails for maximum conversion.
The Results
Now comes the part you were probably eager to check. The figures!
So here are the major performance metrics MotoCMS wanted to improve and how they changed after their Trial automation workflow revamp:
MotoCMS managed to double the open rate of their Trial email sequence and almost triple the CTR.
Original vs Updated Trial Email Sequence
The new Trial sequence launched in early June 2016 and for 3 months, the average sales conversion grew from 4% for the period of June-August 2015 to 8,1% rate. A solid 2x increase!
With 8 378 registered trial accounts for the stated date range, that equals to around 230 purchases per month vs 2 782 registrations and 37 purchases made by the MotoCMS trial users monthly during the same period in 2015.
The updated Client email sequence demonstrated awesome performance as well. Compared to the 14% upsell conversion rate during June - August 2015, this number went up to 27% in 2016.
By the way, any MotoCMS templates has a built-in MailChimp widget to help you get started with email marketing.
Original vs Updated Client Autoresponder
While the open rate didn't really change, the click rate increased by 88% showing a clear benefit of sending more targeted, relevant emails to your list.
The Recap
With the original automated email campaigns, MotoCMS did not have a clear picture of how close their customers are to buying a product or upgrading to a premium offer. The company's decision makers realized the value of email marketing automation, but due to lack of resources could not make the most out of it.
Eventually, though, the marketing team at MotoCMS caught it up by updating their automation workflows to see the 2x increase in email performance and sales conversion.
To reach this impressive result, the Moto team put their major efforts in improving targeting and personalization of their email.
The takeaways from this case study would be as follows:
- Making your messages relevant and timely for your subscribers is critical to success of your email automation workflow.
- Use Google Analytics, SurveyMonkey, your email marketing service reports, and even direct calls, to study your subscribers and improve targeting of your emails. Concentrate on one goal per email. Use a single, clear call to action to prompt your audience to complete that goal.
- Analyse your own stats rather than relying solely on market reports.
- Automated emails can work as an extra way to collect feedback and strengthen relationships with your audience.
- It's email automation, not autopilot. So always keep your hand on the pulse, test, and optimize your marketing automation for the good.
See? Sometimes it takes a few quite basic changes to achieve quite impressive results. So go ahead and happy email marketing!
