• Part 1: Email Automation Flows
• Part 2: Email Campaigns That Convert
• Part 3: Email Deliverability & Email List Hygiene

You can’t control tariffs, but you can control your email segmentation strategy. Uncertainty around tariffs is driving costs up, and making awkward customer conversations necessary.

But an effective email segmentation strategy is one of the best tools you have to soften the blow. Rather than blasting a generic “sorry, prices went up” email, brands that segment by location, purchase history, and price sensitivity can reframe a negative into a moment of trust.

What Tariffs Actually Mean for Ecommerce

Before we get to email segmentation strategy, let’s clarify the impact we’re trying to mitigate.

Tariffs (like the recent increases on Chinese imports) raise the cost of goods. If your business sources products or components from overseas, your COGS (cost of goods sold) goes up. This often means one of three things:

• You raise prices.
• You reduce margins.
• You cut corners on quality, shipping, or packaging.

Most brands pick the first. But price hikes come with a cost, especially when announced poorly. That’s where smart segmentation matters.

The Wrong Way: One Email, One Panic

Many brands send a single price hike email to their entire list. It usually reads something like:

“Due to rising costs, we’re increasing our prices starting next week. We appreciate your understanding.”

It’s vague and impersonal. And it will frustrate many of your customers. Worse, it treats loyal, casual, high-value and price-sensitive customers all as one segment. But their reactions most definitely will not be the same.

If you want to preserve trust (and revenue), you need to segment strategically.

Email Segmentation Strategy: 3 Key Tips for Tariff Uncertainty

Let’s break this down into actionable segmentation strategies.

1: Location: Speak Directly to Affected Customers

Tariffs are often country-specific, and sometimes even region-specific. If only your US customers are affected, don’t send a price change notice to your international audience. And within the US, if tariffs disproportionately impact certain states or zip codes (based on local fulfilment hubs or product distribution), tailor your outreach accordingly.

Tactical tip:

Use your email service provider (ESP) to create a segment of US-based customers (or wherever the tariff applies) and adjust your message for them. Start your email with clarity:

“Hey {{ first_name }}, a quick update for our U.S. customers…”

Then clearly explain:

• What’s changing: “Starting October 1st, select imported goods will reflect a 6-10% price increase.”
• Why: “This is due to new tariffs on specific product categories.
• What’s not changing: “Shipping policies, domestic product pricing, and your loyalty rewards remain the same.”

If your fulfilment or manufacturing varies by region, you can go deeper. Let customers in unaffected areas know they’re safe from price changes.

2: Purchase History: Reward Loyalty with Advance Access or Bundles

If someone just bought from you, they’re invested. If they’ve bought from you 5+ times, or part of your loyalty program, they’re a brand advocate. These customers are more likely to understand pricing realities, but they still deserve context and appreciation.

Instead of a cold announcement, give them a heads up with beneifts.

Segment: Repeat customers (2+ purchases in the last 12 months), loyalty program members, or customers with high total spend or above-average order value (AOV).

Email Angle (2 Approaches)

Option 1: Transparency & Fairness

“You’ve come a long way with us, and we truly value your support. That’s why we want to be transparent: due to rising import costs, select prices will change starting October 1st. You have until then to shop at the current price.”

• Communicates appreciation and clarity.
• Sets a hard deadline to encourage action.
• Feels honest, not promotional.

Option 2: Loyalty as Early Access

“You’ve been with us a while, so we wanted to give you a heads up”.

• Let readers shop current pricing before it goes up.
• Offer bundle deals to help them stock up.
• Frame this as a loyalty perk: 48-hour early access before prices change.

3: Price Sensitivity: Cushion the Blow With Alternatives

You likely have customers who always buy when there’s a sale, use discounts, or shop lower-tier SKUs. These shoppers are price sensitives. So they’re most at risk of churnin after a tariff-driven price increase.

This is where your email segmentation strategy can pay dividends.

How to identify them:

• Always use discount codes.
• Only purchase during major sales.
• High cart abandonment rate on full-price items.

What to send them:

• Lower-cost alternatives in the same category (“If X is out of budget, here’s Y.”)
• Upcoming sale calendar or loyalty perks.
• Subscription or bundle options that lock in current pricing.

Email snippet:

“We know price matters. So we’ve put together a few ways to keep your routine going without breaking the bank…”

The goal is to retain, not upsell. Think: helpful, not defensive. And it’s also a great opportunity to invite price-sensitive customers into your loyalty program, where they can save more and get access to exclusive deals that help stretch their budget further.

Bonus: Combine Email Segments for Precision Outreach

You don’t have to stop at one segmentation filter. Some email service providers (ESPs) like Klaviyo let you stack rules.

You can try:

• Location + purchase history: “US-based VIPs”
• Price sensitivity + recent cart activity: “At-risk bargain shoppers”
• Email engagement: “Opened or clicked in the past 90 days”.

Then tailor the tone. Your high-value US customers can get a softer, more collaborative message:

“As one of your most valued customers, we wanted you to hear it from us first…”

Whereas price-sensitive customers might get practical help:

“We’ve found a few cost-effective swaps that might work even better.”

What You Gain From a Smart Email Segmentation Strategy

Tariffs aren’t your fault. But how you communicate about them is your responsibility. Smart segmentation helps you to:

• Reduce unsubscribes and complaints.
• Keep high-value customers informed, not blindsided.
• Prevent churn from price-sensitive segments.
• Maintain brand trust during volatility.
• Even drive sales with tactical urgency.

Tariffs Are a Trust Test: Email Segmentation Strategy Helps You Pass

In some ways, tariffs are a stress test for your email strategy. They reveal whether you treat your list like one amorphous blog, or a group of real people with different habits and expectations.

Email segmentation strategy isn’t just a revenue tactic, or a way to make work for your email marketing team. It’s how you match the right messaging to the right parts of your audience. Getting it right is a great way to show that you respect the community you’re cultivating around your brand.

