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9 Great Email Marketing Case Studies (and Counting)

• News and Updates Updated August 2020 Posted: August 2015

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Transparency is hot right now, but not in email marketing.

You can see how many Twitter followers a brand has. Lots of businesses blog about their audience growth. And some newsletters share their subscriber count as social proof .

But no one talks about open and click rates, ROI or impact on the bottom line. It’s taboo in the email world.

That makes it really hard to find email marketing case studies. If you want inspiration for your own campaigns, there aren’t many options. You can:

• Read blogs like this one 🙂
• Dive into ReallyGoodEmails.com
• Sign up for newsletters and products to receive their emails

Other than that, all you can do is test your assumptions relentlessly.

We’d like to make it a little easier to read stories about great email campaigns so we collected some of our favorites. Here is the criteria for the case studies we included:

• They are real case studies, not a best practices pieces.
• They include quotes or data from the campaign creators.

That sounds simple until you start exploring the web for stories that meet those two rules. We’d like to add to this list so if you know of a great email story, let us know in the comments.

Together, these posts are long enough to be a book. So we turned them into one.

Download an .epub file

What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign

Read it | Share it | Save it

This story is too nuanced to accurately summarize but here’s a primer.

Watsi is the first non-profit to be part of Y Combinator. They crowdsource healthcare funding for people all over the world. To drive recurring revenue, they broke out their monthly donation feature into its own product and launched it separately.

They used email to source early feedback, used social proof to create buzz and built a personalized newsletter to keep users informed about their donations.

Here’s a snippet from this post:

Part of showing people what they’re getting is investing in communications where you aren’t asking for anything. Instead, you’re thanking people for their business or their participation. You’re acknowledging your end of the deal where you’re committed to delighting and surprising them. This is something that for-profit startups tend to neglect – the importance of not just sending a receipt for a purchase, but honing that interaction to make customers feel something more.

Email marketing is isn’t a channel – it’s one layer of a customer-centric company. This case study reveals how complex (and truly valuable) it is to use email to grow a business.

Building a Newsletter Welcome Series from Scratch

Help Scout’s signature flair is purpose .

As they considered how to welcome to new subscribers – and there are more than 51,000 – they knew that aligning business goals with a great experience was key. They pulled it off by ensuring each email sought to achieve a single, measurable goal.

Each of the five emails in the sequence is explained in detail, including the intended purpose and suggestions based on their own learnings.

How The Skimm’s passionate readership helped its newsletter grow to 1.5 million subscribers

Building a profitable business with email is very different than using email to build a profitable business.

Watsi, for example, uses email to support their product. In The Skimm’s case, the email is the product. When newsletters become a business, it’s worth paying careful attention to their strategy. (We detailed an example of this in our Death to the Stock Photo case study .)

The Skimm’s email newsletter reaches 1.5 million daily. That growth has been fueled by an intense understanding of their target reader and an community that is eager to help. There are more than 6,000 “ Skimm’bassadors ” actively spreading the word about this business.

There’s a lot to learn here but if you take just one lesson, let it be this:

The Skimm focuses on women ages 22-34 in big cities throughout the country. They are busy, they’re on the go. It’s a professional audience. And we looked at what they do first thing in the morning. Your alarm goes off, you grab your phone, and you read emails from friends and family first. It really made sense to us to introduce a product that fit in with that routine. And email is very much in the routines of the demo that we’re going after.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Meet your target audience where they’re already active.

How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week

I hope you’re noticing a trend in these case studies: Pulling off a wildly successful email campaign isn’t easy.

Even when the goals are simple, the logistics tend to get messy. The smartest companies dig in anyway.

In Harry’s case, they used a landing page to gather 100,000 emails in the week leading up their launch. As a shaving company, they are competing against institutions like Gillette. The only way to outsell them is to out-maneuver them.

Harry’s drove traffic to a landing page, asked for a signup, then used a referral mechanism to incentivize people to share the product. Those who referred friends earned free products. They gave away a ton of free razors that week but it cost way less than broadcasting the upcoming launch on traditional advertising channels.

This post gets into the nitty gritty of driving the traffic, managing the flood of interest and actually delivering the free products.

The Art and Science of Turning Free Trials Into Happy Customers

If you’re a small startup, you’ll be able to relate to this story.

