American online retailer eBags sells luggage. A lot of it. It stocks over 550 brands with 50,000 individual bags. Since it launched in March 1999, it has sold 18 million bags.
Email marketing is no small part of that, co-founder Peter Cobb told the eCommerce Conference in Melbourne yesterday.
The company employs a full-time email marketer, who’s recently brought on an assistant. Together, the two of them send out 2.3 million emails a week to the 800,000 people on the eBags database. Half of these are triggered automatically when customers do things on eBags’ website. These automatic emails are responsible for a third of the company’s email sales.
Overall, eBags’ sophisticated email operation is responsible for a fifth of its sales. For every single subscriber, the company makes $14 on average.
“Email is the most effective marketing channel we have right now,” Cobb told the audience. As Google refines its algorithms to favour larger companies and paying advertisers, it’s becoming increasingly expensive to be heard online.
But email still cuts through. If you do it right. In Cobb’s experience, customers aren’t unsubscribing as much as you would expect them to. “With smartphones, people are multitasking. They’re opening their emails on their smartphones while doing other stuff.”
Today, 40% of eBags’ email opens come from smartphones. This has meant the company has had to change how it does some things. But it’s also made email a more effective marketing tool.
Here are eBags’ tricks of the trade.
When eBags began its email operation, it tended towards using the emails to come up with offers. ‘Buy now to get 15% off’, the subject lines would scream.
But then, eBags’ marketers got more creative. And they began to use AB Testing, where half the list is sent one subject line and the other half another, to test which subject lines were most likely to intrigue their audiences.
They found sales didn’t work as well as you’d think. “Maybe shoppers are sick of that sort of stuff,” Cobb said.
He gave a few examples of the subject lines that did brilliantly:
These subject lines were short, creative, and intriguing. Cobbs reckons with the rise of smartphones, short subject lines are the only ones likely to be fully read anyway.
Email marketing is hugely effective for eBags, so the company is keen to grow its subscriber base. However, they’ve always been careful about treading a fine line between self-promotion and annoying their customers.
The company always tests the bounce rates of its email marketing initiatives. If the bounce rate is low, customers can’t be too annoyed, they figure.
Using this method, eBags has settled on the use of a Light Box (a pop-up of sorts that appears over the page you’re viewing that you can close) on the second page a customer lands on. This box allows the user to opt into eBags’ subscriber offer.
“We also allow customers to opt out of our ‘steal of the day’ emails,” Cobb says. This email features a daily offer on a well-priced bag. “In our experience, most people opt-in”.
eBags gets about 2000 new subscribers a week using its Light Box pop-up.
Somewhat unexpectedly, eBags doesn’t ask people questions about themselves when they sign up, other than what their birthday is. “Customers get that, especially if we don’t ask the year,” Cobb said.
“We don’t know much about our demographics from their sign-ups – we get that information in other ways.
“The attitude of a lot of our subscribers is ‘I want to buy a bag from you guys, I don’t want to marry you’. So we back-tracked on that stuff.”
After every mass send-out, eBags reviews what parts of the email got clicks, and what parts didn’t.
“We actually found the most clicked-on bag was the top of the email, but the second most popular was usually our offer at the bottom.
“This is good, because it means people are scrolling down to the bottom.”
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Myriam Robin is a reporter for SmartCompany and its sister site LeadingCompany. She has degrees in economics, international studies and journalism. She likes writing about businesses taking risks and doing new things.
