The success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%, compared to 60-70% for an existing customer. This huge difference, coupled with the fact it costs up to 25x more to acquire a new customer than convert an existing one, means optimising your email strategy to drive retention is an absolute must.

Another factor which makes email an indispensable channel is its status as an owned channel, meaning all the data you collect on your subscribers is yours to keep, review, and analyse. In the face of a looming cookieless future and increased data privacy, it’s essential to build zero and first-party data-gathering into your email journeys.

Absolute figures are dependent on the size of your database, email resource, business turnover and other factors. But what we can say is that email should be generating at least 20% of your online revenue – if it’s not, there are likely gaps in your automations leading to missed lifecycle touch points. We’ve put together a handy guide on how to map your email strategy against your customer lifecycles, which should ensure you’re getting the basics right. For further help and more sophisticated automations and targeting, please get in touch!

Before you can improve your engagement, you need to identify the reason(s) for it being low. Common reasons include sending from a shared domain, sending to your audience as a homogenous group rather than segmenting, poor sending practice leading ISPs to treat your emails as spam, and unwittingly sending to spam traps, causing you to be blacklisted. If you’ve addressed (or not had) these issues and your engagement is still low, you may need to run a mini IP warm-up by only sending to your most engaged contacts for a while, ensuring higher engagement and a positive effect on your sender reputation and inbox placement. For more help with this and other deliverability issues, do reach out to us!

Email is arguably at the centre of your digital channels, in that it interconnects with and can support all of them. An example is the use of email in conjunction with social, not only to promote influencer content, competitions, events etc, but also to feed data back from your ESP to Facebook to create look-a-like audiences for highly targeted paid ads. Another use case is driving traffic to landing pages, particularly where these are part of your content marketing strategy. A third crucial way to use email is to learn more about your subscribers, as data gathered via email is yours to own and use across other channels to build a cohesive customer experience.

It’s quite common for eCommerce brands to feel they’ve outgrown their ESP, particularly if they started out on a smaller scale platform like Mailchimp. When deciding which ESP is going to serve you best going forward, you’ll need to consider price (including scalability), API and platform integrations (e.g. integrating with your eCommerce platform), user friendliness and customer support, and analysis and reporting capabilities. We would also recommend compiling a list of bugbears with your current ESP to discuss with the teams at ESPs you’re considering to make sure you won’t run into the same issues.

Changing ESPs is quite a big undertaking – some platforms have direct integrations to make migrating easier (e.g. you can link Mailchimp to Klaviyo and import a lot of your Mailchimp data directly into Klaviyo), but some require a much more manual process. To help you ensure all bases are covered, we’ve put together a migration planning template you can download here for free.

When you’ve got everything ready to go in your new ESP, you’ll need to begin with a warm-up of your new email infrastructure. This is important to maintain your sender reputation and set your account up with good deliverability and inbox placement.

You’ll need to ensure you have your contacts’ engagement history in your new ESP, whether it’s been imported automatically or manually. This will enable you to create engagement-based segments so you can start by sending to your most engaged subscribers, and finish by sending to the majority of your contacts. You should allow take 4-8 weeks to complete the warm-up depending on the size and quality of your database. As your sending capabilities will be limited during this time, you’ll need to be mindful of the emails you’ve planned to send (i.e. it’s not a good time to promote a site-wide sale!)

We can work with you to improve any element of your email marketing, and beyond! Our bread and butter includes running a database analysis to understand your subscribers and how to target them, setting up and optimising automations, managing your campaigns through briefing, building, and reporting, setting up segments and tailored dynamic content, and ensuring your account set-up is optimised for tracking, reporting and deliverability.

We also have expertise in subscription marketing, loyalty schemes, SMS, reviews strategies, and anything else that can go into an email!

We have an in-house Content & Creative team who can advise on or create graphics, write copy, or run creative workshops to build up your branding and/or storytelling. We also have teams across PPC and SEO, and like to work synergistically as much as possible (whether it’s with your teams or our own).

Brands typically come to s360 when their ambition isn't being matched by their current agency. We have an agile team of 30 based in London with 300 specialists in the rest of the group. Changing agencies is never a fun process but whether your turnover ranges from £10m to £500m, your brand and budgets are in safe hands.

We don't do 'set and forget'. Instead we hire smart and driven people have an insatiable attitude to improve. As the architects of Ecom Leaders, a community of marketers, our conversations with you will be fuelled with industry trends and market insights. Expect our team to use these to proactively evolve your strategy; suggesting new consumer segments, a creative refresh, adding a new channel or launching into an emerging region. This has helped keep our average client growth rate at +18% for the last 3 years.

We aim to be a true extension of your team. An average individual's career at s360 lasts 5.5 years, meaning our clients avoid your the standard agency team churn. From day one we kick off with 'brand immersion' to understand how you tick, replaced by regular hotdesking and collaborative planning sessions to keep our partnership strong year-after-year. This might explain why we have client relationships stretching back to 2014.

Every agency has access to tools, platforms and methodologies. Where our s360 innovative solutions are different is how its born out of 20 years of only partnering with international consumer brands. We use s360's group benchmarking data to understand where your brand is underperforming versus category demand. We carry out FY budgeting using Media-Mix-Modelling tailored to an omnichannel buying journey. We evolve our own channel optimisations over time by plugging in AI, machine learning and other tactics that are proven to work across similar brands to you.