How Macy’s Increased Email Marketing Open Rates and Click Through Rates

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How Macy’s Increased Email Marketing Open Rates and Click Through Rates

Bryan Karas

October 1, 2018

A lot of people would argue against this, but email is still the number one channel to reach and engage your customer. Unfortunately, email marketing just isn’t as sexy as creating Instagram Stories Ads or Canvas ads…

According to a new study from Yes Lifestyle Marketing, 47 percent of consumers rate email as the most preferred channel for brand communication.

So how can Ecom companies who struggle with email marketing reinvigorate a lackluster marketing strategy and bring new life to a channel that’s ripe for sales? Easy. Scrub your email list, segment users by engagement and sales, test new subject lines based of customer activity and continuously improve content, copy, landing pages etc.

Whew – that’s a lot. Let’s dig in and simplify…

Time Buckets (of inactivity)?

First, Macy’s segmented their email list by activity (or inactivity) and the messages that were sent out were more focused on engagement than sales.

The buckets consisted of people who had:

Not opened an email in 13 or more months
Not opened or clicked on an email in seven to 12 months
Purchased from Macys.com but had never interacted with a promotional email
Opted into an email program but had not yet engaged

Macy’s also made a point not to sell to these people. The goal was to get them to re-engage. They used subject headlines like “We Miss You” and “Please Verify Today” to request email confirmation instead of a simply sending off a sales coupon code.

Next, Macy’s looked at open and CTR data to find the optimal time to send their emails. They moved the delivery time from 5am – 7am in the morning to the average time in the past six months when a consumer opened and clicked.

The Magic of Macy’s

With all these disruptor Ecom companies shaking things up, don’t sleep on an old dinosaur like Macy’s when it comes to innovation.

Stephanie Lau, vice president, retention marketing at Macy’s said their new email reactivation campaign resulted in a six percent lift in active subscribers – they also saw a nine percent increase in open rates and a 14 percent increase in click-through-rates.

When you think about how large the Macy’s email list could possibly be those numbers actually are pretty meaningful…

10 Creative Examples of Companies Re-Engaging Their Cold Email Lists

Although scrubbing your lists, segmenting emails, tailoring messages, and using data to test frequency, etc are super important when creating a winback campaign – so is the creative. Take a look at how companies like Lowe’s, Birchbox, Grammarly, Path and others used creative to winback customers.