9 Examples of Email Marketing Success to Inspire You

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”- Shakespeare

Does email marketing really work?

It does. The nine businesses below generated a pretty penny via upgrading their email marketing strategy. For instance, Videofruit made over $220,000 in 10 days. Breaking Into Wall Street (BIWS) made over 105,000 with a unique Black Friday sale. There are other success stories too.

Let’s take a look at all of them.

QIS Packaging Pumps Up Email ROI to 830%

QIS Wrapped Email Marketing Around It’s Finger.

QIS Packaging sells a variety of wrapping items, including paper bags. Email marketing has never been a central part of their marketing efforts. As a matter of fact, they never emailed their database. Surely, many of their marketing officers wondered if email marketing was even worth the investment.

QIS hired an outside company to implement a simple email marketing strategy. Here’s all the third-party company did.

• They cleaned their email list using a list cleaner.
• They created a sale.
• They sent a campaign composed of three emails.

This simple strategy yielded big results. Richard, a central figure at QIS, says the 800% ROI on this email campaign was “head and shoulders” above their other paid marketing channels. He also remarked on the “absolute worth” of email marketing. It didn’t take long for the decision makers at QIS to become believers in email marketing.

Chemist Direct Boosts Revenue by 30% With Recommendation Software.

Customers Love Personal Recommendations.

Chemist Direct is an online realtor based in the United Kingdom. They were founded in 2008. They sell beauty products and medical wares at affordable prices.

As an online business, they rely on their email list to make sales. The company wanted to send better recommendations to their customers. So, they introduced Peerius Smart Software. This software uses algorithms to discover the products that would appeal most to individual consumers. These keen recommendations paid off for Chemist Direct. They were able to boost revenue by 30%.

Hammock Boosts Open Rates by 48%

Hammock is a creative agency. They serve B2B clients. Hammock was unhappy with their (relatively) low open rates for their newsletter. So, they started to analyze their audience. They realized a few things about their industry that shocked them.

• People found their emails content-heavy.
• B2B is a saturated market. There’s email fatigue.
• To stand out in the B2B market, you need to be different.

Hammock decided to create something called a “un-newsletter”. Have you heard of T-Mobile? They realized people were tired of the wireless carrier experience. For instance, American carriers locked you into long contracts and weren’t competitive on price. T-Mobile markets themselves as a company that’s different, a company that’s consumer-friendly, the Un-carrier.

Hammock applied the same idea to their newsletter. They realized people didn’t want Shakspeare. They wanted quick (and ridiculously practical) tips that would enhance their business. So, Hammock branded their newsletter the “Idea Email”, and sent a potent tip every two weeks. The 48% boost in their open rate showed their customers appreciated this change.

Dell Accelerates Revenue 109% With a GIF.

Dell Helped Prospects Visualize Their Laptop.

The laptop market has been sort of stagnant in the last few years. Dell is one of the companies looking to reverse that trend. At one time, one of their flagship products was the XPS 12 convertible Ultrabook. This laptop transforms into a tablet.

At the time, much of Dell’s audience wasn’t familiar with the utility of these convertible laptops. Dell’s challenge was to explain that benefit. They knew that engaging email copy wasn’t enough. Additionally, they wanted to provide more value than pictures. They wanted to show their audience how this laptop could transform into a tablet.

Dell decided to include a GIF of the laptop transforming into a tablet. The gamble paid off. The change gave them a 109% increase in revenue on the product.

Mailgen Improves Open Rates 9% With Segmentation

There’s a lot of talk about email segmentation. Mailgen is one company that took that talk seriously. Their email open rate was a pedestrian 20%. That’s right around the industry average, and they felt higher peaks were achievable.

After analyzing their data, they realized a large group of their subscribers didn’t open their emails. So, they drilled down and looked to provide these customers more value. They decided to send more targeted headlines to these people. The effort paid dividends, as they were able to improve their overall open rate over 9%.

Envelopes.com Increases Checkout Conversions by 65%.

Do you know Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who discovered displacement? Scholars consider him to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He was an incredibly exact person.

