Email & SMS Strategies You Can't Ignore

Remember when everyone said email marketing was dead? “Gen-Z Doesn’t read Emails”, they’d say or “We should go “all-in” on video and social media, Email is too expensive”.

Well, we've got some unsurprising news for you - good old’ Email marketing is not just alive, it's thriving. 

And when you pair it with SMS? That's when the magic really happens.

We've been in the trenches with DTC and E-Commerce brands, and we're here to reveal what's really working in email and SMS marketing. 

The Secret Sauce: Our Top 5 Strategies You Can't Ignore

1.) Get Personal (No, Really Personal)

Gone are the days of "Dear Valued Customer." We're talking about emails that make your customers feel like you're reading their minds. Use tools like Klaviyo or Shopify Email to segment your audience based on browsing history and past purchases.

Set up product recommendation blocks in your emails that dynamically change based on each customer's interests.

Experiment with send-time optimization to hit inboxes when your customers are most likely to engage.

2.) Automation: Your 24/7 Marketing Buddy

Imagine having a clone of your best salesperson working round the clock. That's what good automation feels like.

• Create a welcome series that introduces new subscribers to your brand over 3-5 emails, don’t just “set and forget” a 10% discount.
• Set up abandoned cart reminders on SMS and Email that trigger 1 hour, 24 hours, and 72 hours after abandonment. Again: don’t do the minimum, go beyond!
• Implement a post-purchase flow that asks for reviews, offers complementary products, and encourages repeat purchases. This can be KEY to increasing customer value.

3.) SMS: The Undercover Superhero

If email is your trusty sidekick, SMS is your secret weapon.

• Use platforms like Klaviyo or Attentive to manage SMS campaigns alongside your email marketing.
• Send time-sensitive offers via text, like flash sales with a 4-hour window.
• Set up automated texts for shipping updates or back-in-stock notifications.
• Create a multi-channel campaign where you send an email about an upcoming sale, followed by an SMS reminder when the sale goes live.
• Use SMS to re-engage customers who haven't opened your emails in a while.
• Implement a preference center where customers can choose how they want to hear from you.

4.) Learn, Build, Accelerate

Here's a hard truth: what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.

That's why we live by the mantra: Learn, Build, Accelerate. How do we implement this for E-Mail Marketing?

🧠 Learn: Use A/B testing to compare subject lines, email content, and send times. Klaviyo has built-in tools to intelligently use AI testing to A/B…even XYZ test. 🛠️ Build: Based on your learnings, build out new campaigns and flows. Start small - maybe a new abandoned cart series - and expand from there. 🚀 Accelerate: Once you've found what works, scale it up. Increase send frequency, expand your audience, or apply successful strategies to other parts of your funnel. Only about 61 percent of marketers use A/B testing to improve their marketing performance, so the opportunity is there to beat out your competition.

If you repeat this process until it’s second nature, your customers and your bottom line will thank you. Those that do A/B test (and have their tests set up correctly) have shown an improvement in performance 25% of the time . '

Those are numbers you can’t ignore.

5.) Key metrics to watch:

• Open rates and click-through rates for overall engagement. Not just the WHAT but the WHEN is key to know. 
• Conversion rates to measure bottom-line impact. Remember to track and test each campaign and even each button so you know what’s having the most impact. 
• Unsubscribe rates to ensure you're not overwhelming your audience, as well as how many people are “dormant” and unlikely to convert. You’re paying to reach inactive customers, so segment, re-engage or remove them to increase efficiency.

Remember, the goal is continuous improvement. Each test, whether it succeeds or fails, is a stepping stone to better performance.

Real Talk: A Case Study That'll Make You Sit Up

Let's talk about PangoBooks, a scrappy startup that's shaking up the secondhand book market and who’s digital transformation was downright incredible.

These folks were stuck in email marketing purgatory with a platform that was about as sophisticated as a flip phone in 2024. We see this all the time: E-Mail as the forgotten older child in the marketing family. 

But not for PanagoBooks. They made the switch to a more robust solution, our preferred partner Klaviyo, and it paid off in spades: 

• 63% year-over-year growth in e-commerce revenue in just 6 months. That's not a typo, folks.
• 30% of their e-commerce revenue now comes from email marketing. Talk about a glow-up.
• 31% quarter-over-quarter growth in platform-attributed listings. Translation: more books, more sales, more happy customers. 

How'd they do it? 

They went all in on personalization and automation. 

We're talking welcome flows with more twists and turns than a mystery novel, buyer-to-seller conversion strategies and segmentation so precise it's almost like mind-reading. They went above and beyond the “bare minimum” and met their customers at every step of their journey.  

Seriously, read about it here and ask yourself if you’re putting in the same work on your own Email and SMS strategy? 

Your Turn: Ready to Write Your Own Success Story?

Ready to turn your email list from a forgotten address book into a conversion machine? No pressure, no sales pitch - just real talk about how we can help you become the next E-commerce success story. Give us a call.