Right around the time I was completing the Five Email Marketing Automations Every Business Needs course, I started working with a small business e-commerce store focused on fishing gear.

Wild Water Fly Fishing is a retail store focused on fly fishing gear and knowledge.

The company only had a Welcome Email and wanted to expand their email marketing to grow sales and repeat business.

At the start of the project, the company had a lead capturing pop-up, offering a 10% discount, an email automation requesting public reviews and the standard Shopify abandoned cart automation. All of these automations were the default "plug-&-play" options given by Shopify and their partners.

Implementing The Five Email Marketing Automations

As I mention in the course, these automations can be implemented into any business; small or big, B2B or B2C, Products or Services, etc. But the easiest industry to apply this to is e-commerce. This is due to the simplicity of the customer journey.

To get started we outlined the 5 email marketing automations every business needs. Two of the existing automations were re-made and optimized, and two more were added. Here are the five automations we built:

1. Welcome Automation - The goal is to provide a warm welcome to new visitors while including the offer from the email capture form. This email is a high generator for e-commerce stores. At the moment this email earns 37% of all their email sales.

2. Lead Nurturing Series - This automation is focused on earning trust with new subscribers. We focused these emails on educating their new signups on fly fishing tips with a series of 4 emails. Towards the bottom of the emails we added popular products and recent customer reviews. So far, this stream has earned 15.5% of all email sales.

3. Sales Automation - Focused on selling popular products, specials, etc. This automation triggers 5 days after they subscribe, but ONLY if they haven't made a purchase yet. Amazingly most of his subscribers buy something right away so this automation doesn't trigger as often. So far this automation has earned only 1.5% of all email sales. (A lot to improve here)

4. Cart Abandonment - Helping to capture lost business. For this automation we stopped the default Shopify abandon cart email and created our own in Klaviyo. We decided to do this because we have more flexibility within Klaviyo and were able to add a series of emails instead of a single attempt. The Cart Abandonment automation earns about 13% of all email sales.

5. Feedback and Reviews - Encouraging subscribers to give feedback and leave reviews. (This automation was not part of the case study)

It normally takes between 3 to 4 weeks to fully implement these automations. When building these, it’s important to build and activate them one at a time. This helps pinpoint issues more quickly and helps avoid flows from overlapping automations. If you are new to email marketing, activating one flow at a time also helps build trust with the ISPs for better email delivery.

The Results, 60 Days After Implementation

Remember that we didn't implement all automations on day 0. Each automation was activated with about a week in between of each-other. I will try to make an update after 6 months to show the growth of all automations working together.

So now to the fun part... the results, how did these Five Email Marketing Automations affect their business?

Overall Email Automation Open and Click rate

• 41% Average Open Rate

• 12% Average Click Rate

The Welcome and Lead Nurturing Automations had open rates above 50% for most of the emails in the series. This is because we are providing value to the subscriber. The Welcome automation provides a discount to be used while the Lead Nurturing Automation offers education that gets the subscribers excited to prepare for their next fishing trip!

Website Activity

Before setting up the five automations, the business had only setup a Welcome and a Cart Abandonment automation. Here is the comparison after re-building the existing automations and completing the remaining 3.

• 781.03% Increased Users

• 773.45% Increased Sessions

• 68.20% Reduced Bounce Rate

• 5.02% Increased Time on Site

Revenue:

• 500% More Transactions

• 550.64% Increase in Revenue

Conclusion

After seeing those numbers we can definitely agree that the five email marketing automations worked for their business. Who wouldn't want a 550.64% increase in revenue?

A few things to take into consideration from this case study.

• This business only had a list of 2,800 contacts when we started working with them. I mention this because I often hear businesses say they don't have enough emails to start email marketing. As soon as you have 1 email, you have enough to get started and earn more.

• The point above supports the idea to have an email capture strategy on your website ASAP. Even if you don't have the time to do email marketing, start collecting the emails now.

• The Welcome Automation is the MOST IMPORTANT automation you can create, specially for e-commerce. It takes less than an hour to setup and can help generate a good return for little effort.

• Sale with Education when Nurturing Leads. When we first created the lead nurturing automation we didn't add any products. These were just a series of emails educating the subscribers on fly fishing techniques and tips. Because the engagement rate was so high, (most emails over 50% open rate and 20% click rate) we decided to add products towards the end of the emails, NOT at the top. The lesson here is, you can make a sale on a lead nurturing email as long as you provide the subscriber with value first. If these emails had the same added value but we had put the products at the top, we probably wouldn't have had such success.

• This business had a great PPC strategy that helped grow the list from 2,800 subscribers to over 5,000 in these 60 days.

As I continue to work with this business I would love to share more updates on the stats and changes we make to the automations.

Thanks for reading and I hope this case study helps you in any way!

Want to learn how to implement these automations on your own? Check out our course, The Five Email Marketing Automations Every Business Needs [2020] Updated.

In this course I teach you everything you'll need to know to implement these automations to grow your business, in less than 60 days.

The course is a series of videos where I take you step by step through building your own automations.

The course is perfect for businesses or marketers looking to get started with email marketing automation or for those who want to add more structure to their existing strategy.

Click here to signup.

(With this link, it's free for the first 10 who signup)

Thanks again for reading.