NEARLY TRIPLED REVENUE FROM EMAIL FOR LEADING ONLINE RETAILER OF CHRISTMAS LIGHTS
We've helped Christmas Designers solidify their position as one of the largest online retailers of consumer and professional Christmas lights and décor.
Our relationship has grown significantly over 8 years, starting initially with just paid search campaigns, but evolving over time to include social media on Facebook and Instagram, and later e-mail marketing.
With email, SmartClick identified a significant opportunity for the brand, realizing that revenue from email represented less than 10% of total revenue, whereas with most consumer retail brands, 25-30% of revenue is not unheard of.
Beginning in 2018, SmartClick began to manage emails for Christmas Designers, setting them up on a more sophisticated email platform with increased capabilities.We took the lead in designing their new email program, including triggered flows, templates and newsletter strategies.. This generated a little over $500,000 in revenue for the brand, a nice increase from the previous year.
We then further improved the email performance by refining our strategy and layouts based on data results and insights we gained from successes with other clients' email programs. Importantly, we also knew that it was critical to continue growing our email list. We combined our knowledge and skills as a full-service agency to begin a cross-platform strategy to expand our email audience. This allowed us to promote email revenue growth through both volume and optimization of the email creative itself, a two-pronged approach that was highly successful.
Over time, SmartClick realized that the Christmas light market is oversaturated with traditional Christmas imagery. This can make it difficult for a particular brand to stand out in the consumer’s mind from the rest of the competition. We implemented a careful balance of out-of-the-box campaigns that also didn’t go too far to alienate our consumers. For instance, instead of the normal “Christmas in July” message that every company uses during the summer, we executed a campaign involving a month-long takeover of the website by restless Christmas elves who were ready for some excitement during the off-season (a very similar sentiment shared by our biggest Christmas-loving consumers)!
One overlooked aspect of email marketing is the signup form. Our signup form for Christmas Designers has been growing our email list. Thanks to our set up we were able to segment our audiences in multiple different groups, which was one of the keys to continuous email revenue growth.
Another aspect leading to email revenue growth was the work the agency did in increasing email frequency. By testing and gradually increasing email frequency, SmartClick was able to quadruple our frequency without negatively impacting unsubscribes.
SmartClick also led in the development of marketing via text messages, using SMS technologies. The holiday lights consumer is highly involved and enjoys creative content and will readily engage via SMS.
Fast forwarding to 5 years later, in 2023 SmartClick was able to generate over $1.3 million in revenue for the brand. This was nearly triple the revenue from email that Christmas Designers was able to generate before outsourcing the email process to SmartClick.
SmartClick is a great choice as an email partner.
We've helped Christmas Designers solidify their position as one of the largest online retailers of consumer and professional Christmas lights and décor.
Our relationship has grown significantly over 8 years, starting initially with just paid search campaigns, but evolving over time to include social media on Facebook and Instagram, and later e-mail marketing.
With email, SmartClick identified a significant opportunity for the brand, realizing that revenue from email represented less than 10% of total revenue, whereas with most consumer retail brands, 25-30% of revenue is not unheard of.
Beginning in 2018, SmartClick began to manage emails for Christmas Designers, setting them up on a more sophisticated email platform with increased capabilities.We took the lead in designing their new email program, including triggered flows, templates and newsletter strategies.. This generated a little over $500,000 in revenue for the brand, a nice increase from the previous year.
We then further improved the email performance by refining our strategy and layouts based on data results and insights we gained from successes with other clients' email programs. Importantly, we also knew that it was critical to continue growing our email list. We combined our knowledge and skills as a full-service agency to begin a cross-platform strategy to expand our email audience. This allowed us to promote email revenue growth through both volume and optimization of the email creative itself, a two-pronged approach that was highly successful.
Over time, SmartClick realized that the Christmas light market is oversaturated with traditional Christmas imagery. This can make it difficult for a particular brand to stand out in the consumer’s mind from the rest of the competition. We implemented a careful balance of out-of-the-box campaigns that also didn’t go too far to alienate our consumers. For instance, instead of the normal “Christmas in July” message that every company uses during the summer, we executed a campaign involving a month-long takeover of the website by restless Christmas elves who were ready for some excitement during the off-season (a very similar sentiment shared by our biggest Christmas-loving consumers)!
One overlooked aspect of email marketing is the signup form. Our signup form for Christmas Designers has been growing our email list. Thanks to our set up we were able to segment our audiences in multiple different groups, which was one of the keys to continuous email revenue growth.
Another aspect leading to email revenue growth was the work the agency did in increasing email frequency. By testing and gradually increasing email frequency, SmartClick was able to quadruple our frequency without negatively impacting unsubscribes.
SmartClick also led in the development of marketing via text messages, using SMS technologies. The holiday lights consumer is highly involved and enjoys creative content and will readily engage via SMS.
Fast forwarding to 5 years later, in 2023 SmartClick was able to generate over $1.3 million in revenue for the brand. This was nearly triple the revenue from email that Christmas Designers was able to generate before outsourcing the email process to SmartClick.
SmartClick is a great choice as an email partner.
Women’s clothing manufacturer, Fresh Produce Clothing had good brand awareness and a great mid-priced product. With no online spending, just organic SEO and some email, they were stuck at $2.2 million in online sales, but not having devoted any budget to paid online media, the brand was not growing.
SmartClick identified multiple opportunities for the brand:
- Earmark significant budget to build a paid online presence.
- Email frequency was very low and creative was super repetitive with a high unsubscribe rate.
- The brand was only showing for a few high traffic keywords on organic SEO.
- There was no paid search.
- There was no awareness-building media.
- The brand was not doing any retargeting.
Fresh Produce outsourced online advertising to SmartClick with an ad spend of 7% of sales in year 1 and 2. They outsourced email marketing to SmartClick and we launched multiple creative campaigns at a much higher frequency. SmartClick built out sophisticated campaigns on paid search targeting over 200,000 keywords, and expanded to Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Then SmartClick launched multiple retargeting campaigns on Google Display and Criteo.
In year one, with these efforts, SmartClick nearly doubled sales from $2.2 million to $4.1 million. It was astounding to see simple things like just advertising on the brand's own branded keywords or simply launching retargeting ads driving huge chunks of new revenue.
In year 2, SmartClick launched campaigns on Facebook to build engagement with and awareness for the brand. We built hundreds of keyword optimized landing pages for the brand. We launched a huge influencer outreach campaign to get influencers to post and link back to Freshproduceclothes.com.
In year two, these campaigns all combined doubled sales again from $4.1 million to $8 million!
Mary Ellen Vernon, Founder/CEO of Fresh Produce Clothing said, "SmartClick took us to a whole new level of revenue.” Working with Fresh produce and having so much impact for Fresh Produce was an intensely gratifying experience for SmartClick.