If you’re rethinking how to talk to your list during tariff season, we’ll help you do it with strategy, not stress. Book a call and let us help you get this right.

Smart, right?

Well, maybe not.

Depending on how your setup works, you might be excluding real customers across your campaigns. Even worse, you could be misattributing revenue in flows, while those same profiles still enter the automation. Either way, you’re getting an inconsistent picture of performance, and you may be losing out on real revenue.

In this blog, we’ll break down how inbox security systems can skew your email data, and what that means for your revenue attribution. We’ll also look at why some filters might be doing more harm than good.

So What are Bot Clicks, Really?

On most email platforms (like Klaviyo), a bot click is a link click that appears to come from a non-human interaction, like a script or automated process.

But not all “bot clicks” come from actual bots.

Some inbox providers, like Gmail or corporate email servers, use security filters that automatically click every link in incoming emails. This is a safety measure to scan for malicious content.

The problem is that email service providers (ESPs) can’t always tell the difference. If a security system clicks a link on behalf of a human user, Klaviyo still logs it as a bot click and flags the profile. That usually leads to removing the profile from the list.

So, even if that real customer opens, reads, and purchases later…you might never email them again. They’re on the bot list, and they won’t get future email marketing campaigns and email marketing flows.

When Bot Clicks Exclusion Goes Wrong: Real Revenue Horror Stories

We recently helped a store who had changed their attribution model from 3 to 5 days. They had also begun to exclude bot clicks, which they had not done before.

A couple of totally predictable things happened:

1. Email-attributed revenue dropped. This is inevitable, because Klaviyo was now linking less revenue to emails.
2. Engagement also dropped. Again, this was not surprising: at least some of the opens they had been getting were genuine bot clicks and machine opens.

But then we noticed something far more important: website sessions coming from Klaviyo also dropped.

After digging in, we found that the majority (yes, MAJORITY) of these profiles were real customers. They had been engaging and shopping with the brand before the change. But the bot clicks exclusion had cut them out of all email communication.

These exclusions were cutting valuable (human) subscribers out of the loop. These were profiles who had:

• Opened multiple emails
• Clicked multiple links (beyond the security auto-clicks)
• Completed purchases

They weren’t bot clicks. They were buyers.

Here’s an example of a profile that ended up on the exclusion list, even though there was a purchase history for the profile.

Okay, that looks like a pretty small order. Maybe the data clarity we got from excluding bot clicks was worth it?

Not quite. Here’s another example, but this time a loyal customer whose profile had triggered clickbot=true.

Imagine the impact of this kind of thing at scale. Excluding hundreds or even thousands of active profiles based on inaccurate bot identification could wreck your attribution model and flatten your revenue.

We even found a new customer who had converted via the welcome flow. After entering that flow, the system misidentified it as a bot click. This customer wouldn’t get any more future communication. And the brand would have cheated itself out of repurchase revenue.

Apple Privacy Opens: The Other Silent Revenue Killer

It’s not just bot clicks that brands need to worry about.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) makes a complex picture even messier. It preloads email content on Apple devices, even if the recipient never opens the message.

That means:

• Opens appear as “machine activity”
• Klaviyo (and other ESPs) can’t always tell if the recipient actually read the mail
• Some marketers choose to exclude Apple Privacy opens from email flows and email campaigns

But again, this can be dangerous.

It’s possible for a recent customer to end up in the “machine opens” category. So, if you exclude Apple Privacy Opens from your sends, you could be excluding active customers and losing out on revenue.

Here’s an example of a one-time customer that the system thinks is a machine open, even though they have placed an order.

At the end of the day, it’s better to have slightly noisy data than to lose out on revenue opportunities.

One of our expert email marketing strategists, Liana Mouradian, puts it like this:

“Consistency is more important than precision. If your metrics stay stable over time, even with some inflation, you’ll still spot the trends that matter.”

So Should You Ever Exclude Bot Clicks?

Yes, but only strategically.

In some rare cases, filtering might be necessary:

• During a list bombing attack
• If you notice a surge of invalid or junk profiles
• If a deliverability consultant recommends it for list hygiene or domain health reasons

But even then, proceed with caution. Flagging a security filter as a bot is a blunt tool. Unless you’re pairing it with additional signals, like no site activity, no purchase behavior, or hard bounces, you could be throwing out valuable profiles.

How to Check if You’re Excluding Real Customers

Here’s what we recommend for every Klaviyo user:

1: Audit your bot clicks regularly

Go into your database and identify any profiles triggering the bot classification. Check if they:

• Have a purchase history
• Engaged with multiple emails
• Revisited your site

You can establish this by segmenting these profiles. For example, filter for profiles that met “clickbot=true in the last 30 days” AND have ever placed an order. Those are customers, so keep them.

For active subscribers, you can segment further by digging into engagement levels like “active on site,” and “viewed product”.

We recommend having these botclick+MPP segments in place, and monitoring them regularly.

2: Don’t panic over inflated open/click rates

It’s a trade-off. Yes, some metrics may appear inflated. But excluding too aggressively can cost you more than just some messy data.

• Use engagement and conversion data: Look beyond opens and clicks. Track sessions, add-to-carts, and purchases to get a fuller picture.
• Validate before excluding: If a profile is flagged but has a recent purchase or strong behavioral signals, reconsider excluding it.
• Adjust segmentation logic: For example, instead of excluding all Apply Privacy Opens, exclude only those with no other engagement for 90+ days.

Don’t Let “Clean Data” Kill Your Conversions

Email marketing is messy. Between bots, privacy tools, and engagement filters, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s noise.

But we’ve learned that over-correcting is just as dangerous as under-analyzing. The best move is a balanced, evidence-based segmentation strategy that combines behavioral signals, clear exclusion logic, and ongoing monitoring.

