E-mail Risks Bring Business Rewards

Icebreaker specializes in activewear — apparel for skiers, mountain climbers and participants in other sports that might be considered high-risk. This past Christmas season the New Zealand-based brand took some risks of its own, with an 11-message e-mail campaign to its 25,000-plus U.S. subscribers. Whereas before the company had sent the occasional marketing e-mail every few months, in the six weeks leading up to Christmas it sent as many as three e-mails a week. What’s more, many of the mailings were A/B split tests of the offers, products or creative.

Holiday Sales Up

For Icebreaker, the risks paid off. Total holiday sales were up 32% from the previous year, and according to eROI, the digital marketing agency that worked with Icebreaker, 58% of that increase was directly attributable to the e-mail campaign.

“A lot of people are comfortable with how their campaigns take place and don’t look any deeper,” says Dylan Boyd, eROI’s vice president of sales and strategy. “This was a great example of looking at myriad ways of testing things.”

For instance, for the sixth e-mail in the campaign, one segment of the list received a promotion code for a free beanie with the purchase of any item from Icebreaker’s GT apparel line; the other segment was sent a code for 20% off any GT purchase. Although the read and click-through rates for both segments were similar, the free beanie resulted in more conversions.

Building on the results of this test, the subsequent e-mail in the series offered the free beanie with purchase to all subscribers, but tested the e-mail content. One segment of the file received copy spotlighting the high average customer rating on Buzzillions.com; the other segment received copy highlighting a stellar magazine review. The message with the consumer reviews generated more sales than that with the magazine review.

The eighth message in the campaign again tested two offers: Customers who purchased an item from Icebreaker’s Superfine collection could receive a free pair of socks or a 25% discount. This time the discount, which was higher than that tested in the sixth e-mail, outperformed the gift-with-purchase, in read rate (26.11% vs. 23.48%), clickthrough rate (7.22% vs. 4.38%) and sales.

Timing Was Right

Most companies wouldn’t have conducted these tests during one of their primary selling periods, Bod notes. “A lot of props and kudos are due the Icebreaker team for taking risks and shaking things up,” he says.

Arguably one of the greatest gambles was increasing the frequency of e-mails so dramatically. Boyd says this was one of the first subjects that came up when the eROI and Icebreaker teams began discussing the campaign. “An increase in frequency is somewhat expected that time of year, as everyone is in the market,” he notes. Nonetheless, eROI kept a close eye on unsubscribe rates and spam reports as well as on conversions. The unsubscribe rate throughout the campaign ended up being roughly the same as, if not slightly less than, Icebreaker’s previous rate.

One reason may have been that Icebreaker explained in its first e-mail of the campaign that it would be sending weekly offers as well as Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions and a “Holiday Gift Guide” throughout the season, setting up expectations from the get-go.

“This entire campaign,” Boyd concludes, “was all about testing and [establishing] their baseline of how their customers react, as their previous campaign had very little frequency, so that we could have a very strong program for 2010.”