The Email Octagon #1 - La Boite Spices

Ladies and gentlemen and email marketing fans around the world. It’s tiimmeeeee!

Today we’re kicking off the inaugural Email Octagon blog segment, where we take a brand with killer email marketing, throw ‘em in the octagon, lock the cage, and break down their moves.

I’ll break down their emails and some overall strategies they’re using to give you ideas and “inspo”  to try out in your emails.

It’s time for the Email Octagon

First up in the octagon is a brand that I’ve been a customer of for several years now: La Boite Spices.

A quick backstory. The owner of the company is a renowned Israeli chef and spice blender, Lior Lev Sercarz. He has one of the most effective lead magnets around. A beautiful cook book about spices: Mastering Spice.

Lior’s whole philosophy is that anyone can elevate your cooking simply by adding new spice blends to a dish. The recipes themselves are quite simple for new cooks. There aren’t many flashy techniques, but the book highlights some exotic spices that you won’t find at your local grocery store. Which inevitably leads you to his La Boite website.

Again, nothing establishes yourself as an expert in your field quite like publishing a book. Which is quite rare in the e-commerce spice, but is a fantastic way to set yourself apart.

So let’s take a peak at what La Boite is doing with their tasty emails.

Simple and Effective Email Designs

One thing I love about La Boite’s email marketing is their email layout. They’re simple, elegant,  and to the point. Their emails don’t look like a fancy ad you would see in a magazine. 

Their overall email campaign strategy is simple: inspire their subscribers to try out new recipes and in turn buy new spices that elevate their cooking.

Take a look at one of their campaigns.

Ahh look that layout.

La Boite does a fantastic job of utilizing Klaviyo product blocks at the bottom of their emails. I’m not sure if these products are selected using AI recommendations, or if they manually choose certain spices. But either way it’s a quick and easy way to feature your products.

If I had to guess, it probably takes about 20 minutes maximum, to write and schedule their emails. When you’re sending almost 20 emails a month like La Boite, optimizing your email workflow is critical. And in my experience it’s much easier to maintain a high-volume email cadence like this with text based emails instead of fancy designed emails.

List Cleaning Automations

After I bought my first spice blend from La Boite, I of course joined their email list. Like most people who have an inbox, I get a whole lotta emails every day. I don’t read every single email that I see. I usually scan the FROM names then glance at the subject line and move on to the next.

About a month after I bought my spices this email from La Boite caught my eye.

Subject Line: We haven't seen you lately

Ermagerd 

They hit me with a “Sunset” list cleaning automation.

A Sunset Flow is an automation that triggers if someone hasn’t opened and clicked one of your emails in a certain amount of time.

In La Boite’s case this email was sent about 30 days after I joined their list.

List hygiene flows like this aren’t sexy since they won’t generate a lot of revenue but they are critical to keeping your deliverability healthy. We don’t want to send emails to people who are unengaged. In fact you want to get them off your list ASAP. If we send too many unengaged subscribers, inbox providers like Gmail will roundhouse kick your emails straight to SPAM which will TKO your email marketing revenue.

Most e-commerce brands aren’t bold enough to implement a sunset flow like La Boite. 

They are so terrified of unsubscribes, that the mere suggestion of removing people from their list makes them tap out.

“bUt wE CaN WiN ThEm bAcK LaTeR.”

If someone has gone 3 months or more without clicking an email or buying. They are long gone. Stop being needy and politely escort them off your list. They can always come back later.

This Sunset flow is critical for a business like La Boite that sends about 20 emails a month. 

Which leads us to another valuable email strategy.

Frequency is your friend

One of the most common questions I get from clients is “what is the most important email marketing metric?” It makes sense because if you know what that metric is you can optimize your strategy for maximum results.

As marketers we’re always looking for that little lever to pull that magically makes cash appear. But here’s a little secret, it’s not open rate, it’s not click rate, and it’s certainly not revenue.

So what’s the metric? Number of email campaigns sent per month. 

….uh Ben, are you high? Nope. But hear me out.

 The above metrics are all “output” metrics, which are metrics that we cannot control. 

We can’t make people open our emails no matter how amazing our subject line is. We can’t make people click and buy no matter how great our copy and offer is.

Those are all out of our control.

What we can control are “input” metrics like how many emails we send and the content of those emails.

La Boite sends 20+ emails per month. It shows me that they understand their audience and what kind of content they want. And it also sets expectations for their list subscribers from the beginning. If people aren't interested in their spices and don’t like getting almost daily emails then they will leave.

While most e-commerce brands are playing not to lose, La Boite is out here hunting for the knock out.

I love it.

To put send how important send frequency is to revenue: I’ve worked with clients with 200k+ email lists who literally send 4 email campaigns per year and could  easily add $1 million per year in revenue if they just sent one email per week.

Can you imagine that? One simple, text based email per week?

Alright guys, the final bell has rung for our inaugural Email Octagon and La Boite has won via unanimous decision. Stay tuned for our next Email Octagon Breakdown.