If you’re not sure whether you’re excluding the right profiles (or the wrong ones), Hustler Marketing can help you audit your lists, segments, attribution settings and engagement filters to make sure you’re not ghosting your best customers.

Talk to our expert team about how to clean up your email data without sacrificing revenue.

Your Klaviyo dashboard is your best friend when it comes to figuring out what your customers are up to, what they care about, and how you can reach them more effectively.

Tracking key email marketing metrics is essential to knowing whether your email marketing is working – or if you’re working with an agency, figuring out the ROI on the email marketing services you’re getting. 

Here, we’re looking at need-to-know email marketing metrics, what they mean, and how you should be tracking them to maximize retention revenue. 

Email Marketing KPIs to Keep an Eye On (all the time, basically):

Once your email marketing channel is big enough, it will generate a LOT of data. There are many ways to slice that up, but here are the email marketing metrics to prioritize on the daily.

Let’s start with the easiest: how many people are opening your emails?

1: Email Open Rate

This might be the simplest (handiest) of email marketing metrics. Your email open rate (OR) is the percentage of subscribers who opened your emails. A bad OR could show that your subject lines work. It could also suggest problems with deliverability. 

How to Boost Your Email Open Rate

• Test different subject lines, preheaders, and sender names.
• Segment your list to target more relevant content to specific groups for better engagement.
• Regularly clean your list to ensure you’re sending each profile the type of content they’re most likely to care about.

2: Click Through Rate (CTR) & Click Rate (CR)

Click Rate (CR) is an important indicator that helps you avoid the spammer label. It calculates the percentage of people who open an email and click on a link, relative to the total number of emails you deliver. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks received compared to the total number of views or impressions. (In email marketing, these are essentially opens). CTR provides insight into the effectiveness of your email’s content after that initial attention grab. This helps you understand how compelling your email content is.

Here’s the formula for CTR:

CTR = (Total Clicks / Total Emails Delivered) * 100.

How to Interpret Click Rate and Click Through Rate

A high CR may indicate that your email subject line or preheader text is enticing enough to encourage recipients to click through, while a high CTR may indicate that your email content is engaging and relevant to your audience.

Check in on these daily, because sudden drops could be a bad sign. By tracking both metrics, you can identify areas where your email campaigns are performing well and areas that need improvement.

3: Revenue Per Recipient (RPR): Digging Deeper Than OR & CTR

Open rates and click-through rates don’t directly tell you if a campaign generated revenue. To figure that out, you need to dig a little deeper. RPR is is a key email marketing metric that measures the average revenue that comes from each person who receives an email. It helps you understand how effective your campaigns are at the individual recipient level.

Let’s imagine a Black Friday early bird sale opener email to demonstrate the calculation.

• Total Email Sends: 50,000
• Total Bounces (to exclude): 2,000
• Total Revenue: $150,000

Your RPR is is the total revenue divided by the number of valid recipients. In this case, that gives us an RPR of $3.13, meaning each recipient contributed an average of $3.13 to the total revenue.

How to Use RPR to Improve Campaigns:

1. Segment your audience: Calculate RPR for different customer segments to see where your strongest ROI lies.
2. A/B test: Compare RPR across variations of subject lines, offers, or CTAs.
3. Timing: Analyze RPR across send times and days to determine optimal email scheduling.
4. Content Optimization: Identify emails that had higher RPR and replicate what worked—whether it was specific product recommendations or scarcity-driven copy.

4: How Do You Check Email Deliverability?

None of what we have just said matters if your emails aren’t landing in primary. Email deliverability is the bedrock of an effective email marketing service. One of the easiest ways to track it is to watch average ORs and CRs. If you notice a notable decrease on either of these, it’s a good idea to check in on deliverability, and dip into other email marketing KPIs that you probably aren’t checking daily.

Let’s look at those next.

Email Marketing KPIs That Deserve a Weekly Check-In (or a deep dive when you notice anomalies)

Spam Complaints

It hurts when people don’t open your emails. But it’s even worse when they mark them as spam. If your spam rate gets too high, inbox providers may block your account or take some other action against you. Here are some mistakes that can spike your spam complaints:

• Irrelevant content that doesn’t match the interests of the readers in each segment of your list.
• Spammy email copywriting: words like “free,” “act now,” “guarantee,” or excessive capitalization and exclamation marks.
• Clickbait subject lines that don’t match the offer in the email itself.
• High sending frequency: people don’t like to receive too many emails in a short space of time.

Number of Unsubscribes

Although a high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging, it can actually be a good sign. If people are able to find the unsubscribe option and remove themselves without friction, you’re doing well in terms of email design and format. A trustworthy eCommerce store will generally get more unsubscribes than spam complaints, as consumers choose to leave the sales funnel. 

List Growth Rate

Your email list is the backbone of your email marketing efforts, and tracking its growth over time is crucial. The list growth rate shows whether your efforts to attract new subscribers and retain current ones are paying off. A stagnant or shrinking list indicates it’s time to re-evaluate your acquisition strategies. By focusing on growing your list through engaging content and smart lead generation tactics, you ensure your campaigns continue reaching new and interested audiences.

Bounce Rate

For any email campaign, it is important to check and track the bounce rate, which measures how many subscribers did not receive your email. Tracking this metric helps identify soft and hard bounces, which is essential for assessing the quality of your subscriber list and maintaining the success of your campaigns. Ideally, you want your bounce rate to stay below 1%.

Some People Track Calories. We Track Email Marketing KPIs. Day In, Day Out.

A high-ROI email marketing service needs to be effective, transparent, and continually evolving to do better. That’s the model we have built at Hustler Marketing – and it’s how we have won major industry awards.

But there’s no secret: we just stay focused on email marketing KPIs that grow our clients’ businesses. That, and or exceptionally low account manager-to-client ratio, makes us the email marketing service of choice for eCommerce brands in virtually every niche. Alongside our expertise in email marketing KPIs, we also specialize in UGC ads, providing a potent combination of retention and acquisition tactics. Contact our team to learn more about how the one-two punch of KPI-driven email marketing and UGC advertising could help you exceed your goals for the next quarter and beyond.