Alex Smith runs marketing at ContactMonkey . As a growing company with a small team, it became too difficult to onboard new customers one at a time. So Alex created a series of events in the application that trigger emails or pause existing campaigns.

The result was not only happier customers, but faster growth. Once the triggers were in place, ContactMonkey was able to guarantee that each customer received the right messaging at the right time.

This post shares the exact emails and triggers ContactMonkey uses to onboarding their users, along with some ideas for blurring the lines between CRM and email marketing.

The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails

I think this line will pique your interest about Obama’s last campaign: “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails.”

The Obama campaign famously used a casual, conversational in tone in the email subject lines. The most famous subject line was simply “Hey.” Another – “I will be outspent” – raised $2.6 million on its own.

Source: Slideshare

This didn’t happen by accident. The folks behind the campaigns tested incessantly, sometimes playing with a dozen or more variations on a single email. Here’s one of the most interesting findings revealed by digital analytics directo Amelia Showalter:

…these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.

They bottled lightening over and over through rigorous testing and exceptional copywriting. The viral effect was manufactured, not serendipitous.

What We Learned From A Week Of Prototyping A Newsletter In Public

When Buzzfeed began developing a daily email newsletter, the editors turned to Facebook for feedback. They shared their prototypes ( here’s an example ) with their own friends. They made each iteration of the newsletter public to ensure they could patch any holes before launch.

Interestingly, editor Millie Tran said the most useful part of this exercise was the intense focus on the product/market fit:

The most valuable thing about this exercise was that it allowed us to avoid getting too emotionally attached to any one idea early on and to keep tweaking and adjusting the product to be better.

As we’ve written before, email is an extension of your product and should be treated with the appropriate care.

Buzzfeed also wrote a follow-up to this post about using email to test early versions of their mobile app.

Learning vs. Selling

This is a personal story based on my experience here at Vero. Last year, we created 14-step campaign to welcome new subscribers to the blog. The open rates were decent and we heard some positive feedback from customers about the campaign.

Then we nuked it.

Because it a) wasn’t helping us convert readers into customers and b) it wasn’t helping us learn about our readers. We replaced the entire campaign with a single email.

Tons of people replied and we’ve been able to shape our content and emails to match our readers’ challenges and needs. The lesson is here to create opportunities to learn before you try to sell your product.

The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote

A single email can change a business.

Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, realized this after he created this masterpiece of a shipping confirmation email :

Source: Smashing Magazine

The email went viral. At the time, no one put any effort into their transactional emails . The personal touch resonated with a lot of people.

That one silly e-mail, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search Google for “private CD Baby jet” you’ll get over 20,000 results. Each one is somebody who got the e-mail and loved it enough to post on their website and tell all their friends. That one goofy e-mail created thousands of new customers.

Simon Schmid calls this finesse the “personality layer.” Here are a number of other examples.

A few more case studies from the Vero archives:

• TripAdvisor’s Unfair Email Marketing Advantage
• How Amazon Dominates E-Commerce with Email
• How Death to the Stock Photo Built a Profitable Business with Email
• Why Product Hunt’s Emails Are So Addictive
• Evernote’s Simple But Useful Onboarding Emails

And here’s a few suggestions from readers:

• How The New York Times gets a 70 percent open rate on its newsletters

Want to send more personalized mobile and email messages to your users?

Customer story.

How UNO uses email marketing from the data warehouse to deliver personalized mortgage broking

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Email Marketing Case Studies To Get Inspired and Ensure Your Campaign’s Success

The importance of email marketing case studies

Eleven must-read email marketing case studies, draper james, amanda perry, turn me royal, eternity modern, shiree odiz, final thoughts.

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Warning: The following email marketing case studies may cause extreme FOMO, uncontrollable excitement, and a sudden urge to revamp your entire email strategy. Proceed with caution. 

Still with us? Good. We’re about to take you on a wild ride through a fresh set of email marketing campaigns that captivate, convert, and create champions for brands. Get ready to be inspired and think about how you can apply the lessons from each email marketing case study to your own campaigns, no matter how small your budget or team may be. Read on.

Sometimes, you exhaust all common strategies striving toward your next email marketing goal, and there are only so many experiments you can do on your own. So, learning from the experience of another marketer can be just the perspective shift you need.

