#40 - Thinking Outside The Box

Following last week’s newsletter about the state of the economy, I took some time to study some of our ‘more successful’ campaigns that went beyond the standard ‘sale’ email to share with you guys.

Hopefully this gives a little bit of inspiration!

Driving Customers to a Physical Location

With all the focus of being online, we sometimes forget the beauty of having in-person events. The energy, excitement & relationships built with customers cannot be understated.

Whether you’re announcing a product launch, thanking customers for your Xth year in business, or even doing a good old fashion sale, there’s magic in driving a crowd (apart from the sales generated).

You get tons of user generated content, hear why your customers are excited/buy (perfect for ad angles), as well as product ideas for your next SKU (so you don’t waste money developing something your customers aren’t interested in).

We’ve done this multiple times for an electronics brand that sells a variety of products from monitors, to soundbars and fridges. They host booths at convention centers, and the crowd we drive there helps pull in a greater crowd, which repeats till the day is over.

Another brand that does this fabulously is Jones Road Beauty (see here). It may seem counterintuitive, but seeing others in the queue can help reinforce purchase decisions (ie. other people are buying like me, I’m making a good decision).

So if you have the opportunity to run a pop up or a physical store you can leverage on, definitely try this out.

What’s In Trend?

This is particularly effective if you’re in the furniture/fashion category (or any ‘pinterest-able’ brands).

Essentially, you wanna hop onto the fad of what’s hot right now, talk about what you like/dislike about it, before sharing some examples of products you have that fill these needs.

Content like these are great for engagement, and outperforms our typical sales based emails in clicks by 15 - 25%. Sales are secondary here - the goal is to really get your customers excited whenever they receive an email from you, increasing the likelihood of them opening and clicking, when you have that sale.

Oh Crap I Goofed Up/Message from Founder

WARNING: test these sparingly

It happens sometimes.

Team gets too busy and forgets the link, or the PDP linked is the wrong one.

Perfect opportunity for you to send a plain text email explaining the situation, apologizing and rectifying it.

With a million and one HTML emails in their inbox, a plain text email looks incredibly authentic and almost like the person wrote it themselves.

Having trouble remembering off the top of my head, but I’ve noticed a brand doing this once a quarter with their marketing director (minus the screw up bit).

He shares his thoughts/opinions, and then drops a discount code that completely crushes sales.

The warning is because some customers hate this and will call you out for being inauthentic, so definitely make sure to tread on this one with care.

And that’s a wrap!

Hopefully those ideas gave you a little bit of inspiration.

If you’ve ran campaigns like this (or similar), it would be amazing if you could respond to this with the results you’ve gotten/what you were aiming for.

Always interested in new strategies we can deploy on our end.

But as always, have a great weekend ahead!