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Personalized Emails Work – Marketing Sherpa Case Study Review

Personalized EmailsA 29% raise next month sounds pretty good doesn’t it.  Well that’s my takeaway after studying the benefits of personalized emails in a very good case study done by the folks over at Marketing Sherpa.  Marketing Sherpa is a research firm specializing in tracking what works and what doesn’t in all aspects of marketing.

The name of this case study is Email Personalization: 750% higher CTR and more revenue for e-commerce site written by Adam Sutton

It is a very quick read so I encourage you to check it out for yourself.  This post will break down the three key takeaways from it, as well as put that 29% raise metaphor in perspective for you.

Takeaway 1:  Segmentation and Personalization Drives Revenue

The headline of this case study jumps out at your right away, as an increase of 750% of anything is dramatic.  What’s more impressive is the impact that segmenting and personalizing emails had on real revenue.

The company featured in the Case Study is named Doggyloot.  Doggyloot sent two personalized emails with one contributing 16% and the other contributing 13% to its revenue.  These are huge numbers when it comes to revenue.

To provide you some perspective, a recent report provided data that customer segmentation increases revenue by 24%. So as you see in this real world example Doggyloot was able to beat the industry average hitting a 29% impact on revenue.

Takeaway 2: Add Value to get Personalized Email Data

In this case study, Doggyloot did not initially have the data to segment a large percentage of it’s email subscribers.  This is a situation most businesses face.

When you first start you email marketing program, your #1 goal is to just get started, and not worry about all the bells and whistles.  You may even use the old school methods described in this article on how to build an email list from scratch.

Once you are ready to move from old school to new school, you should take a page out of the Doggyloot playbook and find a way to add value to your customers in order to collect personalization info from them.

In this case study, you see that Doggyloot created a fun and playful profile page for their customer dogs.  Then on top of that, created a $5.oo credit incentive and notified everyone by email to create a valuable call to action.

This was a masterful move that paid off big-time by boosting daily revenue 29%.

Takeaway 3: Automated Follow-up Emails Work

One of the best things about email is that it can automate many of the things you want to do, but just don’t have time to do.  However, many businesses fail to take advantage of this and leave big dollars on the table.

In this case study, you see that Doggyloot was able to add an additional day of revenue each month to their bottom line by using what’s called a “cart-abandonment” email.

Cart abandonment emails are a way to automatically reach out to customers who add items to their online shopping cart but then never complete the purchase.

Doggyloot also uses one other automated email  to wish a customer’s dog happy birthday.  Using this method they saw a 750% increase in click through rate.

Personalized Emails in Perspective

All in all, this case study is such a fantastic real world example of how doing the little things can have a big impact on increasing your revenue.  How would you like to get a 29% raise next month for just spending a few hours a week working on an email marketing program?

It’s pretty obvious that anyone in their right mind would take that deal. This case study showed that Doggyloot could do it, so you can too.