Making Hay out of Meatheads

DMi Partners first began working with leading natural and organic meat purveyor Applegate in 2023. At the beginning of the engagement, the brand was experiencing poor deliverability from Gmail restrictions, which curtailed the effectiveness and scope of our email campaigns. The deliverability issues suppressed Applegate’s open rate, which measured 18.4% when DMi took over campaign management.

In order to boost their deliverability rates, DMi sent emails only to engagers and included any Gmail addresses that had opened any Applegate emails. Once deliverability was fixed, we expanded our reach to a larger engaged audience until we reached the 180-day engaged group. That list contains our most frequently engaging users while maintaining a 99% deliverability rate, which provided a strong audience base for an email campaign leveraging the clever wordplay and social clout of Applegate’s Meathead initiative, featuring influencer Tyler Cameron.

DMi worked with Applegate to send two emails to the 180-day engaged list in January 2024, which was warranted by the strong performance from the initial email and the seasonal interest in nutrition related to New Year’s resolutions.

The results were eye-popping: the first send produced an Open Rate of 70.2% (a 28.5% increase over Applegate’s average) and a Click Rate that topped Applegate’s average by 25%; the second produced an Open Rate of 66% (22% above average) and a Click Rate of 16% above average.