How to use email to build relationships with your customers at scale

Wholesome Culture is a brand on a mission to inspire sustainable and mindful lifestyles. 

The Wholesome Culture team wanted to focus on building a long-term brand relationship with their customers while continuing to generate revenue in the short term. Prior to working with Longplay, they were struggling with four key challenges:

1. Most of their email marketing was flash-sale style promotions. Effective at generating short-term revenue, sure, but less effective at customer retention and establishing a brand.
    
2. Many of their email flows didn’t create the relationships they wanted with their customers, as they were aggressive sales emails that no longer aligned with their vision.
   
   
3. Supply chain issues were causing orders to be delayed and minimal communication with customers was damaging their service.
   
   
4. They had a lean team spending a large percentage of their time on daily email production, taking their attention away from overall business development.

Within 30 days: 

• Increased open rate by 2.66% 
• Increased click rate by 3.72%
• Increased purchase rate by 0.77%
• Increased total % of email revenue by 12.06% 

"Longplay is a pleasure to work with. Beyond having regularly scheduled calls and working effectively through project management platforms, they were open and willing to jump onto calls with us at any time to make sure that our needs were being met. They took the time to continually implement A/B testing to determine the best methods for continually keeping our customers actively engaged. The Longplay team is courteous and works to meet the goals of each client."

Kirsten Pohle
Director of Operations & Product, Wholesome Culture

What We Did 

Post-Purchase Nurture Flow

We built a post-purchase nurture flow for customers after they placed an order to address the longer shipping times and build a positive customer experience. We used the flow to:

1. Educate customers on their sustainable production process

Wholesome Culture has created a sustainable production process to align with their brand. Their products are created in small quantities, often from recycled materials. Highlighting this not only gave full transparency to their customers, but also started to build brand loyalty as they share the same values. 

2. Incorporate the brand mission into their purchase

Wholesome Culture donates a portion of their profits to animal rescue and environmental organizations. This component of their brand mission wasn’t mentioned frequently in their marketing material. We used the email flow to educate customers on the impact their purchase has made and educate them on the brand mission to build loyal customers. 

‍Weekly Content Emails 

To build a better relationship with customers, we added weekly content emails and reduced the number of promotional emails. The goal was to stop discounting Wholesome Culture and instead promote their brand values while creating an additional, sustainable source of revenue.

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The results:

• Content emails generated 10.4% of all revenue from campaigns within 30 days
• 2 out of 5 content emails generated as much as the average revenue from past promotional emails 
• Content emails brought in an average of 4-6x the revenue of past blog emails they’ve sent

Winback Campaign

One of the challenges Wholesome Culture faced was a low repeat purchase rate. Their campaign targeting strategy only sent emails to recently engaged segments. This meant their lapsed customers segment was growing quickly with no retargeting strategy in place. 

We launched a Winback Campaign to strategically retarget lapsed segments we felt could potentially be re-engaged as active customers without hurting the account’s deliverability. 

The results:

• Winback campaign generated 29.43% of the total revenue from campaigns during the period
• Winback campaigns were one of the higher performing promotion emails during the period, which shows lapsed customers were still interested in the brand but weren’t receiving the right messaging