So we won’t bore you with “top Black Friday statistics”. Instead, we’re going to help you to take a hard look at your Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) email marketing strategy to find potential flaws that could end up costing you in retention revenue. 

Black Friday 2024 is going to be the biggest one ever. And it’s not our first rodeo. It’s more like our fifth as an agency, and for some of our experts, that number is embarrassingly high…but so is the revenue we’ve helped our clients to achieve. For BFCM 2023, that figure topped $12.5 million. If there’s one thing we know how to do right, it’s BFCM. 

So we’ve come up with a list of misconceptions about this once-in-a-year opportunity. Under each one, you’ll find some practical steps you can ask your marketing team to take to course-correct. 

Black Friday Email Myth #1: Send Big, or Go Home

Black Friday is stressful. For everyone. 

And you don’t have to be squaring up with your neighbor for a TV to feel it. As marketers, we all get that feeling around late August…

So it’s understandable that many email marketing managers want to throw all caution to the wind and blast their list.

This may generate a spike in sales. But it’s like a sugar high: it will wear off. When it does, you may be in a worse position, because your deliverability will tank. You may also burn relationships with VIPs: they’ll know if you add them to a generic blast, and they will not like it.

You need to take risks, but they have to be calculated. Every move you make needs to preserve your email deliverability. So you need to be tactical about this (keep reading for details in myth #3).

Black Friday Email Myth #2: People Don’t Want to Hear About Black Friday Until October (at the earliest)

Like all myths, this one contains more than a grain of truth. Nobody loves opening LinkedIn in September to see clickbaity posts about some influencer’s “Black Friday blueprint that earned $20 million”.

Now for the Nuance

Here comes the “but”. You don’t need to be in-your-face to start warming up your subscribers. And in fact, if you don’t warm them up, big-ticket discounts may not be enough to motivate them. 

This is why re-engagement is absolutely critical for BFCM success, and it has to start way before the sale itself. We always encourage the Account Managers in our team at Hustler Marketing to start in September, and definitely prioritize it through October. There are of course exceptions: if re-engagement is cost your deliverability too much, you may need to do this differently.

Get that re-engagement flow in ship shape, and start rekindling cold profiles, whatever you have to do. If your re-engagement segment is big (yay!), break it into smaller ones to protect deliverability and avoid hurting your main KPIs while you increase send volumes. 

Also: Focus on Acquisition

September is also the time to start aggressively building your list through paid ads – especially UGC. Subscribers who come in through that door are great, because UGC raises credibility and increases the likelihood of conversio like almost nothing else can.

Black Friday Email Myth #3: Size is All That Matters

Yes, your offer needs to be good.

No, it’s not all about the percentage.

Discerning buyers know that this probably isn’t really their only chance to save. They also want value for money – and they’re savvy about what those deals look like. Many are skeptical about how much they’re actually saving.

If you’re thinking “70% OFF” first, and “what do customers want?” second, you will lose out to a more strategic competitor who’s offering a smart bundle, or some other deal that really does stand out. 

You don’t need to rely exclusively on huge discounts if you’re getting people excited well in advance.

Warm-up Tips & Strategies

Here are some of our Account Managers’ favorites: 

• Early bird lists (with genuinely good offers to reward your VIPs)
• Mystery gift every week in october
• A gift card with in-store credit (we call this the “Willy Wonka”)

Pro Tip: Once the sale starts, exclude recent buyers. If you don’t, you might see a spike in returns as people return their recent purchases to get the discount.

You’re welcome.

Black Friday Email Myth #4: Design is All That Matters – People Aren’t Reading Your Emails, So Don’t Sweat the Copy

How often have you heard things like this in the past week?

• People have short attention spans. 
• They want their Black Friday email offers to get to the point. 
• A CTA must be visible at all times, in every scroll.

They’re all true. But like all generalizations, they don’t always hold up. Sometimes the things people actually do pay attention to aren’t the flashy or bite-sized things, but the stuff that speaks directly to them.

Enter: World Class Copywriters (we have a bunch of them)

That’s why you have great copywriters writing your emails (or if you don’t, you need to talk to us about ours – seriously). We’ve seen simple, but well written and personalized plain text emails skyrocket sales in this period – and at other surprising times of the year.

Plain text emails do 3 things at once:

• Give readers a break from sale fatigue.
• Tell your subscribers that you know who they are – and you care.
• Set you apart from your competitors, who are probably too scared to try this.

My advice: keep these fun, even sassy. If you’re doing the “letter from the CEO”, get the CEO (whether that’s you or your boss) to actually read.

People have a spidey sense for authenticity – and they’re craving it in their inbox.

Related Myth: Black Friday Email Design is all Black and Red

It’s almost always a mistake to drown your brand’s own visual language in “sale” colors. 

You need to strike a balance between pushing the sale with a strong palette, and preserving what makes your brand unique.

If you’re not sure what I mean, this gorgeously on-brand email sums it up:

Myth #5: Cyber Monday is Black Friday’s Forgotten Stepchild

Last year, Cyber Monday hit record-breaking sales, pulling in over $12 billion in online purchases. That makes it the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history. 

Unlike Black Friday, which often goes with a physical store presence or hybrid approaches, Cyber Monday is all about digital. If you’re an ecommerce brand, that gives you an open field to compete with top-tier retailers – and WIN. 

And it’s not just for tech brands either: check out our Cyber Monday email design guide to learn more about how non-cyber brands can actually make this day all about them.

The Black Friday 2024 Hustle Starts Now

I hope you’ve found these myths useful. There’s a lot more I could say about the biggest event in the eCommerce calendar, but I’ve kept you long enough (thanks for reading).

