How TargetBay’s BayMail Helped its Clients to Make the Most of 2019 BFCM Sales

12.Dec.2019 Narendar Rajagopalan - BayMail

Success at scale.

Yes, you’re reading it right. That has been the thoughts that were lingering in us in the last few weeks. Holiday email marketing has always been ‘the most productive marketing strategy’ for e-commerce stores, and this year was no exception as well.

If you look close, you might realize that the race among the e-commerce brands to be on the top of the profit chart during the holiday season has increased in the recent past.

However, as far as email marketing is concerned, delivering emails in the primary inbox folder is indeed a daunting task during the peak holiday season. And this is where you should bring Targetbay’s BayMail into play.

BayMail is a full-fledged e-commerce email marketing solution from Targetbay, which aims to help e-commerce brands achieve above-the-benchmark delivery rates as well as high click-through-rates. The product has already been in the market for a while and has assisted several e-commerce stores to streamline their marketing campaigns.

Let’s get down to the top-level numbers straight!

To put things in perspective, there were more than 40 brands that sent more than 2.4 million emails via BayMail.

So, what’s the big deal?

There were as many as 12 million customer activities and 2,000 orders from the 2019 holiday email campaigns sent from BayMail.

Avg open rate on Cyber Monday was the highest at 11.6%

Avg open rate on Thanksgiving Day was at 11.31%

Avg revenue per recipient was $1.23 on all shopping days

Order Stats:

We helped generate more than two thousand orders with more than $300,000 in sales.

(i) Email delivery greater than 99%

Email delivery is not something that can be guaranteed. Especially if the email has to land in the primary inbox, it’s even more challenging. As they say “delivery is never guaranteed.”

More than 20% of the emails that get delivered don’t land in the primary inbox folder.

At BayMail, we follow the best email marketing practices – our secret sauce is how we warm up our IP address and sending domains.

How we were able to control email bounce rates this holiday season?

As you may already know, the lesser the bounce rate better would be your email delivery. We were able to control the bounce rate by following these best practices.

• Sent it only to opt-in contacts – our email experts team verified that the contacts were at least single opt-in if not double opt-in.
• Contacts clean up – we made sure we cleaned up the list every time before we sent out those email campaigns.
• Verified sender domain – we warmed up our IP address and ensured that the sender domain was verified along with the account reputation every time to avoid emails landing in the spam folder.

Hard bounce v/s. Soft bounce

We were able to keep the bounce rate low – soft and hard bounces combined below 2%, which is the industry benchmark.

Besides this, we take the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 seriously. Hence, we’ve taken all the efforts to go above and beyond this email compliance act this 2019 holiday season.

(ii) Holiday email open rates at 10.01%

Email open rates was 10.01% considering Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Thanksgiving Day – 11.31%

Black Friday – 7.2%

Cyber Monday – 11.6%

Before going to our email stats, let’s cover the email open rates basics,

Email Open Rate = Unique Email Opens / (Total Number of Emails Sent – Total Number of Bounced Emails)

Our clients were able to get more than 10% open rates consistently across all BFCM days using our FREE email templates. There were more than 150 campaigns that were sent from BayMail.

So, what factors influence high email open rates?

• Event triggers
• Sender recognition
• Subject lines and relevance to the content
• Urgency
• Word count
• Number of links in the email
• Email send time

BayMail’s experts were well aware of the above factors, they realize there are 2 major factors which can impact how the email marketing efforts are going to perform.

1.Subject Lines & relevance to the content

We came up with innovative and unique subject lines for each and every email campaign. Another factor that’s critical to open rates is the content relevance with the email subject lines.

So, our email experts ensured that we didn’t send even a single email campaign without doing the above sanity checks.

2. Sender recognition

We configured the sender address and sender name for email campaigns sent from BayMail.

How did we achieve it?

Great content! We worked closely with our clients to educate them about how significant content quality and relevance is in the holiday season emails.

BayMail’s experts went above and beyond the expectations to achieve this milestone.

(iii) Best day and worst day to send emails

Which day had the lowest open rates?

Black Friday weekend had the lowest open rate of just below 7%. However the delivery rates were still above 99%.

Which day had the highest open rates?

Cyber Monday had the highest open rate of more than 11%. We learned that it was the best day to send emails in the entire holiday season.

BayMail’s strengths and ability to scale from here

At TargetBay, we want to revolutionize the field of email marketing. We have a future vision and are striving towards its fruition. As a comprehensive email marketing solution, BayMail has the ability to send to any number of emails, while making sure a higher percentage of emails are reaching the primary inbox.

We follow the best practices in email marketing to Identify and remove spam emails from the recipient list every time before sending out the email.

We’ve also sent staggered emails to find how the overall list performs by sending a small chunk of the bigger list.

Yes, we are ready for the future of email marketing!