Here at LION Digital, our focus through email is on increasing a small number of metrics that make a huge difference.
FRM. CAC. LTV.
These stand for frequency, recency, monetary value, customer acquisition cost and the customer’s lifetime value.
Essentially, all these acronyms mean is this. We get your customers to start shopping with your brand for less investment into that customer, come back more frequently, purchase more each time they do, and stay with your brand for a longer period of time.
There are three main ways to do this and most of what we do at LION is a variation of the three.
Growing the list of potential customers.
Converting customers through campaigns and well-timed automation.
Increasing repeat purchases through personalised touchpoints at every stage of the customer journey.
More than ever in an internet-driven world, we need to be:
There has never been so much noise in the world, or so many challenges for brands to stand out. Automation based on behaviour triggers, and segmenting your audience helps cut through the noise and gets your message across. Better segmentation equals better relationships with your customers, which equals more revenue.
For example, a potential customer comes to your website and browses a couple of product pages, signs up to your email list, reads a blog and then leaves. At that moment, your brand was front of mind and they were engaging with your content. Other than retargeting them on Facebook or offering a welcome discount, most brands don’t have a strategy to engage and convert potential customers based on these behaviours. However, with the message at the right time, email can become a customer acquisition channel.
Enough people making the right behaviours and getting the right messages in their inboxes — equals revenue. As the Email channel is based on behaviours, our benchmark for the channel is that you should be generating 20–30% or more of your overall site revenue from this channel, as measured in Google Analytics (half automation, half campaign revenue). Even if you’re already at this stage, there’s likely more that you can be doing to increase those numbers.
Short term, our expectation is that by migrating email platforms or starting the channel from scratch our clients will break even on our monthly fees within 60–90 days. Long term, the Email channel is expected to return up to 42:1! That’s X42 the revenue that you spend on the platform fees and our marketing retainer.
One of the reasons we can get these results from email is that it’s a fully-owned marketing channel, which means you have control over the content, who’s in your audience, and the timing of your message. Email is not dependant on the operating system, device, latest iOS or Google update.
Did you know that you can run lead generation campaigns through Facebook to a landing page and get potential customers to sign up for your brand’s emails? Then have them go through a custom email automation over 3–5 days that gets them excited about your brand and turns them into customers?
There is an unlimited amount of creativity on how you target customers based on their behaviour, any first-party data that you’ve collected, like preferences, or purchase data from your eCommerce platform. At LION, we put every part of the email platform to work to achieve results for your brand.
Let’s talk more about our unique approach to the Email channel below.
Our strategy is built around short-term wins and long term gains, it’s a balance. What marketing automation to use next, prioritisation of list growth activities, how to adjust our campaigns strategy — all based on data. There is a surprising amount of data that you can collect on how customers interact with your emails, and we harness the power of this to inform our actions.
We audit the technology stack that you use to make sure you’re using it to its full potential (Shopify, ESP, list growth mechanics, apps for reviews, bundles, loyalty and product discovery).
We build a communications strategy that includes automation, segmentation, SMS messages and prioritises what we’ll work on over the coming months.
We segment your customers based on the RFM model, geo-location, preferences and engagement and any first-party data that we create. For example, for a clothing brand your shirt size, shoe size and favourite colour will be very helpful in segmenting your audience.
We create an email specific styleguide that will look great on as many inbox types as possible. We can achieve this using Email on Acid, which is an inbox preview testing tool. As there are no standards in HTML for email, unlike the web, we need to design campaigns that will look good on the majority of your databases devices.
We build a marketing calendar that can align the efforts of your other channels into a cohesive plan.
We make sure the top converting email automations are turned on and humming, and that we include SMS messages sparingly in these sequences. Then we build marketing automation for all touchpoints in the customer lifecycle. A few examples include transactional notifications, tracking, repeat purchase reminders, VIP rewards for lifetime spend, retargeting product views, welcoming subscribers, checkout abandonment, cross-sells and activating dormant customers who have not purchased in a while.
Now we can convert customers who sign up to the list, we make sure there are as many ways to grow your list as possible. Often, this will include monthly competitions, Facebook lead generation, or co-promotion with other brands databases.
We always optimise and adjust our plan as the constant feedback that our analytics gives us, increases our insights into how customers are interacting with your content. This often includes A/B testing content and calls to action.
We review monthly benchmarks against other brands in your niche on email opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and deliverability. This helps us know if we’re sending too many emails, or if our segmentation needs to be tweaked.
We often install and customise complementary apps for reviews, loyalty, product discovery, rewards, tracking, wishlists and bundles as these are a logical extension of the touchpoints in the customer lifecycle that we’re targeting.
Working with the team at LION Digital has been like a breath of fresh air. I almost gave up on working with an agency after 4 previous failed…
Fantastic Service and Staff. They were very friendly and easy to deal with, and gave a big boost to our online Traffic and Webstore.
I can’t say enough good things about Lion Digital! From start to finish, their team has been nothing short of outstanding. They took the time to really understand…
These guys know what they are doing!! We have just begun our partnership with Lion but from the get go we have found them to be very thorough…
Working with the Lion team on our ESP migration to Klaviyo was seamless. They were always transparent with information, reporting, updates and needs – he was like an…
James (our director) and Tom (the sales lead) really like the design you made. I’m very happy with what we have done with the design template!
Where do I start? If you’re looking to invest in your eCommerce digital marketing, you won’t regret bringing LION on board. The entire team at LION are veterans…
