Brute Force is a fitness gear company founded on the core belief in functional strength and blending traditional fitness with unconventional training methods. Their sandbags, kettlebells, and weighted vests are created with an emphasis on unstable, shifting load training. Their gear is found all over the world from garage gyms to the front lines of the US Military, and is designed with one purpose: to cultivate peak performance for the functional athlete. 

Brute Force began working with Longplay in May 2021 with the goals to:

1. Increase the percentage of revenue coming from email
2. Have Longplay work with them as an extension of their internal team who could operate autonomously with minimal management through business growth, changes, and new initiatives 
3. Turn email into a more reliable and significant source of revenue through flows
4. Create a great customer experience and brand that was built on quality content & relationship building with customers

Within 6 months, Longplay generated massive wins that transformed the role of email in the business and built for scalable, sustainable growth: 

Big Wins: 

• Increased % of business revenue generated from email by 68.42% (13% total) 
• 2X increase in avg. revenue per campaign
• 53.67% of revenue from email during Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales

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Flow Strategy 

Prior to Longplay, Brute Force had some basic flows set up but most did not have a clear customer journey or a strong brand & content strategy. They were also missing many major flows that could drastically increase revenue. 

Two of the key flows they were missing were the Add To Cart or Abandoned Cart flows. The Longplay team identified these flows to be a top priority for a few reasons:

• Paid ad spend was being increased and starting to scale which meant more customers with lower brand awareness 
• Through conducting a list analysis, we identified that a large portion of the list had not made a purchase before
• Brute Force had a high add to cart rate & high abandoned cart rate relative to their site traffic numbers 

The Longplay team knew these two key flows would help convert users with buyer intent and educate customers who were new to the brand. 

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The Results: These two flows generated over $72,600 within 6 months of launch, with an average revenue per recipient of $7.87 month over month.

Alongside launching these two flows, the Longplay team also launched & optimized multiple other key flows such as Welcome flows, Post-Purchase Nurture flows, Cross-Sell flows, and Winback flows.

Before Longplay, Brute Force was generating 27% of their email revenue from flows and 73% from campaigns.

By the 6 month mark, Longplay’s work had helped build a stronger foundation of revenue from flows so that Brute Force was generating 35% of their email revenue from flows and 65% from campaigns which provided a more reliable, scalable, and sustainable source of revenue that was less reliant on running promotions. 

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6 Month Data (Pre & Post Longplay) 

Campaign Initiatives

Prior to Longplay, most of Brute Force’s emails were promotions & flash sales which were effective at generating revenue short term, but was not a reliable long-term strategy. They were also starting to see the effectiveness of this strategy decline, with each sale generating less revenue than the previous one. 

Longplay refocused the campaign strategy to have a regular email marketing calendar (2-3 emails per week) with a shift towards value-based content and educating customers on different ways to use their products. 

Longplay also rebranded the emails to bring out the Brute Force values and appeal to their audience more with a more gritty, masculine & aspirational brand even for campaigns around promotions & product launches.

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Through Longplay’s work, the average revenue per campaign doubled from $1,340 to $2,687. This is even more notable since the strategy included sending less sales emails.

SandWOD Initiative

One of the unique assets Brute Force had built was SandWOD (Sandbag Workout Of The Day): a daily workout email sent out by their trainers to their SandWOD list.

The SandWOD list was an extremely small segment of their customers but highly engaged with high AOV and LTV. We also noticed that while the SandWOD email only contained content, they sometimes generated significant amounts of revenue. Longplay noticed this was an untapped asset that could be leveraged to further engage customers and generate a regular source of revenue. 

Longplay launched two strategies to leverage Brute Force’s SandWOD emails:

1. Increase list growth of the SandWOD list
2. Increase revenue from SandWOD list

‍Initiative #1: Increase list growth of the SandWOD list

SandWOD emails were incredibly high value but there wasn’t much awareness being driven towards the list. The Longplay team started by testing the broader list to see if there was interest in joining SandWOD by adding modules to other campaigns. 

Once we saw growth in the list through this method, this validated that there was interest from the average email subscriber and there was room to push this initiative further.

Longplay hypothesized that customers who knew about SandWOD may still not subscribe to the list because they’re unsure on the content they’d receive. So we tested campaigns showing customers an example SandWOD email with a call-to-action to get these daily by joining the list.

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Through these two strategies, Longplay grew the SandWOD list by 46% over 6 months.

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Initiative #2: Increase revenue from SandWOD list

After the first step of growing the SandWOD list was complete, the second part of the strategy was to increase the average amount of revenue generated from a SandWOD email. 

The previous SandWOD emails had great content and were getting great engagement but weren’t consistently generating revenue. Since these were getting sent out daily, if we could increase the average revenue per SandWOD email even slightly, the long-term revenue growth would be significant. 

Longplay re-designed a template for the Brute Force trainers to use that was optimized for conversion and on brand. It was critical that the new template was easy to use for their team since they were being used by non-marketers unfamiliar with the platform. 

The new template also included a section pushing customers to get the gear for their workout to improve conversions.

Through these changes of growing the list and optimizing the emails for conversion, the SandWOD emails generated 46% more revenue in a 6-month time period while maintaining the same levels of engagement.

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