During our recent LinkedIn Live event, “How to Ride the Wave of Retention This Summer,” our team faced some major technical difficulties. As a result, our Amazing Women in eCommerce (AWIE) speakers weren’t able to share their expert insights on generating sales during the summer sales slump and leveraging SMS and email marketing to drive retention.
But our Product Marketing Manager, Email, Olivia Staub connected with our speakers — Dallas Parsons, Director of Customer Experience at Mixhers and Jenny Watson, Owner and CEO at The Elderberry Co. — to get the inside scoop!
How do you optimize your email and SMS marketing strategies during the summer months when attention is lower?
Dallas Parsons: At Mixhers, we believe that it’s essential to adopt a thoughtful and engaging approach. Some ways we approach this are by emphasizing summer-related themes, such as vacations, outdoor activities, or refreshing experiences — which can capture attention and resonate with recipients’ seasonal mindset.
Summertime is often associated with relaxation and leisure, so keeping emails and SMS content light, informative, and visually appealing can help maintain engagement. Additionally, incorporating exclusive summer promotions, limited-time offers, or unique incentives can create a sense of urgency and drive immediate action. By tailoring email and SMS strategies to align with the summer atmosphere while providing value and enticing incentives, we have found great success in maintaining engagement and driving revenue.
Jenny Watson: Our content marketing strategy emphasizes the idea that health is not limited to specific seasons, but rather, it’s an ongoing aspect of people’s lives. Instead of altering our funnels, we prioritize the use of blogs and user-generated content to effectively communicate the advantages of our products and reach a wider audience.
Relationship building is also key during the summertime; therefore, when we’re creating blog content for our customers, we ensure that it adds value, empowers our shoppers, and focuses on building connections. By investing in consistent communication, we encourage lifestyle opportunities focused on getting outside and keeping families healthy and active.
How do you use SMS and email to create personalized journeys for your loyal and returning customers?
Jenny: Our marketing strategy revolves around tailored funnels specific to each product with a focus on complementary products. By utilizing these funnels, we aim to upsell and encourage larger cart purchases, maximizing the value for our customers.
We also create unique experiences for our customers by opening up early-access sales to product subscribers as well as loyalty customers. Doing so allows us to make our customers feel special — and because they’re the reason our brand is so strong, we do everything we can to provide engaging experiences for them.
Dallas: By leveraging data and customer insights, we can ensure that each communication either via SMS or email resonates with our customers’ unique preferences and interests. Personalization begins with utilizing segmentation and tailoring content accordingly.
Yotpo’s segmentation tool is so powerful for this! We create different customer journeys for both email and SMS and we’re able to send targeted messages based on past purchases, browsing history, or engagement patterns. We have also implemented automated workflows triggered by specific actions or dates, like birthdays, subscriber milestones, etc. to surprise and delight loyal customers with personalized messages and exclusive rewards.
By consistently delivering these personalized messages, we are able to foster deeper connections, strengthen customer loyalty, and create truly memorable experiences for our valued customers.
Jenny, we know The Elderberry Co. recently made the switch to Yotpo Email from another well-known email provider. We’d love to hear from you about how switching to Yotpo Email might change your strategies this summer compared to last.
Jenny: The seamless integration of the complete suite of Yotpo into our email system has proven to be a tremendous advantage since migrating.
Between the email editor and the integration with Canva, Yotpo Email will allow us to save time and money so that we can focus more on strategy. Simply having SMS and email in one platform makes so much of a difference — now, we only have to segment our subscribers once and we have one complete view of our customers via dashboard analytics. Plus, the Reviews Block makes it easy for us to add customer reviews directly to our emails, and with Loyalty Personalization, we can customize our email banners to include customers’ loyalty points or VIP tier.
Dallas, since Mixhers uses Yotpo for Reviews and Loyalty as well — we’d love to hear what some of the benefits are of having a platform approach and what unique strategies this unlocks for SMS and email marketing?
Dallas: We love how easy it is to include Reviews and testimonials directly into our text messages, abandoned cart flows, and product recommendations to enhance credibility and influence purchasing decisions.
Another benefit is Yotpo’s data and analytics, which allows us to create highly segmented and personalized email and SMS campaigns and flows based on customers’ points balance, referral and review history, or loyalty tier. This allows us to send exclusive gifts, rewards, and messages to customers. This personalized approach not only increases customer engagement but also fosters a sense of exclusivity and appreciation. Whether it’s promoting new products to loyal customers or re-engaging inactive customers, Yotpo helps us unlock unique strategies to maximize the impact of SMS and email marketing, ultimately, driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
About Amazing Women in eCommerce
This Q&A is part of our Amazing Women in eCommerce (AWIE) series, in which we celebrate women who are founders, leaders, marketers, rising stars, and innovators in the D2C space. As a community, AWIE also invests in future generations of women leaders by raising money for Girls Inc — and we’ve raised over $150k to date! To learn more about AWIE, join the conversation anytime via our monthly newsletter and our Slack community on womeninecomm.com.
