90 Days of Email: A Recap

As a part of your email marketing strategy, it's essential to constantly evaluate your most important metrics - opens, clicks, revenue, and deliverability - to take the temperature and identify opportunies for improvement.

Here's a quick recap of the past 90 days of email at Paddle North, with a high-level summary of what worked.

Highest Open Rates

Subject Lines: Centered around 'NEW!' or 'RESTOCKED!' products. Assuming you're targeting the proper audience, these are powerful attention-grabbers that can lift open rates. 

Company Updates (Newsletter): As I've shared in past posts, people care about your small business - the ups, downs, wins, and internal updates. Not every email needs to directly sell a product (although this can still occur indirectly). Adding a face to the brand is appreciated and well-received. This should be an integral part of your email marketing strategy as you continue to build a credible and trusting relationship with customers and prospects.

Highest Click Rates

Clear and Focused CTA: Define the purpose of your marketing emails and remain consistent. It can be tempting to cram too much, resulting in too many CTA's. This causes paralysis and negatively impact clicks. Our highest performers have been simple and to the point. 

Minimal Text + Concise Message: Newsletter message aside, messaging has been concise and to the point, leaving just enough information out of the body to force a click to learn more.

Highest Attributed Revenue

Urgency: Calling out products with low stock levels only improves conversion rates.

Back in Stock: Not only did "restocked" verbiage increase email open rates, but improved clicks and subsequent conversions. 

Promotions: When there is short-lived promotion with an expiration date attached, there is typically a lift in revenue.

What are the common attributes across all of these categories?

Segmented Lists: reminder to target recipients with content that is relevant based on purchase history, site browsing history, product interest, and any other relevant first-party data that you have access to. Cross-sell "new" or "in stock" accessories to existing customers that already own complimentary products. This will ensure a relevant message with engaged subscribers.

Scrubbed Lists: Consistently unengaged subscribers were omitted, maintaining healthy engagement metrics and deliverability score.

Engagement matters. If you're unable to identify what's working (and what is underperforming), then it's important to continue tweaking, testing, and tracking.