Envelopes.com is amazingly exact with their email marketing. They obtained a 65% increase in checkout conversions, a real surge to their revenue. How did Envelopes.com obtain such fantastic results? Most companies only have one cart abandonment email or trigger. Envelopes.com used three campaigns and targeted three groups of people.

• People who got to checkout, but abandoned their cart.
• People who added to their cart, but never got to checkout.
• People who browsed, but never added an item to their cart.

This specialized campaign allowed them to drill down like a laser. They sent varying numbers of emails depending on how far the customer was in the checkout process. They also included the following details in those emails.

• A picture of the product.
• A shop now button.
• A list of options, such as color, size, etc.
• A thank you message.

This level of precision for each individual customer allowed them to increase checkout conversions by 65%.

EasyDNS Supplements Revenue by 10%

EasyDNS is a premium domain name and hosting provider. They are at the upper-end of the market. If Hostgator and GoDaddy are Honda and Toyota, then EasyDNS is Lexus. They pride themselves on providing premium service to customers. In terms of hosting, that means they provide increased security and reliability.

Yet, there was a time when EasyDNS’s email marketing campaign wasn’t up to snuff. They had a bare bones campaign structure, and there was much room for improvement. After some probing, they decided the following emails needed to be revamped or added.

• Hello Emails
• Growing Leads Emails
• Recovering Abandoned Cart Emails
• First Time Customer Emails
• Frequent Customer Emails
• Inactive Customer Emails
• And More

After implementing refined emails for these categories, engagement went up. Revenue followed. EasyDNS increased their revenue 10% by adding these basics. For a fairly established company like EasyDNS, that’s a nice chunk of change.

Videofruit Makes Over 220,000 in 10 Days With Email Marketing

Bryan Put All His Entrepreneurial Eggs in This Launch.

Bryan Harris from VideoFruit calls himself the email marketing guy. He decided to create a super course. This course took over three months to make. It also took him time to get his email subscribers (he had over 13,000 at the time of launch) to sell too.

Bryan wasn’t just selling an ebook. He was selling a value-rich course. He sold to 262 people, and each of them averaged over $800 in payments. To get people to pay over $800, he knew customer satisfaction was vital. He couldn’t risk giving his customers something they didn’t want. That’s why he got feedback on his project from a segmented list of subscribers.

His questions were effective. Here’s the gist of what he asked his email list after they sampled the course.

• Do you want to buy the course?
• How many subscribers do you have?
• What feature of the course makes you want to buy?
• What questions came to your mind while you engaged with the course?
• What module should I add to the course?
• Do you have any more feedback to improve the course?

Bryan was able to upgrade his course through the torrent of feedback he received. Instead of making a product he thought people would like, he used their actual feedback to upgrade. He also didn’t implement a one-size fits all approach, particularly in terms of payment. For instance, he knew businesses with less subscribers would have less income to spend. That’s why he offered a payment plan for those customers.

Bryan harnessed the power of data and customer feedback to get over $220,000 in sales in 10 days.

BIWS Gets $105,253.00 By Harnessing the Power of Scarcity

Breaking Into Wall Street (BIWS) is a popular site for young bankers. Many of their customers are bankers who want to advance their financial knowledge, young people who want to get a high-paying job. After a while, BIWS wanted more revenue out of their email list. They built a nice size list. They were nourishing this list with great content. Yet, they weren’t getting the ROI they would have liked. Moreover, they didn’t have a product to sell this list.

It was quite the quandary, particularly the part about not having a new product. So, they decided to bundle all their other products into one. They offered that product with a $1 trial, and payments after 30 days expired. Giving the bankers a chance to pay over two years was quite appealing, as it lowered their monthly payments.

After that, they marketed through the power of scarcity. They did a Black Friday promotion and informed subscribers the pricing was an experiment. It panned out for them. They initially expected sales of $30,000, but they blew those numbers away, eventually reaching over $100,000.

You Can Have Email Marketing Success Too

Email marketing has a great ROI. Whether you sell medicine, financial information, or marketing advice, email marketing can make you thousands. The people above came from a variety of industries, but they all used email marketing to make more money.

Hopefully, these examples will inspire your campaign. Do you have an email marketing success story? We’d love to hear from you. Please share with us in the comments.