Case studies are real-world marketing examples that describe how different companies achieved their email marketing goals. They offer practical advice and proven strategies you can use for your own campaigns. Here are other benefits you can get out of reading email marketing case studies:

• Learn from real-world challenges: Case studies show how email marketing strategies work in action, with all the real-life obstacles and distractions. With this information, you can learn what to account for when using this or that technique. 
• Stay updated on the latest marketing trends: Case studies are often created to demonstrate the use of cutting-edge technology and the latest marketing trends . You can learn about the newest best practices in the field and keep your email marketing management competitive and effective.
• Gain inspiration: Sometimes, case studies can spark your creativity and inspire you to try new techniques or adapt successful strategies for your own email marketing campaigns. 

All in all, by examining the successes (and stumbles) of others, we can not only learn what works but why it works. And that’s the first step to making your own campaigns a hit. 

We are not going to talk about big brands and well-known cases, published by numerous email marketing blogs over and over again. Forget the usual suspects with their sky-high budgets and household names you can find in any other article with a similar title. In our research, we are dialing into the small and medium-sized businesses that have quietly but effectively revolutionized their email strategies. Prepare to be inspired by stories filled with actionable advice, proving you don’t need a blockbuster budget to make a blockbuster impact.

About the company: Neurogan creates high-quality and safe CBD products.

Challenge: The company had many problems: they needed better targeting to get noticed in a crowded market. They had to keep their reputation safe. They wanted to improve their engagement metrics. 

Solution: They decided to start with list segmentation. And then experiment with different types of promotional emails to see which one gets the better response. If emails were left unopened, they set up an automation to deal with that as well. They made sure the design of their email campaigns was appealing to their customers. 

Results: The results were pretty impressive — a 76% growth in year-over-year revenue, a 20% increase in open rates. They had 37% more clicks coming from their campaigns. And got a nice increase in revenue for cart abandonment automation. 

Key takeaway: Neurogan’s case proves that when email marketing is done right, it remains a very powerful marketing tool. Personalization, knowing your audience, and continuous testing can increase engagement, retention, and revenue, even in the most competitive industries.

Check out the full Neurogan case study . 

About the company: Vitrazza is a brand making luxurious glass chair mats.

Challenge: Vitrazza had trouble with their first email campaigns because they didn’t get many responses or sales. There wasn’t enough of the brand’s personality in the basic welcome flow and email content to keep customers coming back.

Solution: The welcome flow was completely redesigned to include customized messages that showed off Vitrazza’s unique selling point. The promotion was more compelling because it was based on customer segmentation and targeted content that included customer reviews and personal messages from the CEO.

Results: Email sales went up by 55%, click-through rates went up by 20%, and open rates for usual campaigns and the welcome flow went over 30% and 50%, respectively. The welcome email series made $564,200 in sales in less than four months. The Memorial Day effort stood out from the rest of the emails and brought in over $90,000.

Key takeaway: Vitrazza’s story shows how small changes to important flows can completely change a business’s email marketing results. Customized, data-driven strategies mixed with real brand stories and smart campaigns can greatly increase online sales and keep customers interested.

Check out the full Vitrazza case study . 

About the company: Draper James is a clothing line launched in 2015 by actress Reese Witherspoon. The brand incorporates classic designs into the wardrobes of modern women. 

Challenge: As a luxury brand, Draper James couldn’t figure out a way to use incentives and not appear too pushy. Without motivation, the brand’s subscribers didn’t rush to become paying customers.

Solution: Draper James zeroed in on the messaging and used real-time AI to improve the email campaigns’ copy. This helped to create messages that compelled the subscribers to become first-time buyers. Another clever strategy was to use customer data not only to increase first conversions but to also stimulate repeat purchases. 

Results: First-time purchases increased by ten times. Plus, Draper James got a 30% boost in repeat purchases and significant time saved on routine tasks that were automated.

Key takeaway: This case is a reminder for small and medium business owners that the secret to converting leads lies in understanding and addressing the unique needs and desires of their audience.

Check out the full Draper James case study . 

About the company: An e-commerce fashion brand. 

Challenge: Amanda Perry’s client used to generate sales through a private community in their Facebook group. But when the unpredictable changes in Facebook’s algorithm hit, converting leads into sales became impossible. So the brand decided to look into email marketing. 

Solution: Seemingly generic email welcomes were turned into personalized style narratives, complete with brand-centric animations that complemented their marketing campaigns. All of the emails were sent on days and at times the brand’s audience loved to engage.

