How we created a profitable mailing for MISURA

We've been building the MISURA electronics brand since its inception in 2021. Thanks to fine-tuned communications, it experienced strong growth during 2022, which continues. MISURA products have been gaining traction not only in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but also in Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, Italy, and a few weeks ago we started working with a distributor in Iceland. With the growing number of registered clients, the number of repeat purchases and newsletter registrations has also started to grow. So it was time to replace the occasional mailings via Mailchimp with a comprehensive, automated solution.

A review of mailing tools

We defined the features we required from a mailing solution and tackled a multi-criteria decision-making task.

Tab. 2: Example of a table with the processed search of mailing tools

The aspects we included in our evaluation were almost 20. The most important ones for us were the ease of integration of the tool with WordPress and UpGates, two platforms we use at MISURA. During our research, we did not forget about the clarity of the environment, the English language version, online support or, for example, whether the tool offers predefined automation scenarios or whether we will have to set them up ourselves together with the development team. From an initial selection of 15 tools, we finally chose the solution we still use today - Ecomail.

Ecomail implementation

After choosing Ecomail and getting the top-of-the-line Marketer+ plan up and running, which was able to cover our contact lists and also made it easy for us to link our sites to the mailing tool, the next step was for our development team to get to work. Thanks to responsive online support, we were given a fairly detailed guide to implementing Ecomail for both the e-shop and the macropage presentation, and our development team then adapted the required code to make this solution the most benign intervention to our existing websites. Linking the lead collection forms, forwarding information about customer movement around the site, including which products the customer had placed in their basket - Ecomail then began to collect all the information needed to launch mailing campaigns.

Automated campaigns

When we first came up with the idea for the mailing, our primary goal was to create a system that would use automation and therefore require minimal intervention from the client. So we gradually created several automation scenarios in the Ecomail environment, which are now able to manage themselves.

Thank you for signing up - The moment a new customer signs up for our newsletter via the web form, their contact will be transferred to the contact list in Ecomail and an initial email will be sent thanking them for signing up. This way we get in touch with the customer and, thanks to several CTA buttons in the email, we try to engage them with articles on the blog and interesting products in the e-shop.

Abandoned Cart - If a customer puts a product in the cart but doesn't complete their purchase, we can remind them within two hours with a personalized email that includes a link to click back to the cart and information about the products they forgot in the cart. However, this is not the end of our efforts to complete the purchase - we will send another reminder email two days after the product has been added to the basket if the purchase has not been completed.

Holiday greetings - We do not forget our customers even on days when they celebrate their important days. Ecomail can work with first names, so as soon as a customer celebrates a holiday, we automatically send them a greeting card and a small gift in the form of a discount code.

Info about new articles - As our strategy is to create interesting content not only about the use of our products, we regularly publish articles on our macropage misura.store, which acts as an information portal about the MISURA brand. The moment we publish a new article, we send it out to our customers and try to drive them to our website.

New product info - We support new product launches with social media campaigns, for example, but also through mailings. In this way, the customer receives information about new products on the e-shop among the first.

There are no limits to the imagination when creating automation scenarios. Ecomail offers a large number of predefined and proven scenarios to choose from, but we can always add to them and even create our own scenarios tailored to our needs. Our development team, especially Serhiy and Marek, is our support in this, as they always manage to get what we dream of as marketers into our automation scenarios and mail templates.

Testing emails

The launch of a new campaign is always preceded by careful internal testing. The email template we subsequently send out to the lower order thousands is seen by our team including copywriters, analysts or developers before the mailing begins. This allows us to catch any functional, content or graphic deficiencies in a timely manner, so that customers receive a fully functional and optimized email in their inbox. During this checking process, we do not forget about the different device types (desktop, mobile), mailbox types (gmail, list) or display types (dark and light mode).

The results of the mailing campaigns

During the first months of using Ecomail, we implemented three large mailings.

Activation Campaign - Our first area campaign consisted of a welcome email that introduced the new MISURA newsletter and offered customers a 10% discount on all products in the e-shop. Within a few days, we saw sub-ten orders using the discount code offered.

Easter Giveaway - The Easter campaign, which was promoted in parallel on social media, included discounts of varying amounts on a selected range of products. In terms of conversion values, this was the most significant mailing campaign since the start of Ecomail.

Spring offer - After evaluating the Easter campaign, we decided, given its positive results, to extend our discount offer and implemented a spring campaign. Although the spring campaign was very similar in content to the Easter campaign, it even managed to surpass it in several aspects observed.

To evaluate the success of these activities, we track several metrics:

Table 6: Comparison of the results of the first three mailing campaigns

For the open rate, i.e. the percentage of open emails, it can generally be considered a success if your campaigns regularly exceed 20%. Our campaigns achieve results of over 30%, i.e. one third of all our contacts open the mail and read the message after delivery. Such high numbers are due, among other things, to precise work with the subject lines of the emails, which can "lure" the reader to read them, but also to excellent tuning of the technical aspects of the email template, thanks to which our sent emails do not fall into the SPAM folder.

The second essential metric is CTR, which in this case means the ratio of people who, assuming they opened the mail, clicked through the links placed in the body of the mail to our e-shop or blog. In this case, 4% is cited as the threshold of success, with our MISURA brand mailing we achieve up to 14% CTR level. This is due to the strategic placement of CTA buttons in the mail template, but also to the sophisticated texts that can engage the reader and make them click through to one of the products in the e-shop or one of the articles on the blog.

An important part of the emails sent is the block with links to interesting articles published on misura.store, which are specially adapted for each mailing depending on the focus of the campaign. Clicks to articles make up a significant part of the total clicks to MISURA websites from the mailing. Through the articles, people then go on to the e-store with the specific products mentioned in the article.

Table 8: Overview of articles with the most clicks from the mailing