At Hustler Marketing, we really want to help you to make the most of your Black Friday 2024. But what we want even more is to be in the trenches with you, working alongside your team to explode your email revenue. 

How about that?

Many of us roll our eyes when we see an email in our inbox asking us to spend time answering questions about a brand – even a brand that we like.

And the discount offer in a survey email subject line usually sounds too good to be true (“100 free pairs up for grabs!”).

But (you knew it was coming) – there is a right way to do customer survey emails. And they can help you to understand your customers better, so you can make the right decisions when sales are lower than you’d like.

In this article, we’re taking a deep dive into customer feedback surveys:

• Need-to-know stats about how many people actually respond to surveys
• A quick case study on a high-end skincare company that saved themselves a LOT of money through feedback survey emails
• Quick guide to creating effective survey request emails, from subject line to sign-off

Feedback Survey Emails: the Good, the Bad, and the Spam-Worthy

It’s no secret that a lot of ecommerce email marketing surveys are poorly executed, and give readers unnecessary work.

That’s probably why the average response rate for feedback surveys hovers somewhere between 20 and 30%.

But email surveys are an essential tool in the email marketing toolbox, for a couple of reasons:

They give you the literal voice of the customer: your current and potential customers are engaging with your website and/or ads. So if you want to answer critical questions about your brand, there is nobody better qualified to answer them.

They’re pretty cheap: the costs are relatively low, even if you use a dedicated survey platform. 

Surveying customers shows you care: people in general may not like surveys. But they do like it when a brand listens. If you give them a chance to air their opinion – and then act on that information, you can make a lasting impression.

Email Marketing Case Study: Customer Survey Emails as a Source of Vital Business Intelligence 

One of our newest clients at Hustler Marketing is a high-end skincare brand that uses natural, safe ingredients. 

When they came onboard, they had great products and beautiful, rich digital experiences from website to social.

Despite all of that, sales weren’t what they wanted them to be – and the relatively high price tag looked like the most obvious culprit.

But we’ve seen this before, and we suspected the picture was more complex. So, before rushing to offer big discounts and special deals, the Hustler Marketing team pitched a different strategy: customer feedback surveys.

A Twofold Survey Invitation Email Strategy

Our team created 2 survey invitation emails, for buyers and non-buyers. These emails were plain text, and each contained a link to a simple Google Form with 5 clear questions.

We ensured that there was minimal friction: the survey was easy to complete, and there was an attractive discount incentive for those who completed it.

Buyers Survey: Focused on demographics, past purchases, satisfaction, packaging, shipping, customer service, overall experience, and suggestions for improvement.

Non-Buyers Survey: Gathered information on skincare habits, age, and reasons for not purchasing.

The Results of Our Customer Survey Emails

For non-buyers, the main barriers in order of priority were:

• I don’t know the brand well enough
• I want to try out a product sample before I buy
• Physical shopping is how I like to buy skincare products
• The price is a little high
• I need more information before I can make a decision

For buyers, the main areas for improvement were:

• There are some issues with packaging
• Product variety isn’t broad enough
• I liked the product, but the price is keeping me from buying again

The really interesting thing here was that price didn’t make #1 position for either segment.

So, if the store had resorted to discounts to boost sales, they would have lost out on revenue (completely unnecessarily). 

How to Create an Effective Survey Request Email

There’s a simple rule when it comes to survey request emails: reduce friction as much as possible.

Friction comes from things like:

Asking too many questions: the more questions you ask, the less time people spend answering each one. So pick a small number of questions that target the info you really want. In the case study we outlined earlier, we went with 5 short questions .

Demanding long form answers: instead of asking “how do you feel about our prices?”, use something like a scale. For example, the question can be: “Our prices are…”, with options ranging from 1 (really low) to 5 (way too high).

Not offering anything in return: you don’t have to offer crazy discounts, but you’re more likely to get engagement if readers feel like there’s something tangible in it for them.

Survey Email Subject Lines: Clear Trumps Clever

People see through email marketing copywriting tricks. So we recommend just being honest and straightforward.

Here are some examples of effective survey email subject lines we used for our skincare client:

• How is your order going? ✨ (curiosity)
• We hope you loved everything✨🌿 (caring)
• Your opinion = 25% off ✨ (help us help you)

Ecommerce Email Marketing That Gets Results: Hustler Marketing Makes it Happen

At the end of the day, getting to know your customer isn’t just about personalizing your email marketing. If you really listen, you can gain real business intel that translates into cold, hard revenue. 

So here’s some advice from an email marketing agency that’s seen it all: don’t forget the tried-and-test email feedback survey. Make it clear and simple, so the people who know your brand best can tell you what’s up.

As always, we at Hustler Marketing are here to help. Reach out to our friendly team to learn more about our done-for-you email & SMS marketing services, and how they could transform your retention marketing strategy for long term growth,

In this article, we’re taking a deep dive into text only emails:

• What they are, and why they work.
• A plain text email case study.
• Plain text email tips and best practices.

Do Plain Text Emails Really Have a Place in eCommerce Email Marketing?

A plain text email is exactly what it sounds like: no images, no GIFs, no buttons. Also known as “text only”, these emails are simple and straightforward. In the right hands, plain text emails can do wonders for eCommerce store revenue.

The reason is simple. There is something intimate and personal about email as a communication channel. Emails feel like a one-to-one interaction, unlike, say, videos. Plain text emails amplify this effect. They can even bring up to 51% more clicks, under the right circumstances.

These emails are also cost effective and easy to produce. And because they’re light on design elements, they’re easy to read on mobile. That’s perfect for urgent or short communication, like apology emails or personalized offers.

Bonus Points for Deliverability

Another benefit of using plain text emails is the impact on deliverability. Because they have no code or special elements, these messages are less likely to trigger the spam filter or land in the promotions tab, helping deliverability and domain reputation.