Results: Over three months, the company gained £25,000 (about $31,000 at the moment of writing) in revenue. The brand’s subscriber base grew by 50%. All of these results were supported by the engagement rates. Open rates increased to 26% while the click-through rate (CTR) made it to 3%.

Key takeaway: This case proves that it’s worthwhile to invest in email marketing even for businesses focused on social media presence. When other channels face turbulence (be it due to the changes in the algorithms or policies), email marketing consistently engages customers and brings sales. 

Check out the full Amanda Perry case study . 

About the company: PetLab Co. is a pet wellness firm that makes premium dog supplements and care items.

Challenge: The company offers a wide variety of products and an audience at every stage of the customer journey, from loyal subscribers to one-time browsers. So, they needed to be sure that their email campaigns were aimed at the right segment and that they were not wasting their efforts. 

Solution: Through precise email segmentation, the company changed advertising so that every pet owner felt like the best of the bunch. They ran comprehensive A/B testing, experimenting with CTAs, send timing, and even how removing PetLab Co’s name from subject lines affected open rates.

Results: Increased click rates by 53% and open rates by 24%. Not to mention, total clicks increased while bounce rates decreased. 

Key takeaway: Segmentation is your best friend. It guarantees your message reaches the right people at the right time and turns a random visit into a sale.

Check out the full PetLab Co case study . 

About the company: Turn Me Royal is a unique service that turns pictures of their customers into bespoke Renaissance-style portraits.

Challenge: The business needed to create an all-encompassing email marketing plan, but first, it had to build an email list and earn customers’ trust. After this, the main challenge was segmentation and making the content relevant to different groups of clients. 

Solution: Email marketing experts created a full welcome flow for the brand. The efforts were mostly focused on big sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Email campaigns were designed to target specific groups, such as VIP customers. The brand also started dynamic email campaigns to show how fun it is to give personalized portraits as gifts.

Results: Before the changes, email marketing brought nothing but a mere 5% of total income. Within the first month, this metric jumped to 15% and then settled at an average of 30% per month. The email list grew to over 25,000 people.

Key takeaway: Strategic, creative, and focused email marketing management can make the customer experience much better. This proves that email campaigns can be a strong foundation for e-commerce success. At the same time, standard strategies like promotional emails or segmentation stay the golden standard for businesses at the start of their email marketing outreach.

Check out the full Turn Me Royal case study . 

About the company: Eternity Modern is a furniture shop customers love for its mid-century modern sofas, high-end lighting, and wooden items. 

Challenge: Previously, the company didn’t invest in email marketing and now needed to build the strategy from the ground up. Eternity Modern also had to make this new sales channel profitable.

Solution: The company made a welcome series, a cart abandonment sequence, and an upsell/cross-sell sequence, as well as 6 other email flows. Next, Eternity Modern separated the subscriber base into groups and amped up the email frequency. Moreover, the company cleaned the email list saying goodbye to uninterested and disengaged customers with a sunset campaign. All of these strategies combined decreased the spam rates and made deliverability more consistent.

Results: From zero revenue, email marketing results came out of the woodwork to $80K/month in three months, hitting $289K/month by the 11th month. 

Key takeaway: The company was dedicated to a thorough email strategy with segmentation and dynamic flows, balanced content. It also accepted continuous testing. These steps helped the furniture shop use email marketing to the fullest and turn it into a sound sales channel.

Check out the full Eternity Modern case study . 

About the company: The brand creates inexpensive yet high-quality jewelry that would not tarnish or get ruined by water.

Challenge: The company didn’t have many employees and had to handle a lot of different email and pop-up systems. It wasn’t working.

Solution: The brand used TikTok to build a big email list before the launch and kept adding to it with pop-ups. Then, they made targeted email ads and automated flows that worked well with the people they had just found.

Results: After the changes, Nadaré Co was getting 29% of its revenue from automated email marketing efforts. One email sent after purchasing, for example, has brought in over $10,000 more in sales.

Key takeaway: A well-thought-out plan that includes important email marketing flows, such as welcome emails and emails to customers who abandoned their carts, can engage clients more and help you make more money.

Check out the full Nadaré Co case study .  

About the company: DSLRPros is a marketplace for drones and related accessories.

Challenge: Their emails were not engaging enough and there was no consistency in the sending schedule. The content of the messages was quite redundant. Also, their approach lacked personalization and segmentation.

