When your business is a brick-and-mortar store, it might seem easy to forget about digital advertising, let alone email marketing. However, for years retailers have been adopting ways to directly engage their customers outside of their physical locale. An entire ecosystem of apps and loyalty programs have been built out of this, but neither has the direct impact or access to scale like email marketing.
About the Client
Astoria Lighting is a premier supplier of exterior illumination solutions that create outdoor atmosphere, ambience, and added security. They offer a wide selection of lighting products to beautify your home or business. From ornamental and outdoor living to landscape design and installation, their organization outfits best-in-class lighting for their clients.
Email Marketing Goals
Increase site traffic
Determine best communication timelines
Create momentum with a previously unengaged audience
Flipping the Switch
A business that focuses on lead generation instead of online sales requires a completely different approach to marketing, and it’s an opportunity that Logical Position has been perfecting for years. Whether it’s through geo-targeting likely buyers or retaining users with previous brand engagement, taking the client/business relationship online is the only way to stay ahead of the competition these days.
Strategic Illumination
Sending out regular email campaigns was new to Astoria Lighting, so one of our primary goals was to warm our list and build a strong sender’s reputation in order to ensure that emails made it to a subscriber’s inbox instead of their spam folder. As we ramped up Astoria Lighting’s email presence, we collected data from their CMS in order to track and segment out where each customer was in the sales funnel, from quote to close.
Testing and Flickering
With lead generation, we oftentimes want to get potential customers in direct contact with an employee from the advertising outreach. Through advanced A/B testing and audience segmentation, we were able to direct a large number of subscribers to Astoria Lighting’s quote page. This included, but was not limited to gif vs. static banner images, along with varying send times and email subject titles to entice clicks with seasonal promotions, such as holiday lights in winter or decorative outdoor uplighting in spring and summer. We mixed this with various imagery based on location, age, income, and use-case depending on whether the recipient was an identified wholesaler or home owner. We have successfully deployed all these strategies and built a strong email presence to help more customers share in the magic of Astoria Lighting’s product offering.
Seeing Is Believing
Since Astoria Lighting signed on with Logical Position in the summer of 2021, they’ve grown their contact list by an impressive 372 percent and accumulated some 5,887 clicks. With no prior outreach strategy to message clients directly, their email deliveries have achieved a 546 percent year over year growth rate with a steady 2.5 percent average click rate accounting for 358 RFQs from email alone. On top of that, the campaigns have seen a 239 percent rise in unique clicks from automated campaigns—meaning we’re helping the client maintain scale while they continue basking in the light of their email marketing return on investment.
Other KPIs Recognized
174,000 emails delivered
51 percent open rate
9,833 active users on site attributed to email marketing
Tips for Achieving Similar Results
Better Late Than Never: It doesn’t matter if you’ve never thought about engaging your customers through a coordinated email effort, start gathering contact information immediately. Whether you believe it or not, these will serve as a lifeline later and create immense opportunity for your brand and/or business.
Setting the Mood: Figure out what works. Segment your contact list, even if arbitrarily, to understand what works, then figure out why. AB testing might be intimidating, but remember, if you’re not testing, you’re just guessing. So you might as well give yourself any advantage possible. Test it, then reflect it.
Stay Current and Be Present: Being oblivious to the time of year or current social climate can be devastating to any business’s reputation, and email marketing is no exception. Remind your audience that there are real people behind these emails with timely references and seasonal acknowledgments, which are critical to spur engagement and draw attention to your content.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Getting started with email marketing can be an intimidating endeavor, not to mention actually hitting Send on a piece of correspondence that could potentially reach thousands of people. Here’s the thing: personal email is still the backbone of a user’s online persona, so if you’re not reaching out to them, someone else will. Make sure you’re extending an invitation to engage past clients and potential customers as well, because you can’t tell whether the lights are on or off if the door is closed in the first place.
Is your business ready to flip the switch and see the light? Reach out today for a complimentary account audit and no-obligation campaign recommendations.
