Email Marketing Case Study: Aquanautia.com
Industry: Travel Apparel and Accessories?
Platform: Shopify Plus / Switched from MailChimp to Klaviyo?
Wins:?
The Setup
Aquanutia specializes in high-quality men’s and women’s clothing for adventure travel. It started as a Kickstarter in 2018. It is a classic startup case: He single-handedly “bootstrapped” his way to his first one million in sales with a laptop, a great idea, and a handful of free apps.?
But his approach to marketing was chaotic. In addition to doing his own email marketing, he had to oversee all growth. He had no marketing plan or background in any marketing at all.?
I joined the company as a blogging intern. I wrote a few blogs and then offered to write a few email sequences for him, which I was starting to get into at the time.?
Fast forward to the end of 2022. His email list has grown consistently to 11x its original size, and email has played a pivotal role in helping to develop the e-commerce side of the business.? Built on Shopify Plus with a simple Klaviyo integration, email revenue accounts for 60-70% of the company’s overall revenue.
The Challenge
The challenge was immediately apparent: without visibility into customers’ preferences and interests, how would I (a content creator, not a strategist) plan and execute a fully optimized email marketing program?
When I got access to the MailChimp logins, I was ready to upload some well-crafted copy and hit send.?
But right from the start, I saw that MailChimp wasn’t an ideal fit for what Rishi (the founder) wanted to do.
Without visibility into shopper behavior, I found that Rishi essentially sent emails into the cloud without truly understanding his customers' purchase history or preferences.
Choosing Klaviyo
I began a search for an email service provider that would provide the increased visibility he needed to kick Aquanautia’s email marketing into high gear.
So I reached out to my LinkedIn contacts, who were already killing it in the email marketing space, and asked them what the best email marketing program would be best for Rishi. The feedback I heard was consistent: the gold standard for Shopify email integrations is Klaviyo.??
Luckily, one of Aquanautia’s core strengths already in place was killer content: I had access to a huge database of marketing photos and top-notch videos produced by some of the founder’s friends in Spain.?
Using that content to help create an incredible brand experience on the website was the first step in accelerating our list growth.
Building Customer Segments
With a rapidly growing email list, we were determined to understand the optimal email cadence and targeting to drive sales. After all, in email marketing, the most important KPI is sales. Plus, it’s the easiest KPI to track and report.?
I got the green light from Rishi, and we decided to start experimenting with Klaviyo.
I used the “segment builder” in Klaviyo to divide the master list into groups for different email campaigns. I recorded the results from month to month.
I started by identifying and weeding out the lurkers and tire-kickers on the list with a super-simple 3 question survey. It was simply a link to a Google form with a chance to win a free pair of shorts. I made sure to mention that it was only 2 minutes of their time, and in this way, I was able to create a few new segments:
For one test, we sent a short loom video from the founder to two different segments that, if watched to the end, would give a discount code for early bird deals on Rishi’s new Kickstarter design.??
I designed this specifically to help me better understand customer behavior.?
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The first send went to the highly engaged segment; the second went to the rest of our list, which was double the size.
The difference between the two segments was clearly significant.
The active segment showed a 42% open rate (OR), a 4% click-through rate (CTR), and 39 purchases, resulting in $5,850 in attributable revenue.?
Meanwhile, and somewhat predictably, the other segment didn’t perform quite as well.
13% open rate. 0.7% click-through.?
Zero purchases.?
Zero revenue.?
With this strategy and the higher open rates that came with it, I could show the Email Service Providers we were sending messages that people wanted. And begin to build that sender reputation that improves overall deliverability. The approach also strengthened the subscribers’ connection to the brand. They started to feel nurtured instead of just spammed as user behavior triggered new flows and would customize which emails customers would receive.
We continue to build out and test different types of segments, including ones that get even more precisely targeted. For example, in the final hours of the window for crowdfunding a waterproof backpack, I sent the same email to two different segments.?
Group A: Customers who had opened at least one email related to the idea.??
Group B: Customers who had opened three or more emails in the last 180 days
Even though everyone in this group was tagged “highly engaged,” Group B customers had never opened an email from this chain before.?
The results speak for themselves.
In the first group — the subscribers who had opened at least one related email — we saw a higher open rate, higher CTR, and 9x more purchases than the other.?
After running test after test and seeing similar results, I could scale the approach. Now, Rishi uses it to build out highly targeted audiences and offer each segment precisely what they want regularly.
This allows him to ask the most simple (but profoundly influential) question, “Who will be excited about this?”
With more targeted email campaigns, I realized another win: unsubscribes decreased by 60%.
But even with this success, there’s always room for improvement.
Looking Ahead
Rishi and I have already started planning the next big campaigns.
Having reduced the number of non-targeted emails Aquanautia sends out, our next step is to identify opportunities to strategically increase the number of precisely targeted emails. The goal is to increase our emails while maintaining the same engagement levels.?
If I can keep on this path, I can deliver Rishi his next million in sales, twice as fast as his first.?
And a 5% cut for me, which aint half bad.??
Now, if you've read this far, you should just DM me, and we'll get you set up with your own million in email marketing revenue already.
Every bit of this is easily repeatable in your business, too.
DM me already :)
From the founders mouth:
“Working with Jacob on our new product launch was awesome! It was helpful to hear his ideas for promoting the offer itself, as well as his ideas for refining the email copy to match our brand. He smashed our goal of ￡8,000 in 5 days – and still counting. We’re not going to let him go.”
Rishi Thornhill, Inventor, Founder, Kickstarter