One key action necessary to drive overall email performance has been to grow the email subscriber database and all the while keeping the unsubscribe rate down to a minimum. 

In order to achieve this, we tested together with the F64 team various lead generation strategies. 

The most prolific has proved to be a combination of Facebook Lead Ad campaigns and themed sign-up forms running prior and during important discount periods like Black Friday. 

It's a known fact that visitors are more likely to subscribe and engage with a brand's marketing communications around promotional periods so we leveraged this information by giving new subscribers sneak peaks of the upcoming sales, free ebooks or even prizes. 

These actions led to a 30% increase in subscribers compared to the previous year. Unsubscribe rates, which tend to rise up proportionally, has been stabilized by moving new subscribers through an onboarding funnel.

F64 has a big database with which the brand communicates at least biweekly. One of the things we were asked to address was the lower engagement of some of the subscribers who were failing to open, click or interact with the emails and website. Implementing a Sunset flow for the unengaged subscribers, sending reactivation campaigns, or targeting the communications based on customer history and activity, were some of the actions that helped us in our endeavour. 

A more granular segmentation allowed us to send increasingly targeted communications to our customers, and while we incremented the overall number of emails sent throughout the month this did not have a negative impact on deliverability.

One of the most important direct marketing mediums used by F64 for their customers is the email, so in order to generate the expected uplift we needed to prioritize its optimization.

We started by refreshing the email template and making it more responsive on various email providers and devices. 

Then, together with the F64 team, we expanded the communication themes to focus more on the various competitive advantages that make F64 unique on the Romanian market like the quality and diversity of complementary services (print, rent, etc) or the  abundance of educational content, offers and product assortment. 

Together, all these small actions culminated in bringing 10% more sessions on the website and 37% more transactions from the email source compared to 2021.

To increase the open and click rates, a series of A/B tests were in order. 

First, we included a sense of urgency in the subject lines, followed by an attempt to stir subscribers' curiosity through the use of questions, emojis or first name.  A more educational approach superseded whereby subscribers were invited to read different articles or how to's. 

Click rate was addressed by testing different email content. For example, interactive elements such as videos or GIFs, did wonders to our engagement metric, same as placing the CTA on the main banner. 

Based on these actions we succeeded in increasing email deliverability with up to 38%, open rates with 58% and click rates with 5%.

Converting new subscribers to first-time customers, as well as retaining them, has been a second focus in our project. Several automations have been created to touch upon some of the most important steps in a customer's journey. 

We began by creating conversion flows tailored to different levels of experience: from photography newbies on the look-out for courses, ebooks and beginner equipment to experienced photographers who worked in the industry and needed professional gear. 

Second purchases were encouraged by retention campaigns split according to our clients' buying history. 

As a result, we succeeded in converting 42% of our new subscribers into new buyers, 26% out of which placed a subsequent order. 

Lastly, we were interested to understand more about our customers and find out some of the reasons behind their preferences. 

As such, together with the F64 team we tailored surveys based  on RFM, with inactive users receiving questions regarding their late disinterest and overall past experience, and active users being asked about their future equipment needs or their reasons to shop on F64. 

The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the surveys encouraged F64 to implement dedicated campaigns in response to customer needs and gave us more ideas on what kind of information we need to push forward so as to have a communication as relevant as possible with our subscribers.