Camping and the great outdoors took on a new appeal for many people during the pandemic, as lockdown saw foreign holidays replaced by the staycations. Tents overtook villas in people’s holiday plans, while sleeping bags and rucksacks suddenly became must-have essentials.
As a result, specialist leisure retailers such as Worcestershire-based Olpro saw a huge surge of interest in their websites. “There was a pent-up demand for getting back outdoors,” says Jack Barnett, the company’s head of PR and digital marketing.
Barnett and his team had to act fast to harness these new potential leads, developing a strategy to use their existing Mailchimp account to help turn tentative interest into solid sales through an email marketing campaign.
“We are seeing huge increases across our marketing channels, but particularly in email marketing … it’s playing a big part in our business and our growth,” he says.
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways for businesses to promote their products and services, with estimates pointing to a return on investment (ROI) of between 32:1 and 45:1, depending on the sector. And while social media has flourished, the number of Facebook and Twitter accounts is less than the estimated 4 billion people who have an email account, and who collectively send more than 300bn emails a day.
Olpro is a wholly online retailer that has won a host of awards for its digital and e-commerce activities, says Barnett, who deploys Mailchimp features in a variety of ways.
Last year, for instance, he used the platform to launch the company’s first customer feedback survey. Initially planned as a one-off, it proved so successful that it is now included as a click-through banner on company newsletters.
Olpro uses Mailchimp to send out these regular mailshots, with a range of formats and colour palettes enabling its marketing teams to ensure newsletters follow company brand guidelines.
Once they land in customers’ in-boxes, Mailchimp provides valuable insights on what elements of the newsletter work, for instance what product mentions generate the most click-throughs, says Barnett. “What’s useful is that you can see what the customer has and hasn’t clicked on,” he says. This helps his team to decide which features to expand and which to drop.
As a way of generating sales, Barnett is a fan of the automated emails that can be sent out through Mailchimp using predefined rules. These can trigger emails and personalise messages based on specific actions customers take.
For instance, Olpro now sends special discount codes to customers on their birthday, and a follow-up email when they’ve bought a particular high-value product, suggesting other products they may be interested in. “It’s value-added for the customer,” says Barnett.
Email automation is a powerful marketing tool, but it’s important to only send messages when you really need to. Once someone has trusted you with their email address, don’t abuse that trust. Flooding an inbox with superfluous emails can cause people to lose interest or even unsubscribe, so messages need to be relevant and engaging.
By helping businesses to link their website analytics with their email marketing, Mailchimp enables companies to target people based on behaviour, preferences and previous sales. Prioritising this element of personalisation can increase the relevance of automated campaigns.
Mailchimp tools can help build and maintain engaged subscription lists made up of people who want to receive messages. “Repeat business is ideally what every business wants because that’s how you build your brand loyalty,” says Barnett. “It’s much easier and more cost-effective to sell to an existing customer.”
Mailchimp can bring other benefits for retailers, too. “You can see what products customers have bought as a result of your mailshots, and it integrates well with our website,” he says. This is important to Olpro, which stocks more than 2,000 products. By integrating with the company’s content management system, Mailchimp enables the team to pull in details of different products for different mailshots without having to re-enter all the information.
Automation can help address the issue of abandoned carts, when customers place something in their basket but don’t click through to actually complete the purchase. Industry analysis suggests that about 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts, for reasons ranging from high shipping costs to concern about a site’s security. Sending an automated email can help companies recover some of these losses.
Automation also frees up time by removing repetitive tasks from a team’s to-do list, enabling them to focus on more valuable tasks, such as responding to customer questions.
Olpro receives about 20,000 orders a year, says Barnett, with many new customers opting in to receive regular company communications. However, without automation, responding quickly to customer enquiries would be a logistical nightmare, he says. Instead, customers receive “instant communications from us even though nobody is physically clicking the button to send them out”.
Returning to those all-important ROI figures, Barnett believes the numbers speak for themselves. The company assesses the effectiveness of all its marketing channels each month and email consistently outperforms social media advertising and affiliate marketing.
This is helping the business to maximise profits at a crucial time, when demand is high and stock is limited, says Barnett: “That’s why email remains so popular.”
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.