Solution: The business changed the way it does email marketing totally. This included a big increase in emails sent and the creation of fully automated email flows for different stages of the customer journey. Their strategy included better content (including webinar promotions). This helped to establish DSLRPros as even more of an expert in the aerial business.

Results: More than a million emails were sent in less than six months, the click rates went up by 115%, and the number of new clicks increased by 445%. Orders increased by 4.4 times, and the order rate tripled. This caused average revenue per recipient to rise by 227%, and total revenue rose by an amazing ninefold. Notably, the browse abandon flow had a click rate of over 7%, which brought in a lot of money.

Key takeaway: DSLRPros greatly increased their return on investment (ROI) through personalized communication, sending more emails, and dividing their audience into segments. And so can you.

Check out the full DSLRPros case study . 

About the company: Shiree Odiz is a small diamond jewelry store. Their goal is to make classic, fine diamond jewelry that is made in an ethical way and has classic patterns that have been updated for comfort, durability, and high-end looks.

Challenge: The brand had a hard time with high cart abandonment rates, even though their first email flow for people who had abandoned their shopping carts got some responses, it wasn’t enough to bring back a lot of lost income.

Solution: Shiree Odiz set up an automated email with an easy checkout link that was sent an hour after a shopping cart was abandoned. The next day, another follow-up email was sent. It had a minimalist email design (text-only) and included a personal note and a small discount.

Results: The first email has a 41.4% open rate and a 1.4% click rate, bringing in $15,300 in a quarter. The following email has a 30.6% open rate and added $69,400 in revenue.

Key takeaway: Simple, bottom-of-the-funnel methods like sending follow-up emails at the right time can help you make more money with little work. Follow-up emails that include personalized deals can be a great way to get people who have left items in their carts to return. 

Check out the full Shiree Odiz case study . 

About the company: Astana Hub is the biggest global tech park and IT startup hub in Central Asia. It was created in 2018 to help innovative IT companies grow and bring in talented IT workers from all over the world. Astana Hub is home to over 1,300 people and works with companies like Draper University, Binance, Google for Startups, and EPAM. 

Challenge: The company was looking for the right tool to start its email marketing efforts to onboard users to its mobile app, announce and promote events, and attract participants and partners. 

Solution: They pulled and segmented the contact list from their CRM into groups based on industries, events, and lead status. The marketing team at Astana Hub used Selzy to design newsletters and change their emailing schedule. They now send newsletters twice weekly and combine daily emails into a single weekly digest as one bulk email.

Results: Astana Hub got 28,000 people to download its brand-new mobile app, with a 63% email open rate and a 26% click-through rate. Email marketing was a cheap way to stay in touch with its subscribers, and Selzy’s ability to divide its customers into groups made them more engaged and raised awareness about the company.

Key takeaway: Good segmentation and proper email frequency can boost user engagement, open rates, and click-through rates. It can contribute not only to revenue but also to other marketing goals like user onboarding and increasing brand awareness.

Check out the full Astana Hub case study .

Impressed by these case studies and eager to work on your own strategy? Register in Selzy and revamp your email marketing. Selzy is an email marketing platform with all the features you might need like forms, responsive templates, analytics, and more.

All of these email marketing cases prove that the road to each company’s success is unique. But if you want to make yours less winding, explore these tried and true ideas:

• Make your emails feel personal. Customize your messages and make them unique to your brand. Just like everyone likes a thought-after birthday gift, people prefer emails that feel personal. If your audience likes what you send, your open rates will improve and your relationships will be better.
• Try basic strategies first. Cart abandonment or subscriber engagement problems can often be solved with a simple, well-timed email. So before doing a one-eighty, try the basic strategies.
• Use dedicated software. Email-sending services like Selzy simplify your process while also providing data reports and automation. Overall, they greatly help you optimize your strategy for more engagement and conversion.
• Tell your brand’s story. Your brand’s story is a powerful strategy on its own. Engage your audience with stories that match their own experiences and goals, turning casual browsers into devoted consumers. For example, start by introducing your company’s founder, and try this in the welcome series to make a positive first impression.
• Test, learn, adapt. The digital world is always changing. Stay flexible: test different methods, learn from your analytics, and be ready to adapt your plan. Keep up with the trends and expectations but also evaluate the tendencies before committing to them in full.

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