Plain Text Email Brings 3X Campaign Revenue for Online Sports Retailer

In July 2023, one of our longstanding sports brands had an interesting problem. Open rates were healthy, but click rates had slumped to an average 0.42% for a few consecutive weeks. Campaigns were generating $3500 on average.

So, they had a great product, a loyal community, and decent revenue. But the Hustler Marketing team knew they could do even better.

The Account Manager responsible for the store decided to experiment with plain text emails. The team crafted a short, direct plain text email with one of the store’s most common discount offers.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about the offer itself – the store regularly offered subscriber discounts like this. But the team thought that putting it in a plain text email could boost lagging click rates.

Emails were scheduled for Sunday afternoon in the recipients’ time zones. This was a calculated risk. In low-competition periods like Sunday afternoon, it’s more likely that readers will open your email. But, it can also irritate them. The Hustler Marketing team took this decision in light of their deep knowledge of the store’s audience.

After carefully segmenting that audience, they hit the send button.

The Results: 300% Boost to Campaign Revenue

The first plain text campaign earned $4550, a 30% increase over the average.

Two weekends later, they repeated the experiment using the same offer. This time, revenue soared to almost $11,000.

The experiment had paid off. With the help of Hustler Marketing team, the brand had discovered a way to bring variety their email marketing strategy and engage certain segments of their audience in a more effective way.

Plain Text Email Best Practices for eCommerce Email Marketing

So how did the team achieve these results using such a simple tool? Let’s explore some strategies for effective text-based campaigns.

If you’re using Klaviyo, it’s pretty simple to set up a plain text email using the platform’s intuitive controls.

But before you hit send, make sure your email has these elements:

Get your list segmentation right: make sure you’re targeting the right email addresses. For example, it’s a good idea to exclude people who have already made a recent purchase.

Add a personal touch: consider signing off with the name of the store owner. You can even use this in the subject line. Make readers feel like you’re communicating directly with them.

Keep it simple: emails should always be easy to read. Make sure the copy is clear, with a straightforward offer that the reader can easily understand. Provide a link and clear call to action.

Make it look good: it’s important to present the email well. Use a font that makes sense for your brand. You can also emphasize important information with colors and different font sizes, and bullet points for an easy read.

Pick the right time to send: as we saw earlier, send time really matter. You may need to A/B test to identify the best day and time. This comes down to understanding the audience and researching their preferences and behaviors.

What Not do Do: Common Plain Text Email Mistakes

You may be worries that sending messages in plain text could make your brand look unprofessional. That’s a legitimate concern.

To avoid compromising your brand image, keep these factors in mind:

• Don’t use plain text for campaigns with many product showcases. For a multi-product showcase, product images are important, so it’s better to go with a designed template.
• Be very clear about the purpose of the email. You don’t want the reader to think that something has gone wrong with your emails. They must understand exactly why you’re communicating in this way.
• Take a consultative approach with your team. Consider testing different text lengths and tonalities to figure out what will work best for your audience. Let your copywriters take the lead here.

Plain Text Email Success: the Right Message, at the Right Time

Knowing how and when to use plain text in email marketing takes experience and deep knowledge of a brand’s audience.

At Hustler Marketing, each Account Manager leads a multi-disciplinary team of email marketing professionals. This pool of world-class talent provides the agility and flexibility it takes to identify and exploit email revenue opportunities.

Check out our case studies to learn more about our solution-oriented approach to eCommerce email challenges. 

Before getting deeper into how to introduce personalization in email marketing, it’s important to establish the definitions of flows vs campaigns.

Flows vs campaigns

Flows as we know are automated emails or series of emails that are sent automatically to a user based on a certain trigger. They’re not sent in one batch as campaigns do but rather in real-time as and when the trigger occurs. For example, when a customer first inputs their email in a pop-up, this triggers a Welcome Flow. And when they add products to their cart and start the process of checkout but abandon it, the trigger is for the Abandoned Checkout flow.  

Flows are the beginning of personalized email marketing

The journey of personalization starts right with the flows when a user receives personalized emails about the specific action they took on the website, even if the specific trigger was system-generated rather than manually sent by the store! In this way, delivering a message to the right person at the right time is the essence of personalized email marketing. 

A customer journey isn’t always about pushing product

According to Julie, creating segments depending on customer activities is the crucial aspect to start thinking more about personalization, along with being mindful of what you’re sending and communicating, to whom, and when is the formula recommended to achieve the goal and avoid unsubscriptions. 

A common misconception is that each email needs to push products or a purchase, the goal is to make revenue and conversions but in fact, it’s about as important to stay relevant, visible, and constantly valuable to the customer.

Other than activity or conversion-centric flows, flows can also be used to nurture your customers. A good example of this is customer data-based flows such as a birthday emailer sent to a customer with a discount code or a free gift for them. This is a simple flow that can be created if your email popup or product checkout page collects the user’s birthdays. 

Another way to nurture a customer not just before purchase but even after is to set up a post-purchase email about how to use, and clean the product they just bought. 

Understanding your customer’s buying habits and psychology is important to personalize the email strategy

Julie asserts that part of achieving the goal of getting closer to your audience comes by understanding your product “When starting out a business, keep in mind not just the size of it, but the type and products you’re selling as automations are created based on these. For example, a furniture store customer  isn’t likely to buy a piece every month, take that into consideration for replenishment flows that will need a different trigger and a different time delay, as opposed to a low-ticket purchase such as a snack pack or a piece of clothing.. “

Adjusting and tweaking as per response is another crucial step in personalization, along with knowing your business and how different it is from others by always trying new ideas and testing the triple, what works and what doesn’t by tweaking flows, being proactive, and constantly updating them as you manage your campaigns time frame, per quarter, per month, per season. Providing a new experience each time a person receives an email is key. Think about the recurring automations, like post-purchase, (not Welcome Flow as this will be only sent once), for repeat buyers, and try to make this message different each time to keep the sparkle on. 

