• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, June 1, 2017

According to an analysis of 1.5 billion emails from 1,000 US companies, by Klaviyo, success rides on a combination of segmentation (deliberate, selected mailings,) and automation (triggered mailings by customer behavior.)

 In the aggregate, says the report, the companies studied made over $230 million from purchases attributed to email in Q4, 2016, 27% of their overall store revenue, on average, during that time.

The companies with greater annual revenue have a greater percentage of their revenue coming from email, and they also make more revenue for each email they send, with higher revenue per recipient, says the report. Those with annual 2016 revenue of $10M or more had an average revenue per recipient of just over twenty cents, bringing in nearly a third of their store revenue via email in Q4.

Getting the most revenue out of your list is about growing your total number of engaged contacts, says the report. These are people who are happy to get your emails, and have a track record of opening them.

And, studying the lists and email habits of the companies in the sample, that larger companies have bigger email lists, and have proactively divided their lists into a greater number of segments. This increases their capacity for sending highly targeted, relevant emails.

On average, we found that companies with an annual revenue of under $100K in 2016 had 13.36 segments.

• Those with annual revenue of $100K to $1M had 29.96
• Companies with $1M to $10M had 43.96
• Companies with more than $10M annual revenue in 2016 had an average of 133.97 segments.

Building strategically tailored segments is a necessary part of a winning strategy for a number of reasons. When you send more relevant messages, you’re supplying content that the recipients are more interested in

Comparing email campaigns sent in Q4 to less than a quarter of a company’s total email addresses to those sent to more than three-quarters of the total (a more traditional “blast”), campaigns sent to a narrow slice of a store’s contacts outperformed campaigns sent to most of the list, providing better open rates, click-through rates, and revenue per recipient.

The fact is, says the report, the most successful companies are using more segmentation and driving more of their total revenue from email. So as a strategy, “batch and blast” is not the best bet.

(By email campaigns, according to the report, means emails a company sends out proactively, including customized sale and promo emails, newsletters, holiday messages, and updates.)

The companies studied brought in over $50 million in Q4 using automation, says the report. They set up behavior-triggered email sequences, or automated email flows, in advance and let them run. Once the flows were up and running, says the report, the marketing teams at these companies could focus on the busy holiday season while the emails essentially sent themselves.

The flows automatically sent on their own when a customer triggered them by:

• Leaving items in a shopping cart
• Purchasing from a certain collection
• Going for a certain number of months without making a purchase

Email Types Considered For Additional Revenue

• Welcome series: A way to bring in new customers
• Abandoned cart emails: Sent to shoppers who fail to complete a purchase within a designated amount of time. (7 out of 10 shopping carts get abandoned, says the report)
• Browse abandonment emails: Sent to shoppers who view products but did not add them to their cart 
• Winback emails, (Re-engagement emails): Sent to customers who made a purchase (3, 6, or 12 months ago) but not since

The highest revenue per recipient was found in abandoned cart emails sent by stores with an average order size of over $200: $14.14. Considering abandoned cart emails, here’s how much revenue the companies studied a brought in, on average, in Q4 simply from abandoned cart flows:

Setting up even sophisticated abandoned cart email flows is relatively simple. It’s remarkable to see how much revenue comes in as a result of investing some time and effort up front, concludes the report.

For additional information from Klaviyo, please visit here.