Continually growing email leads at the top of the funnel is extremely important for conversion, but having leads is meaningless if emails are not reaching their inbox. See how Sleep Number is tackling deliverability as it exponentially grows its lead database.

Lisa Erickson, Sr. Director CRM, Sleep Number, and Adam Reynolds, Sr. Manager, Email & SMS Marketing, Sleep Number, spoke at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit in December 2018.

Lisa: Nobody does what we do. Strong competitive advantages. Exclusive distribution. In store only. Lifelong customer relationships. people purchase mattresses every 8 to 10 years. Loyalty. Official sleep partner of the NFL. Leader in sleep innovation, delivering the best quality sleep through effortless adjustable comfort and biometric sleep tracking. Visionary in health and wellness. Sleep IQ technology platform. 575 stores.

Adam: I am a sleep number 35, soft end. Wife is a 90 after two children. 

350 million emails we are on track to send this year. We are a super sender. This is twice as many as we sent last year. 60+ triggered campaigns daily. Dynamic and personalized. Sending five unique promotional emails/week. Some a batch and blast, they are all personalized. Our email team is 1 sr. Mgr, 2 developers/campaign managers, 1 data analyst, 1 designer.

Email audiences: insiders, anyone who has purchased a mattress from us. Inquiries, anyone who has provided a full phyliscal mailing address. Easy inquiries: anyone who we just have an email address for And maybe first name/zip code.

New audience tiers: new non responsive, on the list for less than four months. New Inactive, New Active, 4 months is decision time frame for mattresses. Mature audience tiers: mature active, mature inactive. Focus most on these groups. 

Risky audience tiers: not mailing at all. Very risky inactives. Mature non responsive; we will try to work into our promotion emails. Very mature non responsive.

Collect emails with light box signup for new visitors, footer signup on all pages, third-party certification of email address, 4 emails welcome series over two weeks.

In store, people lay down on bed, find which bed most appropriate. We send five email welcome series over six weeks.

Fluent lead generation. Fluent has been a great partner of ours since 2017. Thousands of emails from them at top of funnel. Take ads, get new subscribers and target them. This has become one of our most effective drivers of converting email leads.

Sweepstakes lead generation: internal and third party, opportunity for targeted welcome campaigns.

Event lead generations: NFL events, super bowl, pro bowl, CES, state fairs, home shows, etc. 

“Deliverability: We have a situation.”

Over 25K email addresses added daily. We had deliverability issues with Gmail and Microsoft. Over 50% of subscribers had deliverability issues. Mid-August is start of our biggest sale of the year. Labor Day weekend.

We needed to recover quickly.

We suppressed all Gmail and Microsoft Mature inactive emails. Suppressed non responsives. But had a chance to show interest.

We were back up to 95%. It’s good to have a foundation of your data. Having it all within our ESP, being able to act on it fast.