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How to drive higher conversion and revenue for your email/sms automations and campaigns in 2024

Harris Gani
Harris Gani
In 2024 we’re seeing e-commerce DTC brands shift their focus on profitability instead of rapid growth. As brands do this, they are investing more in their email/sms channels as they are very profitable channels

I’ve interviewed 100+ email/sms marketers and found that the largest levers to test on email/sms traffic is the email template design, sms message copy, landing pages (LPs), and subject lines. What’s surprising is that 95% of the testing covers all of these levers except landing pages. When it comes to testing the landing pages in email/sms automations and campaigns, brands tend to re-use one of the following: homepage, category page, product page (PDP). They rarely test creating a dedicated landing page for email/sms automations or campaigns.

What’s interesting is that we all know landing pages outperform traditional product pages in terms of conversion rate - this is why acquisition marketers invest so much into LPs when it comes to paid social ads. I asked these 100+ email/sms marketers why they aren’t testing LPs for their flows and they all gave the same answer — time and cost bandwidth. They said it was too expensive to pay an agency to make it as this can cost $1k-$10k per landing page and typically takes 2-4 weeks to create a single LP. Luckily in 2024, there are tools and services to build personalized landing pages specifically for email/sms traffic both cost and time effectively (like Viddy).

Let’s dig into why LPs are so important for email/sms automations and campaigns taking abandonment flows as an example. Abandonment flows are usually the largest revenue driving email/sms automation, yet the vast majority of brands “set & forget” these flows and rarely optimize them.

Let’s think about the psychology of an abandonment flow and ask: why do shoppers abandon? While there can be many reasons for this, a high-intent shopper primarily abandons because they haven’t been convinced from the brand’s PDP that the product is worth it. Sending this shopper an email/sms with a link to the exact same PDP that they literally just abandoned surely isn’t the best way to get them to buy your product. Instead, showing a personalized LP with new supplemental content such as video testimonials, founding stories, and product demos is far more compelling.

This notion of showing new content and using an LP as the vehicle to do that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. We as humans are especially susceptible to external validation to mitigate our chances of buyer's remorse. When we are seriously contemplating buying a product as a buyer, we’ll go to other sources such as YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok to see other people’s reviews on a product. We’re looking for proof that the product is worth it by seeking out additional content. As a brand you might be thinking you can just link out to one of these platforms where there are already reviews and positive social proofing. Doing this is really under-optimized for a variety of reasons:

  1. Shoppers will usually see a competitor’s ad on YouTube before a brand’s content loads
  2. Instagram and YouTube algorithms distract shoppers away from a brand’s content
  3. These social platforms don’t let brands feature products and checkout within their videos
  4. These social platforms don’t give any visibility or ownership on engagement/watch metrics. Brands should be able to do event-based segmentation to retarget user cohorts based on this data (example: users who watched 50% of a certain video)

In 2024 we’re seeing e-commerce DTC brands shift their focus on profitability instead of rapid growth. As brands do this, they are investing more in their email/sms channels as they are very profitable channels. A common theme I’ve seen in my 100+ marketing interviews is that brands want their email/sms channels to account for a larger percentage of their total revenue. With this in mind and the fact that LPs are rarely tested in email/sms flows…starting to use LPs for these channels is one of the largest opportunities for brands to increase both revenue and profitability.