October 29, 2020
By: Chase Dimond
Since launching Boundless Labs in June of 2018, Chase Dimond has sent hundreds of millions of emails resulting in over $50 million in email attributable revenue for over 50+ eCommerce brands.
He recently released the most thorough eCommerce Email Marketing Course that covers every aspect of generating 20-30% of your Sales from email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the most important channels to generate revenue for your eCommerce store.
If you’re like most brands, you know you need to spend more time on your eCommerce email campaigns, but don’t know where to begin.
In this article, I share with you 3 campaigns that you can start sending right away. What’s more, these are campaigns that very few other brands are leveraging.
Because other brands aren’t sending these, you’ll be able to differentiate your emails which is important for driving engagement and ultimately revenue.
Each of the 3 campaigns I dive into below includes the following:
The Cross Promotion Email is comparable to a giveaway email but a lot more conversion focused.
Don’t get me wrong, giveaways are great and they serve their purpose, but this is a great campaign you can level up with.
The reason this works well is because you’re typically offering your audience a sizable discount (i.e. 20% to 30% off) on your cross promotion partners product(s). Ideally you have a high converting email form + retargeting on website visits to pick up any scraps from this campaign.
The goal of the cross promotion campaign is to partner up with a brand that serves a complimentary audience but one that doesn’t have a competitive product. This will be more clear when we look at the examples below.
Example 1 from rooted is focused on promoting a brand called Hungryroot. They start the email with an eye catching photo that showcases both brands.
They then share text around why they’re fans of Hungryroot and the benefit behind their product. They then proceed to talk about the attractive offer at hand, “30% off first order + free veggies for life”.
The discount code name that’s provided is hyper-relevant. I like how they end the email with the plant care tips.
Example 2 from Recess is focused on their new product done in collaboration with maxbone. This is slightly different than the example above, but still an awesome use case to review. In this example, instead of linking to maxbone’s website, they link to a collection page on their own website.
This technically is more of a partnership but would fall under the larger bucket of cross promotion. I like that they include the maxbone text right under their logo on the top left.
In typical Recess fashion, this email is awesome. The design and copy are on-point. Lots you can learn on the email front from Recess.
Example 3 is an email that Hydrant sent to promote their cross promotion partner, Snow. Snow sent a similar email to their audience promoting Hydrant.
This email is extremely simple, yet effective. Notice the discount code is Hydrant. This will help Snow see how many sales Hydrant drove. And in Snow’s email promoting Hydrant, the code was Snow, for the same reason.
Overall these examples should help you wrap your head around how you too can execute a cross promotion campaign.
I want to approach this campaign idea a bit differently than I normally do. I normally provide 1 example from 3 different brands. Instead of doing that, the 3 examples above are from a single brand.
The reason being is that I want to show you how we approached different customer problems/pain points through various emails that each tackled a solution to common problems that our brands customers have.
The brand I’m displaying is one in the men’s grooming space. More specifically, they’re focused on products for guys with beards as well as for guys who want to grow a beard.
For the first example, you may just have to zoom in a bit. I apologize but the emails was long.
Example 1 One of the common recurring issues their customers mentioned is that their beard was scratchy/itch.
So we sent out a dedicated campaign as you can see in the example link above calling this out. So we present the problem (itchy beard) and then we present the solution (their beard soft product).
Throughout the email we address how this specific product will help those with that specific issue. And at the very bottom of the email, we have call outs for other special offers in-case someone that is reading this doesn’t have the problem of an itchy beard.
Example 2 is focused on the problem of feeling unkept and the solution being their Arsenal grooming kit. Notice here the length of this email is much shorter.
We’re always testing email length to see what moves the needle most. For every client, there’s a slightly different outcome but for this particular client, this shorter form email performed better (example 2 > example 1).
Example 3 is focused on the problem of feeling grimy and the solution of their True Cleanse product.
As mentioned in the example 2 section above, the shorter form, more direct email, performed better for this particular client (not always the case for other clients), so hence why this third example follows a similar format. This is short and sweet with the solution being: “perfect product to keep your face clean”.
We have gotten in the routine of sending one problem meets solution campaign every month for this client. We’ve sent 7 of these emails in total now.
With the exception of the callout banners at the bottom of email one, we never really send discounts in these problem meets solution emails.
So these campaigns are definitely sales and conversion focused but we don’t include any offers. You absolutely can, but because we’ve found for this particular client that we’re driving some solid revenue from without the discount, we didn’t feel the need to include one.
Make sure to test this. We have some clients where the conversion increases drastically through the use of a discount code and others where there is very little marginal increase.
– The Expert Email Example 1
– The Expert Email Example 2
– The Expert Email Example 3
I am using the word “expert” here to encompass a few different buckets of people.
1. Celebrity – this is straightforward. In the first example from Persona they leverage Kelly Ripa. This is a massive social proof play. It adds a ton of legitimacy to the brand as Kelly Ripa has built an incredible reputation.
2. Expert – for this I mean anyone that has a background or expertise in something relevant to what is being pitched. In the second example from Sio Beauty they are leveraging an Esthetician.
This is a great person to leverage for the legitimacy of a product/brand in the beauty industry. They also do a great job in this example of providing informational/helpful content.
3. Influencer – this is much like the celebrity bucket but more attainable for most brands. A majority of brands don’t have the budget or relationships to leverage a celebrity, so this is a great way to approach it.
The third example from Parachute does a great job with providing entertaining content + curation + recommendations from the influencer, Alivia Fields.
The name of the game here is a few things:
1. Social Proof
2. Curation
3. Related to curation is recommendations
4. Entertaining/Informational Content
5. Legitimacy
You have to be willing to test these multiple types of emails; it’s the only way to thoroughly know to replicate the campaign or to move on to something more scalable. I cannot stress enough how important eCommerce email campaigns are for the growth and success of your store.
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