KEY METRICS

SUMMARY

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 from current performance (between 25-30%, or roughly industry standard) to above 30%.

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, as follows: 90-day engaged (opened/clicked an email in the last 90 days), and 365-day engaged (same logic, just expanded to 365 days). This created an opportunity to query for 30-day engaged subscribers to estimate the audience size. The initial figure was approx. 16,000 consumers – small, but 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 the company is not direct to consumer, Smithfield was promoting a contest partnership with NASCAR on its website ($250 in free groceries), a prime opportunity for engagement. Once the team approved the test, DMi launched the sweepstakes email on May 16th. The email outperformed expectations with a 51.35% open rate.

Following the initial test email, a second email was distributed, 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, it was decided to use the opportunity to nurture the relationship with this audience by incorporating them in monthly send calendars, setting us 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 the Smithfield brand, expecting a 41% open rate on average.

Armed with the knowledge that the 30-day engaged audience was the most active segment, the strategy to move more of Smithfield’s subscriber base into that segment was implemented. This led to campaigns with specific messaging designed to re-engage old contacts and augmenting the 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.