Smithfield: Putting Email Campaigns on Overdrive

We’re Problem Solvers

Background

Smithfield Foods is a U.S. CPG company dedicated to producing “Good food. Responsibly.®” In May 2023, Smithfield tasked the DMi Partners email team with improving the average weekly email open rate.

The Goal

Smithfield sought to improve its average weekly email open rate from its current performance (between 25-30%, or roughly industry standard) to above 30%.

The Approach

DMi created a multi-step approach to this goal: 1) identifying Smithfield’s most engaged audience segment; 2) crafting campaigns to increase engagement in that audience segment; 3) increasing the proportion of Smithfield subscribers in that audience segment.

In the first phase of the approach, DMi recognized that Smithfield was sending to just two audience segments a month: 90-day engaged (opened/clicked an email in the last 90 days), and 365-day engaged (same logic, expanded to 365 days). The left us an opportunity to query for 30-day engaged subscribers to estimate the audience size. The initial figure was approx. 16,000 consumers – a promising base for proving ROI from a more strategic engagement approach.

DMi proposed crafting a single email for the 30-day audience as a test sample. Though Smithfield is not direct to consumer, the brand website featured a contest in partnership with NASCAR ($250 in free groceries), a prime opportunity for engagement. Once the team approved the test, we launched the sweepstakes email on May 16th. The email outperformed expectations with a 51.35% open rate.

Following the initial test email, DMi sent a second email featuring popular recipes but with no sweeps or promotion incentive — closer to Smithfield’s standard email format. When using popular sandwich recipes for the email, the open rate registered at 42.22%. After reviewing the performance with the brand, we recommended nurturing the relationship with this audience by incorporating them in monthly send calendars, setting Smithfield on a path to fostering a loyal audience and garnering better insights on active subscribers. The 30-day audience continues to be the highest-performing segment for Smithfield, with an average 41% open rate.

Armed with the knowledge that the 30-day engaged audience was the most active segment, we implemented a strategy to move more of Smithfield’s subscriber base into that segment. The strategy included campaigns with specific messaging designed to re-engage old contacts and an augmented send calendar to create consistent opportunities for the full audience to qualify as 30-day engaged. By the end of the year, we had built the segment from 16K users to 47K users – a 194% increase.

The Results

51.35%

open rate for test email to newly identified audience segment (30-day audience)

41%

average open rate for 30-day audience

194%

increase in 30-day audience volume in 9 months

BACK TO OUR WORK