Email marketing can be a wild beast, but it does not mean it cannot be cracked. This company implemented amazing email marketing strategies. In fact, in 2021 it helped them raise £1 million through crowdfunding in just 20 minutes. This shows how powerful well-planned digital communication can be in today’s fast-changing business world.
Dan Murray-Serter is the founder of Heights, a company providing supplements for one of your most important organs (yes, the brain).
“Brain care is not a known term, this is not something people do. This is something that we’ve identified as a behaviour that we think is really important. And a lot of the things that we understand to be good for our brains involve our minds. For example, mindfulness, social connection, therapy. As an organ, if we get the basic level, certain chemicals will literally make an impact on whether your brain is thriving on foot and on all cylinders. This is not a case of opinion.”
Who knew what an email list could help spread the good word about brain care? Instead of just collecting email addresses, he created a real community. By regularly sharing useful information, Heights built a group of loyal followers. These followers were eager to support the company’s crowdfunding campaign, leading to great success.
The Origin of an Email Marketing Strategy
He set himself on a mission to read a science paper each week on the brain and rewrite it in plain English, in under three minutes, and send out as a newsletter.
“I asked myself why we do not read science papers, which I was doing at that point, for my own curiosity. The thing that I am good at is communicating, I like writing. I enjoyed the practice and I think it’s one of my skills.”
Dan Murray Serter
There is so much to unpack here. First and foremost he filled a need that he had, quite specifically for himself, about a topic he was passionate about. In fact, he set himself up to use a medium he felt comfortable with, and do that extremely well. “It was just a newsletter, a hobby. One of those things that you try and start and you see how it goes.
November 2018, the first newsletter came out 45, people signed up and read it. “It was a very slow burn, every single week, I researched the science paper, and they rewrote it in plain English. We did a few different versions of it, like the first one was honestly about 10 minutes long, so it was too long. I put it down to about three minutes” he remembers. “We try all sorts of different testing, and with the length for the topics, etc. but the same principle is true, which is if you sign up for the Heights newsletter, every Sunday, you get an email that is under three minutes long. It’s scientifically researched. And it’s about something that you can do to take care of your brain that week.”
We love the idea of testing, testing, and testing a bit more. Even more key, consistency in sending is absolutely keep. Create that appointment for your audience, and the rest will follow.
Crafting the Ultimate Email Marketing Campaigns
To create an email marketing campaign that gets noticed, focus on your readers first. Split your audience into groups and make your messages personal. This helps your emails connect better with people. Use email tools to send out messages automatically at the right time, based on what each person likes and does. Remember, a great campaign isn’t just about selling things. It’s about building strong connections with your readers over time.
There are a few things he recalls from those early days: “this is something I enjoyed doing, so this was taking something that I was enjoying doing and just giving it more of a formality.”
His motivation was leading him towards being interested in mental health in this area. He could see that there was a big gap in the space when it came to nutrition and education. “It feels like there’s a business, I don’t know what it is yet” he thought to himself.
“if I just write a science paper based newsletter, and I can do whatever I want product-wise, as we can learn by getting feedback from our community.”
“Read a science paper, figure out what I want to say, reference it professionally, and then write about it in a fun way. It’s become the cornerstone of our whole content strategy.”
Dan Murray Serter
In the early days, they used their newsletter to communicate with people about what what behaviours they use related to the topic.
They went out and did a bunch of user research from people that were reading the newsletter.
For example, he asked them about their behaviours, what they did to look after their brains, what they did to look after their general well being: “this idea of supplements and vitamins came up all the time, in terms of people starting a habit, not finishing it and showing us what they had in all of these things became really obvious to us.”
The Art of Personalising Email Content
Making emails personal is really important these days. In fact, building highly targeted campaigns is the best way to nurture relationships. There are so many emails in people’s inboxes, so you need to stand out. It’s all about showing your potential customers that you get what they need and like.
Email marketers can do this by using information they have about their subscribers. This helps them send emails that match what each person is interested in. When you do this, people enjoy your emails more and are more likely to read and click on them.
When you make your emails fit each person, it makes them feel special. This is what sets your emails apart from all the others people get every day.
Leveraging the Power of Your Community
As Dan mentioned, newsletters became a cornerstone of Heights’ strategy. The idea is to have conversations, to ask people to engage them.
In fact, he got into the practice of asking a question at the end, and (some may thin surprisingly) people respond: “As an example, yesterday, I got maybe 3040 responses on the newsletter didn’t even ask a question. People are so in the habit of responding to our newsletter, because it’s sent from me. If people respond, I respond back to them.”
117 newsletters later, 38000 people a week, may seem impressive.
