6 effective email marketing strategy examples from real-life brands

Your email marketing strategy and the tactics that go along with it make up the foundation of your owned channels.

When ranking marketing channels by the ROI they deliver, 76.86% of all businesses place email marketing in the top 3 ROI-generating marketing channels, according to Klaviyo’s marketing mix report.

Just starting out? Learn how to create an email marketing strategy in 9 steps. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of tactics with some real-life examples, you’re in the right place. With inspiration from real-world brands, we’ll show you how to:

1. Use personalization to increase revenue.
2. Segment your audience as soon as they become subscribers.
3. Optimize all content elements with A/B testing.
4. Prioritize the mobile experience.
5. Engage inactive subscribers with a win-back series.
6. Use email automation to generate consistent revenue.

1. Nuun drives 820% more revenue from email with personalization

According to a report from Ascend2 and its research partners, about 6 in 10 marketers say email is the digital channel where personalization is most impactful.

“Brands need to spend more time collecting zero-party data and using it to intelligently segment customers into specific groups,” says Carson McComas, CEO of FuelMade. “Your owned marketing channels are one of your most powerful assets, but at this point in the industry, every brand out there is using email as well.”

Wellness brand Nuun learned this firsthand when they noticed that a certain group of athletes typically bought only their endurance products.

The team began sending that group of customers strictly endurance-related content—and the results were mind-blowing: a 950% increase in website traffic from emails and an 820% increase in revenue generated from email marketing YoY.

2. Tomlinson’s Feed uses pop-ups to segment their audience from the jump

A one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with your audience can water down your strategy. Segmentation, on the other hand, is what allows you to send messages that fit your target audiences’ online behaviors, lifestyle, demographics, and locations.

“Segmentation should be at the heart of your campaign strategy,” says Kelly Stymiest, partner at Homestead Studio—“especially now with the iOS 15 update and the more recent Gmail deliverability issues. Without proper segmentation, your deliverability can crash, and it’s a long road to get back to a healthy place if that happens.”

“Segment your audience based on engagement, past purchase history, interests, and more,” Stymiest suggests. “Not everyone on your list needs to receive every email (hello, deliverability issues!), so I always recommend speaking to your customers with high intent. That all comes down to segmentation.”

Tomlinson’s Feed, a pet store in Austin, Texas, uses pop-up forms to learn whether their subscribers are dog or cat people.

Based on this information, they can segment their audience and target customers with personalized email messages.

3. Latico Leathers A/B tests copy, design, subject lines, and CTA buttons

Copy, visuals, email subject lines, colors, and animations convey your brand’s unique personality. Companies with strong brand personalities use email design as one more tool for building recognition and standing out among their customer base.

Brands can also use email design to engage recipients with interactive elements, mix images, illustrations, and GIFs to focus on the main call to action (CTA) or urge customers to make a purchase.

Latico Leathers is a family-run, handcrafted leather goods boutique that mixes and matches email design elements to entice customers. During the spring season, they experimented with subject lines to promote seasonal sales, new products, and colors.

Latico Leathers also experiments with visuals, CTA buttons, and even using product reviews in their email design.

4. Dagne Dover prioritizes mobile with a punchy subject line

“Most email opens are happening on mobile devices, so it’s critical to think mobile-first when you’re writing subject lines,” says Dayna Scandone, principal customer success manager at Klaviyo.

“You should always be testing your email marketing campaigns on desktop and mobile to ensure they’re showing up exactly how you want them to,” Scandone adds. “That includes the subject line.”

You don’t necessarily need a super short subject line to see high email open rates. But at the very least, your subject line should look great on mobile.

Dagne Dover, the brand that creates “problem-solving bags for problem-solving humans,” demonstrates a mobile priority with this subject line that’s just 4 words long. It stands out in an inbox not only because it’s shorter than other emails, but also because it’s so concise and direct.

5. Tula wins customers back with a well-timed incentive

As you grow your email list, inactive subscribers will become a reality. But emailing your entire list without suppressing inactive subscribers can hurt your deliverability.

Does that mean you should just remove inactive subscribers from your list? Definitely not.

“One key segment we always create at Homestead is a sunset segment. This segment is connected to our sunset flow, which aims to weed out inactive, unengaged customers who have no intent to buy,” says Stymiest.

“If customers don’t engage with that flow, we suppress their profile,” Stymiest explains. “The sunset flow is one that gets overlooked often, but it’s so important for deliverability—and it can also keep your Klaviyo bill down.”

Instead of ignoring potential customers and missing out on sales, set up a win-back email as a re-engagement campaign for inactive subscribers.

Here, skincare brand Tula encourages customers to come back and make a purchase by offering a 15% discount. With an appealing subject line that hints at exclusivity (“We never do this, but we miss you”) and highlights favorite customer products, each with a customer review, Tula makes its win-back offer hard to resist.

6. Maison Miru uses email automation to generate consistent revenue

It’s almost impossible to manually schedule and send emails to all your subscribers and customers—especially as your list keeps getting bigger. Enter: email automation.

From welcome emails, post-purchase follow-ups, and order notifications to up-sell and cross-sell emails, automations can help you earn revenue while you sleep. “If you use automations correctly, your brand can generate consistent revenue,” says Joanne Coffey, assistant manager of retention marketing at Jones Road Beauty.

Jewelry brand Maison Miru, for example, used a browse abandonment flow to plug a leaky email sales funnel. To attract new customers, Maison Miru had been offering a pair of earrings for just the cost of shipping. But they noticed that not many subscribers went back to complete the purchase of free earrings.

Using an automated flow that nudged people to come back and receive their reward after a couple of hours, the brand generated a 2% revenue boost.

Pro tip: “Flow filters and trigger filters are underutilized because brands don’t want to exclude customers from receiving their messages, but setting these up are essential to ensure you’re not over-sending to your customers,” Coffey says. “I’d rather have 100 customers receive a relevant message catered to them than 500 people receive a message that isn’t.”

“In our automations, we use hide/show blocks—another underutilized Klaviyo feature,” Coffey adds. “We’re able to provide education based on which products a customer has left behind in their cart.”

For example, “we can educate the customer on how to apply our products based on their skin type from our quiz,” Coffey explains. “We’re also able to include a free shipping bar for the customers who have over $85 in their cart. The possibilities are endless.”

Next steps: gather the data you need to execute these tactics

While 78% of ecommerce executives understand personalization at scale is a must-have in marketing, 41% say they can’t execute the tactics to get it done.

A customer data platform like Klaviyo CDP solves this problem by centralizing subscriber and customer data within a platform that also sends marketing. When you only need one piece of software to gather data and use that data, the tactics we’ve highlighted here are a lot easier to execute.

Learn more about what a CDP can do for your marketing strategy—and for your bottom line.

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