$0 to $1,000,000 In One Month and The Ugly Truth About Email Marketing.
Several years ago I got my second ever client at the big agency I worked for. A well known apparel brand with a lot of celebrity influencers, that was just dipping their toes into the ecommerce world.
Until that point they sold all their apparel through department stores. So they were rightfully skeptical about how successful their online DTC store could be.Their email marketing was, to put it politely, atrocious. They were on Mailchimp. They had one abandon cart email and they sent email campaigns maybe once a month.
We got started in mid September and we hit the ground running.
The overall strategy was pretty simple: Build out their core email automations and warm up their list to ensure good deliverability for a steady campaign cadence.
First things first, we transitioned their email database off Mailchimp and onto Klaviyo, which integrates seamlessly with Shopify and is a lot easier to use. (No offense to any apes out there).
Next we started work on the copy and design for their essential email automations. Welcome series, Abandon Checkout, Browse Abandon and post purchase.
LIke most apparel brands, they wanted eye-catching email designs, which always slows down the process, but it’s part of the territory when you work at a “creative agency”. While those emails were going through the tedious design process we sent out a few plain text emails to start their list warming process.
Whenever you move to a new email platform you cannot just blast everyone on your email list at once. You have to start with your most engaged segments and gradually expand to the rest of your list.
To make this deliverability warm up go smoothly we used plain text emails to make sure we don’t trigger any Spam filters with too many images. Again our goal here is to hit that inbox and get people opening, clicking and buying.
Finally, after almost a month and half the client approved the all automation email designs. We were ready to go live!
Bombs Away.
I turned on the automations in early November and we followed up with a few Black Friday campaigns.
I wasn’t prepared for what would happen next…
We didn’t hit a run. We crushed a fucking grand slam over the Green Monster and into outer space.
When the dust settled we brought in just over $1,000,000 in their first month from email.
And 365 days later email marketing was responsible for just north of $4,000,000 in sales.
So what’s my secret sauce?
Was it my amazing strategy and marketing prowess?
Did I crack the code to the marketing Matrix?
I could sit here and humble brag that this was all my doing. Then claim I’m responsible for $10,000,000+ in email marketing sales.
Like everyone else in this space.
But this success was due to a much larger force that marketers rarely give credit.
This was my first encounter with the Mass Desire marketing law that copywriting legend Eugene Schwartz talks about in his book Breakthrough Advertising.
“Let’s get to the heart of the matter. The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy.
Copy cannot create desire for a product.
It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it.”
- Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising
I didn’t fully understand this quote until after my first few months working at an agency.
80% of the success we achieved was because of all the hard work this company had spent building a business that tapped into an existing Mass Desire. They started with one fantastic product and gradually expanded to an entire apparel lineup with hundreds of items.
I was merely helping them to channel some more water into their fields.
On the flip side I’ve worked with clients whose business was struggling and they came to us to save them. Like we were going to be a winning lottery ticket.
These clients always ended in disaster and left on bad terms after spending tens of thousands of dollars.
It sucks.
This is why I’m so careful about choosing who I work with as a client. I want to make sure that your money is a real investment and not a gamble.
Email marketing is a wildly effect tool for making more money. But you need to already be tapped into that river of Mass Desire.