Issue 005: Increasing Email Click-through Rate by 360%

We also talk about building customer loyalty using custom portraits, saving ad costs by using stickers, and why most buyer personas are useless.

October 16, 2024 | #005 | Free Version

Welcome to Startup Blitz, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in your online business.

This week, we discuss –

✔️ How Zogics increased their email click-through rate by 360%

✔️ How custom portraits help chewy build customer loyalty

✔️ How stickers helped WindsorOne save $250,000 in ad costs

✔️ Why most buyer personas are useless

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How Zogics Increased Their Email Click-Through Rate by 360%

Zogics is a manufacturer of cleaning products. They have found a simple way to boost email engagement. After customers make a purchase from their website, they receive a standard confirmation email.

Several hours later, typically at the end of the day, customers receive a second, more personalized email. It looks like this:

They include an image of an employee holding a clipboard that says, “Thank you, [Customer Name]!”

This small gesture makes a big difference. Before using the personalized image, only 4.5% of customers watched the video. After adding it, the view rate jumped to 20.7%. This is super impressive for first-time e-commerce purchasers.

Zogics creates a personalized video for each customer. These videos take less than a minute to make. They are simple and don’t require high production. When customers watch, they hear a short message:

“Hi [Customer Name]! Laura from Zogics here . . .

I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for your order and let you know we’re here to help with anything that you may need.

We love to see our products in action, so please feel free to upload a photo or video to social media using the hashtag #zogicslove.

Thanks again for your wipe and dispenser order. We hope to hear from you soon!”

By investing just a minute of their time in each customer, Zogics creates a lasting impression. This is crucial in fostering loyalty and encouraging repeat business.

Source: Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman

How Custom Portraits Help Chewy Build Customer Loyalty

Chewy is an online retailer that sells pet food and other pet products. Their intense focus on customer loyalty has helped them become the leading pet food company in the USA.

In her book Creating Superfans, entrepreneur Brittany Hodack shares her personal experience with Chewy. This story shows why they became America’s favourite pet food brand so quickly.

Brittany ordered some prescription dog food from Chewy. About a week after placing that first order, she received a handwritten “Welcome!” postcard in the mail, addressed to her dog, Bear.

A few days later, an employee from Chewy called to check if the dog food had helped Bear recover. The employee also suggested a few non-prescription foods she might try in the future.

Impressed by their service, Brittany posted about her experience on Instagram and tagged the company. A few weeks later, she received a package by mail.

Inside, there were toys and treats, along with a note from a Chewy employee named Allison. Allison mentioned how much she enjoyed watching a video Brittany had posted of her dogs pawing at a Chewy box.

Brittany became a loyal customer. A couple of years later, she received a hand-painted canvas portrait of her two dogs from Chewy. She proudly hung it on her wall. Every time someone visits her home, they ask about the painting. And every time, she shares the story of Chewy.

The company sends out more than 1,000 hand-painted pet portraits each week.

How Stickers Helped WindsorOne Save $250,000 in Advertising Costs

Word-of-mouth is one of the most affordable and effective marketing strategies. Cameron Scully shared a great example of it in an Indie Hacker post.

WindsorOne is a company that produces and sells wood boards. They were struggling after a market crash. They needed a low-cost way to build brand awareness.

So they came up with the idea of putting a “Call Kurt For A Free Shirt” sticker on their wood planks.

When people called, Kurt would try to build relationships with them. He encouraged them to take small steps, like getting WindsorOne’s business card with the shirt.

The shirts featured local memes that customers found amusing. They told their friends to call the number and get a free shirt. This brought in a bunch of new customers.

Over ten years, WindsorOne received more than 20,000 calls. Before using the sticker, they were spending $400 per lead. Thanks to the sticker, they were getting more than 50 leads per week. Just for the cost of cheap shirts and stamps.

Book of the Week: Data-Driven Personalization by Zontee Hou

This week, I want to highlight Data-Driven Personalization: How to Use Consumer Insights to Generate Customer Loyalty by Zontee Hou.

In this book, Zontee Hou, managing director of Convince and Convert discusses how to make marketing resonate by personalizing every message, using data, research and behavioural economics.

One important point she addresses is a common mistake new business owners often make:

“To better connect with our customers, we need to have a rich understanding of how they behave and what they value, in the context of our brand and our products/services.

“Over the last two decades, we’ve seen organizations in all industries and of all shapes and sizes embrace personas as a way to bring our customers to life. The common wisdom goes: By creating a profile of a person with the specificities of an individual, we can better imagine the customer we’re serving—and, therefore, be more strategic in our approach to communicating with them or marketing to them.

“Yet, personas—as they’ve often been developed—aren’t really personal. They’re often audience segments masquerading as deep knowledge because they include more “human” details like their supposed habits, names, or family makeup. While lacklustre personas can help us plan more broadly, without more detail on each individual consumer’s needs within these broad buckets, marketers are often left making assumptions about what people will value in the communications they receive from brands.

“I still encounter many organizations that build their personas on limited data or on the knowledge and assumptions of their employees, rather than on research. Personas or audience segments that are not built on robust research are flawed by the biases that their creators bring to the table, as well as their limited purviews. In other words, their writers include what they know (or think they know) and exclude what they don’t know. To create a more rounded picture of our customers, we need a lot of information about how they think, behave, and interact with our brand categories in the world. Building this kind of profile through discovery and investigation is more akin to market research.”

Interesting Articles We've Read This Week

🤖 Why AI workflows are the next frontier of GTM

👩‍💼 I hired ChatGPT as my career coach, and it changed how I think about work—and myself

📉 Why it sucks to be selling software between $50K and $100K right now

📢 The how & whyyy of unhinged marketing

💡 How MSCHF turns irreverent ideas into a real business

Thanks for reading, until next week!

Sayed Bin Habib

Co-Founder, Startup Blitz

Follow me on LinkedIn / Website

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