What are the basic flows of the customer journey?

Depending on your business there are a lot of automations options you can set up to make the experience unique and tailored for each customer. However, these are the basic flows Julie advises to start with: 

1. Welcome Flow

2. Added to Cart

3. Browse Abandonment

4. Checkout Abandonment

5. Post Purchase w/ Upsell

What role does SMS and Email play in personalization?

The benefits of using both at the same time let you widen your chance of being seen in front of the customer and then be able to identify what channel your audience prefers to use in future campaigns. Emails and SMS experiences are very different, you check a personal inbox 2 – 3 times per day, which is not very constant, but SMS is immediately a much more personal channel and we need to be very thoughtful in how to use this. SMS works better for urgent quick information. We recommend a Welcome email series and SMS welcome series as well. 

Another important factor is the tone in SMS, as being so instant, we should keep it a bit more informal/relaxed as you’re talking to a friend or family member. With SMS you don’t need to think about too much, the technical aspect is pretty simple, not padding. Just fast and to the point. Here’s a handy guide on SMS marketing copywriting tips for better conversions. 

Email inboxes are crowded and full of distractions. Personalized emails provide a way to cut through the clutter and show subscribers that you have something to say that matters to them. Help your strategy by balancing email with SMS marketing as you don’t want to email people who are not interacting with the brand anymore. If you’re new to email personalization, there’s no reason to jump right into the most advanced techniques. It’s totally fine to start small and move slowly and experiment with different ideas and find out what your contacts respond to first. If you are still unsure about how to start, book a call with us and let us help you create and strengthen a relationship with your subscribers.

1. What is email marketing segmentation? Why is segmentation important?

Segmentation is the division of a company’s email list into smaller, more targeted, and different groups of subscribers based on set criteria. These criteria can be demographic, psychographic, behavioral, or geographic.

We talked to Susanna Papette, Head of Account Managers here at Hustler Marketing, about the benefits of segmentation in email marketing, and these are some of the most relevant ones:

• By creating segments and tailoring content for each, you send more relevant content to your audience.
• That relevancy helps avoid Spam Complaints and decreases Unsubscribe Rates.
• You can learn more info about the profiles your list includes, and you can get great insights to help you improve your overall marketing strategy.
• When done right, segmentation drives conversions and increases your email marketing ROI.

2. How to start creating segments for your email marketing strategy?

Segmentation is very beneficial if done right, but over-segmenting can also be time-consuming and may not be worth it. So when you’re creating a segment, remember that segments need to be created with intent. Think about the content you are able to create and ask yourself:

• Who is this content relevant for?
• Who would want to hear about this?
• And who should definitely not hear about this?

For example, let’s say you are an apparel brand with customers from all over the world and you are launching a new swimwear collection. Maybe it’s best if you send your launch email just to the subscribers that are living in places with warm weather or that have actually been browsing your swimwear and exclude people who live in places with predominantly cold weather. Another important criteria to think of segmentation is culture. Would you want to send an email campaign targeting Bikinis to an Arab country?

3. Basic email marketing segmentation

You can basically segment potential customers into groups based on: demographic, psychographic, geographical, and behavioral characteristics. Let’s take a look at each type and an example of an email campaign that was sent out to each specific group.

Demographic segments

Here you can exclude or include people based on characteristics such as age or gender. In this example, this apparel store sent out this email campaign with a 20% OFF just for their female audience.

Psychographic segments

Interests, likings, and dislikings are the criteria for this type of segmentation. Here you can see this email was sent out to people that had shown interest in that specific product.

Geographical segmentation

Are you opening a new store? Giving out free shipping for certain cities/countries? Then you seriously need a segment based on the location of your subscribers. People in Ecuador won’t find relevant the new availability of your product in India, so maybe it’s best to exclude them from that campaign and avoid high spam or unsubscribe rates. That’s why this cosmetics store sent out this email campaign for people in or close to India only.

Behavioral segmentation

With this type of segmentation, you can separate people based on actions they have taken or haven’t. For example, if someone added a certain product to their cart but didn’t buy it, then you may need to remind them about it and get that conversion!

How to build behavioral segments in Klaviyo

Let’s take a look at how to build some basic behavioral segments: buyers, non-buyers, openers, clickers, engaged on the website, and engaged on email.

Buyers

Non-Buyers

Openers

Clickers

Engaged on the website

Engaged on email

4. Advanced email marketing segmentation

Advanced segmentation is basically taking what we already know about each different type of segmentation and putting it all together to achieve more targeted and specific segments. That is to say, instead of having just a location-based segment, you could have a geographical + behavioral-based segment.

Marko Kojadinovic, an experienced Account Manager Lead at Hustler Marketing shared with us some of the advanced segments we commonly use here at Hustler Marketing. Let’s dive deep into each of them:

1. High Rollers

These are the people that are loyal to your brand. They have tried your products more than once and spent a considerable amount of money at your eCommerce store. These are the people you want to hit consistently to keep them engaged and placing repeat orders.

2. Brand Enthusiasts

These subscribers like your brand and have placed more than order overall time, but they are not big spenders. So they may appreciate a coupon once in a while to convert. (Who doesn’t?).

3. Waiting for wows

These are people that are constantly engaging with your emails and have been browsing your online store but haven’t placed an order just yet. These are people who are waiting for you to wow them. Maybe with a new product launch or an interesting sale.

Find out more about these segments in this amazing article Klaviyo published in its blog.

5. How to win-back old customers and re-engage old leads through email campaigns?

Did you know that on average, it is five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain existing customers and encourage repeat orders? It’s true. So it’s always a good idea to hit old customers and old leads with interesting emails that can grab their attention back to your brand and products. Let’s see how you can build a win-back and re-engagement segment and when to add them to campaigns.

5.) a. Win-back segment

A win-back segment will include profiles that:

• Have subscribed to your list
• Have placed at least one order in the past
• But haven’t purchased in a considerable amount of time.