However, it did not all happen overnight. “There has been massive growth over the last six months, particularly. It was very slow for the first 18 months, it’s definitely worth saying, and so a lot of persistence lessons there.”
In fact, his primary focus is making sure that the newsletter feels personal. Just like he’s having a conversation with people and that they can respond to him, And if they do he responds back to them: “This whole notion of it being a community is super important. It has to keep that kind of feel for us.”
The length of the newsletter is important, but there are two other key things that make Heights’ emails stand out: making them personal and keeping them simple. These factors help Heights send emails that really connect with people.
Understanding Subscriber Behaviour
Knowing when your subscribers are most likely to read emails is essential for effective email marketing. This involves looking at data to find patterns in how people interact with your emails. Things like the day of the week, time of day, and even special events can affect when people open and engage with emails.
By sending emails at the right times based on these insights, you can increase the chances of your messages being read and acted upon. This strategy not only helps more people open and click on your emails, but it also shows your customers that you value their time. This can make them feel more loyal to your brand.
- Understand subscriber behaviour to optimise email timing and content
- Use data analytics to find patterns in how subscribers interact with emails
- Consider factors like day of week, time of day, and special events when scheduling emails
- Send emails at optimal times based on subscriber engagement data to increase open and click rates
Highlighting the Onboarding Flow
How can seasoned marketers make the most of newsletters, choosing content and subject lines, and even better customise that experience for their users?
One of the things that they Heights identified is customer flow by understanding what journey someone’s come from on the newsletter. This is something that can be done by trying to tailor the onboarding experience at the very beginning of the journey, or in Heights’ example, in the first four newsletters that they get.
“Identify the journeys that people are going on from our newsletter to understand types. Now there are different onboarding flows” he remarks, yet never underestimate the power of refreshing and utilising some of your old content by giving it new life, even when it comes to newsletters.
“We’ve done 100 newsletters that’s 100 newsletters worth of my time, it’s a shame not to be re-using some of that content.”
This is where you can analyse some of the content based on the core interest of your audience and the customer journey.
Deep Dive into Audience Segmentation
“If someone comes in because they’d love to learn about sleep, we now have a flow that identifies that. We want to educate them about the topic first, but if they came in through nutrition, we’d make sure that this was one that they got in the first core communication.”
In order to identify what topics may work for you, you can pick out you highest quality newsletters with the best engagement rates. And highlight topics that are really important: “little things like that start to really boost the engagement rates up dramatically”.
Here’s a helpful tip: divide your audience into groups based on what they’re interested in, what they want to learn, and how they act. You can even go as far as looking at their purchase history.
- Keep your newsletters short and consistent. Aim for a length that can be read in about three minutes, and send them out regularly (e.g., every Sunday) to create a reliable appointment with your audience.
- Make your emails personal and engaging. Treat your newsletter like a conversation, asking questions at the end to encourage responses from subscribers.
- Segment your audience based on their interests and behaviors. This allows you to tailor content to specific groups, increasing relevance and engagement.
Email Marketing Strategies Can Fuel Success
So how does a company manage to get over 1 million pounds in just 20 minutes?
As always, there’s no such thing as an overnight success, and the whole team focused on this idea of crowdfunding for six months, by letting people know, planning and strategising. When it came down to executing our campaign, they ran a record breaking campaigns, and raised a million pounds in 20 minutes.
“That’s the PR version” he explains “Of course, the reality is that we had six months of planning in advance to make sure that things are lined up really, really well. In the end, we raised 1.7 million in five days. That was just such a fast campaign.”
Integrating Email with Broader Marketing Strategies
As well as using other channels, they spent time informing their audience about when they would go live, using the newsletter to, ultimately, say two things.
One is that if you want to invest in Heights, you can do so from as little as 10 pounds: “this is one of the more important things for us, it wasn’t about trying to assume the economic circumstances about any of our participants or readers, because the idea of sharing in a reward or something shouldn’t be about how much money you already start with at all or the stage in your life, if you’re motivated by the mission of Heights, and you’ve been reading our newsletter, you can invest in 10 pounds, that was really important to us.”
The second part was encouraging the viral effect by telling your friends: “if you think this is a good opportunity, and you think it’s something you’re going to do, then share it with other people.”
Here are the main takeaways:
- Short newsletters are better for keeping readers interested and making sure they read everything
- Making emails personal means having real conversations with your readers
- Newsletters can help you understand your audience better
- Grouping topics helps you customise how you introduce new readers to your content
All in all, newsletters just like any other marketing tool can be incredibly powerful (and this is a clear example of it). If you’d like to listen to the full 40 minute interview, we recommend you check out the full interview.
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