Many a CPG brand marketer has come to us wringing their hands about investing in ESP and CRM systems that are gathering dust while email marketing stays in the starting blocks.

Our advice to these brands: the first (two) steps are the most important. No matter the ESP and CRM you’re using, the principles to getting email marketing momentum are the same:

1. An expanded welcome series
   
2. More members in your database

(And yes, that’s the order – there’s no sense in mass-acquiring users if you don’t have a good plan in place for engaging them.)

We’ve worked with dozens and dozens of big-name CPG brands to help get their email marketing get traction. From our experience, the right partner or in-house resources can get things pointing up and to the right, with a solid foundation to build on, in three months.

Let’s look at those two steps in more detail.

Expand your welcome series

Many CPG brands have one blanket email welcoming new subscribers into the fold – and that’s where the welcome series stops. Some brands have even built out a still generic, multi-step sequence that looks something like this:

Ideally, your welcome series should be designed with automations in place to begin progressively profiling based on how customers engage with your brand’s content. This allows customers to self-identify based on behavioral triggers, which in turn enables your email team to build dynamic segments more relevant to their users. A more dynamic welcome cadence looks something like this:

We’ve seen the power of a good welcome series firsthand we helped revamp and enhance the approach to engaging new users for Sargento, a beloved American cheese brand, and earned 2.2X the industry average open rate, which provided all sorts of data for future personalization.

There’s a significant bonus to this approach; along with increasing engagement and brand loyalty, strategic segment build-out and usage can help email marketers stay on the right side of GMail and Yahoo spam guidelines.

Once your enhanced welcome series is designed, it’s time to move to step two.

Acquire new CRM subscribers at scale and onboard them

Our tried-and-true approach to subscriber acquisition is to work with relevant third-party partners to include email opt-in offers for your brand. In this setup, consumers who opt-in to a co-registration email offer are connected to the advertiser’s email list in real time via an API connection so the advertiser can get a welcome message out ASAP.

Here’s an example from one of our client campaigns:

There are a couple of key best practices to note with this effort: first, choose your partners wisely. In the above example, the relationship to site and product is clear and synergistic: Clorox helps you provide a safe, clean environment for your child. Second, your creative should be explicit about the value users will get from subscribing – and that value should be tailored to fit your partner’s audience.

The impact of new user acquisition, combined with a strategically designed welcome series to welcome those users, can be transformative. For Sargento, a wave of new users introduced to the brand through the welcome series mentioned above resulted in over 80,000 engaged new subscribers nationwide.

Simply put, these two initiatives give your brand a method for bringing in new users and a better approach to engaging them. They may be the first steps in email marketing growth, but they’re the hardest and most important ones to take.

If you have any questions about how we build three-month programs to get CPG clients’ email campaigns off the ground, drop us a line at info@dmipartners.com.