A strong email marketing strategy can be crucial to reaching and connecting with a target audience in a way that engages them with the business and increases sales. But effective email marketing is about more than simply reaching the right people. It’s about listening and creating a conversation with them.
It is also why so many companies use the email marketing platform Mailchimp and its suite of tools to better understand their customers’ preferences and create email content that speaks to them in a more personalised way. Northampton-based Honeywell Bakes uses Mailchimp to tailor its content to different customer audiences within its subscriber base, while maintaining its core brand message. As a result, the company has taken its communications strategy to a new level.
The company produces personalised biscuits and baking kits for corporate and individual gift markets, and since its launch a decade ago, sustainability has been at the heart of everything it does. It recently achieved B Corp status – which means it meets high standards around accountability and transparency – a clear validation of its sustainability-led business model and strategy, which it is keen to convey to its existing customers and potential customers.
Marketing coordinator Gemma Goode says: “Sustainability is so important to consumers. Nowadays, people want to know what sort of company you are before they spend money with you. When someone visits our website and signs up to our emails, they receive an instant ‘thank you’ email, which is also an opportunity for us to tell them about the company they’ve just purchased from, including our B Corp status.
“Our growth has relied largely on attracting and engaging with eco-conscious consumers, people who know that we use locally sourced ingredients, and organic flour, and that they won’t find unnecessary plastic in their purchases. Our goal is for anyone who visits our website and makes a purchase to understand us well enough not to have concerns about our environmental impact.”
Monthly data reports from Mailchimp provide valuable insight into how people interact with the email; how many people opened it, how many scrolled through to the sustainability section and how many clicked on the engaging images and infographics that bring the company’s sustainability journey to life.
“This information helps us to shape the content and structure of future emails, and make them more personal,” says Goode. “Knowing what our customers are interested in, and want to know more about, influences the way that we talk to them. From a sales and marketing perspective we want people to fall in love with our brand and with the idea that we are a business that wants to do more than just sell bespoke biscuits.”
Last year, Honeywell took its email personalisation strategy a stage further by launching an opt-out scheme to give people more autonomy over their choices about the email content they receive. “It’s easy to assume that your customers love all of your content, but when you have over 40,000 subscribers, individuals all at different life stages, that content may not always be relevant or appropriate,” says Goode.
The company trialled the scheme by allowing customers to opt out of emails relating to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day; events that are a cause for celebration for many people, but for others, can invoke very different emotions.
Goode says: “Feedback about the scheme was very positive; people loved having that choice. It also made us realise how important it was to give people that choice. For example, you might assume that people opted out because they’d lost a parent and didn’t want to receive emails about Mother’s Day, but some women opted out because they had infertility issues.”
Honeywell approached Christmas in a similarly thoughtful way, recognising that not everybody celebrates or welcomes the festive period. Instead, those who declined the Christmas-themed emails received winter-themed email content focusing on seasonal activities and baking recipes, etc. “We made sure that opting out didn’t mean being left out, and that all our subscribers continue to feel part of the Honeywell community,” says Goode. “Our email marketing has become a conversation, and people really appreciate that.”
The company has now created a preferences centre where subscribers can update their Mailchimp profile information themselves. Every few months they are emailed a reminder that they have control over their preferences and can amend them by clicking on a link in the email. This in turn created opportunities to engage more closely with their subscriber audience in other ways, for example, asking them for the date of their birthday so that Honeywell can celebrate it with them.
Mailchimp’s platform and tools have played a big part in Honeywell’s business growth strategy. Goode says: “We are about to send out an autumn email, which we will tweak to create a few slightly different versions that reflect the different customer behaviours and preferences identified by Mailchimp data. It shows, for example, how many subscribers are high spenders who want to buy products, and how many are not high spenders but always open their emails. They may not necessarily have a reason to buy, but they definitely want to read our content. Using Mailchimp’s segmentation tools, I can create a high-spender segment, write an email tailored to their specific shopping behaviours, then create a low-spender segment and tweak that email to provide the content that is of value to them.”
She adds that the most important aspect of email communications is listening and responding. “That’s the key to being more in tune with your customers, who are then much more likely to buy from you. It’s the reason why Mailchimp is the one tab on my computer that I have open continuously, no matter where we are in the month.”
Mailchimp is the number one email marketing and automations brand*. With plans suitable for every size of business and database, marketers are able to send the right message at the right time to convert more customers, get AI-assisted suggestions to make content more engaging, and set up automated workflows to cross-sell products, recover abandoned carts and to help drive more loyalty and sales.
*Based on competitor brands’ publicly available data on worldwide numbers of customers in 2021/2022.
The views, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the people interviewed and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Intuit, Mailchimp or any of its cornerstone brands or employees. The primary purpose of this article is to educate and inform.
