CASE STUDY: How This Australian Automotive Accessory Retailer Grew 187% Revenue Growth from New Email Subscribers

Email marketing is like the Meryl Streep of the digital marketing world. It’s been around for decades (sorry Meryl!) and yet it’s still cleaning up the awards for the industry. In fact, like Meryl, it’s getting better results than ever before.

47% of retail marketers say email is the digital marketing channel that delivers the greatest ROI, ahead of social at 19% (suck sh*t Zuckerberg! Who BTW uses email to drive traffic too)

Better yet, SalesForce reports that the average ROI on an email campaign is 3800%, or in simple man’s terms, $38 dollar in return for every $1 spent! Yeah baby, I’d award that an Oscar!

So, it’s that time of the year again, we are having conversations with our virtual assistant ChatGPT…and yet, despite all of these new-tech and consumer marketing achievements, email still stands strong. In fact, in a recent by Forbes, they talked about Millennials being obsessed with email! Go figure, Millennials FTW (for the win)!

Email today is unrecognisable when compared to the first ever plain text emails sent back in 1970’s. I know! I know! You want me to talk about the latest in design, personalisation, segmentation and AI. Sorry to disappoint, but I am saving all of those juicy deets for our Email Accelerator Program (keep reading)!

Today I want to go back to basics. Because basics, when done right, with a growth-goal in mind and coupled vigorous testing, will see you achieve amazing results. To the tune of 187% increase in revenue generated from new email subscribers! Oh and done in 90 days…

The Problem

The company is a well-established retailer with over two decades of experience selling in the Automotive industry. They are rated #1 in Australia and if you took a peek at their reviews I doubt you could find one lower than 5 stars. Total Guns…

Anyway, after completing one of our email marketing programs and applying the strategies shared they saw 200% growth from email revenue. Their return was way better!

However, over time this spike in results steadied and they were ready for their next growth project. They were now beyond the “try this” from our group workshops, they needed a custom growth strategy and that’s where we stepped in armed with our secret ANCR model.

We established the need to not only grow the clients email list significantly, but also boost conversions from email. In order for the client to sustain their email marketing efforts they needed to see a strong return fast, so that was our priority. It was time to make it rain!

The Solution

One thing that is proven time and time again is when a consumer is offered an incentive worth acting on, they’ll act on it! But if your incentive is long-winded and written in gibberish, and not humanised, seriously ain’t nobody got time for that!

Here at MI Academy, we like quick wins with minimal time-wasting. We tested two call-to-actions testing long and conversational vs. short and concise. Here are the results.

Example of what they had (Long)
How’s this for a great deal? Join our newsletter and get $10 off your first purchase

Short (winner winner chicken dinner)
Subscribe to get $10 off your first order

By offering a clearer incentive we got an avalanche of new subscribers ready to act on the incentive. But there was still one more step to ensure these subscribers didn’t sit in the mailing list gathering dust.

By making improvements to their linear welcome series we were able to nurture the new subscribers. We moved them through the customer journey and got them to the point of conversion faster than ever before.

To make these improvements we did three things:

1.  We changed the CTA button
2.  We introduced product categories instead of just individual products
3. We used external customer feedback to build trust.

Email marketers beware. When you’re testing for improvements it’s a common mistake is to look at improvements based on opens and clicks alone.

You need to set your testing plans and measure your improvements against your goals. Metrics can be misleading if you haven’t established a goal. In this case we were testing revenue growth so we made a point to not be sidetracked by opens and clicks.
In these kinds of scenarios it is easy to be driven by the option that gets the most clicks/opens, but you need to remember that quantity does not equal quality and at the end of the day one person acting on your offer is better than 1000 opening the email and forgetting about it.

Results

By offering a clearer and more humanised incentive the client not only saw
the sexiest metric of them all, a 187% increase in revenue from new email subscribers! They also saw a 28% uplift in their open rate, an 8% uplift in CTR.

If this case study has you sweating profusely while mentally adding up revenue lost on missed email marketing opportunities, then there are two things you could do today.

One, add an incentive if you don’t already have one or improve it if you do. You can thank us later!

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Do you want to drastically increase the size of your email list?

Read this post we were featured in by The Hoth asking 25 conversion rate optimisation experts to give their best tips for getting more subscribers.

Because email marketing has an average ROI of over 3000%+, just implementing a few of these tips will help you increase your sales!

Ready to grow your revenue on email? Apply for our 12 week Email Marketing Accelerator where we will grow your email revenue by 30% or your money back.