This timeframe will depend on the product you are offering. If you sell coffee or supplements, your customers will probably need a refill each month. In that case, you could consider them as win-back opportunities after 90 days or more of no purchases. But if you sell personalized jewelry, people may buy from you twice or thrice a year. So the number could go up to 180 days or more with no purchases.

5.) b. Re-Engagement Segment

A re-engagement segment will include profiles that:

• Have subscribed to your list
• Have been receiving emails from you
• But haven’t engaged with your emails after a certain timeframe or after receiving a certain number of emails.

Knowing the exact amount of time after which you can consider a lead or a customer unengaged can be hard. So just as a reference, you can generally consider a customer inactive after six months of them not engaging with your brand, but it’s different for everyone. It all depends on the product you sell, seasonality, the number of emails you send per month, and, of course, your audience.

5.c. Email Marketing Segmentation: When to send campaigns to your win-back and re-engagement segments?

As we can see, these are segments that include people that have already shown interest in your brand, so you don’t want to miss an opportunity to grab their attention again. Let’s talk about ways in which you can do so through email campaigns.

Basic approach

If you have great deliverability you can have a general and more basic approach. That is to say, you could add your win-back and re-engagement segments to a huge sale you are planning on sending out to your regular engaged segments.

However, because you’re sending to unengaged subscribers, you’ll want to be careful here. If you over-send, you risk hurting your sender’s reputation, especially if recipients unsubscribe or mark your message as spam.

Targeted approach

If you want to avoid deliverability issues, you can take a safer and more specific approach. You could create win-back and re-engagement segments based on product preferences, seasonal shoppers, custom profile properties, interests, etc. Check out these examples:

Let’s say you sell shampoos and you are launching a new shampoo for the Curly Hair collection. You can create:

• A win-back segment that includes people that have purchased from that collection in the past.
• A re-engagement segment with people that have browsed multiple products from that collection.

Or maybe you own a baby apparel brand and you have seasonal shoppers, you always see an increase in people that purchase during the holidays. In the next Christmas season, try to win back people who bought clothing from you last year between November and December, maybe they will be interested this year too. You can even show in your email how well the new arrivals match with the previous year’s best sellers.

These will be smaller segments than the general win-back or re-engagement segments, but the message will be more relevant for the recipients of your email. There are many properties and behaviors on which you can base your win-back and re-engagement segments. So, the next time you are scheduling a campaign for your regular segments, think if maybe this content is something your old customers/leads may want to hear about.

Check this and more information in our last webinar for eCommerce store owners and marketers about Email Marketing Segmentation 101. Now that you got the hang of it and you are ready to take the next step on your email marketing strategy, book a free call with us!

Profile Property Buttons: The Why?

Not long ago my colleague wrote about a great Klaviyo feature, Property Links, which help collect even more useful data from our customers. At the time, we had just decided to increase our email frequency which, counterintuitively, decreased our unsubscribe rate considerably. Our members heard our point of view more often, and more depth made more sense.

Nevertheless, giving our subscribers a choice of how many emails per week they would like to receive seemed to return the goodwill they had shown our additional sends and would surely strengthen the list over time. Now I knew how to accomplish that!

First, we made a campaign asking them their frequency preference. (See this in Image 1 and the results in Image 2.) We included this question also in the first email of our Welcome flow. We got the following result: compared to the previous month we noticed a 50%+ CTR increase in the Welcome flow’s initial email in which we posed the question.

This powerful tool is not only good for improving segmentation and personalization. By using Preference Buttons we can increase our CTR resulting in better engagement. It also makes email more interactive. In the long term, our emails become both more interesting and trustworthy which should raise conversion rates.

For example, in this Halloween email, our content was the same across our list, but we used Preference Buttons to personalize the introduction. (See Image 3.) No matter what recipients answered, our product would help them enjoy Halloween’s festivities.

Plus, presenting an interactive option helped focus the readers on visualizing that night, into which our products could easily fit. It also gave us useful psychographic data we could leverage during subsequent holiday promotions.

Profile Property Buttons: The How?

First, we set up buttons just like you would for a Call-to-Action. However, instead of pointing them to a URL with a discount code, we used Klaviyo’s update_property_link’ tag. This tag first collects information from the recipient, entering it as a property in the recipeint’s profile, and then redirects them to a URL. 

In the email template editor, we selected our Preference Button and entered the following into the Link URL section: {% update_property_link ‘profile_property’ ‘property_value’ ‘redirect_link’ %}.

From there, we changed each section of the code to customize it as follows:

• ‘profile_property’: the profile property we wanted to create; in this case, Halloween Event.
• ‘property_value’: the value that the particular button corresponds to; for example, Staying In.
• ‘redirect_link’: the URL that we wanted to redirect them to after they click the button; for example one of our products that worked well for their Halloween choice, whether it was going out somewhere or staying in.

It won’t be necessary to update Halloween preferences until the Fall, but, from our earlier example, recipients’ send frequency preference might change within a year. Accordingly, we have sent emails that provide an opportunity to update this. As with any Profile Property, recipients can only select one value as their choice, but if the current selection overwrites a prior one, Klaviyo automatically updates the record to reflect the latest decision.

Once you begin to collect data like this, you then use it in your subsequent emails.  You can create segments that use these properties as conditions in the definition, like we do for send frequency. You can also use the data to personalize emails. For example, we could find out how Halloween at home worked out, modifying the message for those who purchased the product we recommended and for those who did not. 

You can even split flows by different properties. For example, we could make a winback flow targeting recipients who presumably like to go out on the holidays, based on their Halloween choice, versus ones who prefer to stay in.

What experiences have you had with Profile Properties, either through Preference Buttons or even a Managed Preference Page, which lets you update several properties at once? Comment below and let us know!

Marko Kojadinovic and Thomas McClintock

Hustler Marketing