Client
Year
Deliverables
Situation
Like many small businesses, Concetti’s lean but mighty team often found themselves juggling marketing responsibilities in addition to their day-to-day design work. After approximately one year of consistent growth, the Detroit-based interior design strategy studio partnered with our team in August 2022 to support their evolving communications needs, including email marketing.
At this point, Concetti was already doing a great job communicating with their email audience frequently. In fact, they were sending several emails out each month covering various topics – like project launches, client testimonials, giveaways and more.
Before taking on content creation, our first step was consolidating these efforts into a monthly e-newsletter. This way, we could help them streamline efficiencies and add consistency to give Concetti’s email audience a clearer idea of when to expect communications from them.
Plus, we also had the benefit of an already engaged email audience – their January to July 2022 average open rate was 38% – well above the industry-wide average of 21.33% (according to MailChimp’s industry benchmarks). However, we wanted to take it a step further than adding efficiency and creating the content each month.
So, where else can an e-newsletter go when engagement is already strong? Our approach was something that’s helped us increase engagement time and time again: segmentation.
Approach
We began the segmentation process with a re-engagement campaign prompting existing contacts to complete a brief survey to answer whether they’re interested in commercial or residential projects, or both. After collecting that information, we worked with our client contacts at Concetti and used their thorough knowledge of their email list to split remaining contacts who didn’t complete the survey into commercial design, residential design and “both” segments.
Once we had the commercial and residential segments established, we used a sign-up page on their website to automate the segmentation process when gaining new subscribers. This landing page also introduced a third “both” segment for new subscribers who indicated interest in learning about both residential and commercial projects.
RESIDENTIAL
COMMERCIAL
From there, we began shifting our monthly strategy from a single e-newsletter to three separate email campaigns, with subject lines, preview text and content tailored to each individual segment. Although several months of e-newsletter campaigns have proven each audience responds well to vastly different subject lines and preview text, this isn’t always the case in terms of content.
Depending on the blog content, media coverage and Concetti announcements available, some months’ residential and commercial newsletter content is completely different. However, the primary difference in most months’ campaigns are the introductory blog post and angle…yet another example of how remixing and repurposing content helps us add efficiencies!
Results
In comparison to Concetti’s January to July 2022 e-newsletters’ 38% average open rate, the non-segmented September 2022 to February 2023 campaigns created by Franco generated an average open rate of 39.4% based on subject line and preview text experimentation alone.
Following segmentation beginning in March 2023, the three segments’ average open rate has increased to 42%, with the most engaged segment’s open rate averaging 43%.
