This is the second installment in “Emails We Open” – a blog and content series in which the team at MH Digital shares and analyzes real emails that we receive in our own personal inboxes that stick out to us. We break down not only the design and layout but the content strategy itself and how it pertains to their audience.
Read the previous edition about a newsletter we love here.
The email we’re highlighting in this post is from J Skis, a boutique ski brand based out of Vermont.
Email:
J Skis – Promotional Email
Company Background:
J skis has built a bit of a cult following in the ski space by taking a direct to consumer approach and by creating limited quantities of product built and signed by its founder Jason Levinthal, a guy who built other popular ski brands before starting J skis. His personal touch and transparency goes a long way in building trust from their audience.
The Audience:
While we don’t have access to the direct J skis email database, they’re likely a relatively traditional e-commerce email business. Skis are typically a $600+ investment, and as such, there’s a longer nurturing and consideration for each purchase. In addition, the majority of skiers are not going to be purchasing multiple skis and many ride the same pair for many years, even up to a decade.
It is likely that this email was sent to a segment of their subscriber database that has yet to buy skis – we’ll circle back to the importance of this.
Breaking down the email itself:
This email is written in a plain text format and has no styling outside of some bolding and all caps text. When used sparingly, a plain text email can be a striking enough difference that it gives the feeling that it was handwritten and personalized for its recipient. In this case, it’s so amateur looking that you can’t help but think it was indeed written by Jason himself.
The brevity of the email is striking (especially for a marketing email), and your eyes jump immediately to the sale price and the ‘secret link’.
The messaging of this email is really nothing special – but used in combination with the audience it executes a strategy we’ll lay out shortly.
Analysis:
Despite the elementary styling of the email itself, we love that it successfully acts as a promotional email to the specific audience segment that has yet to purchase skis.
In this case, a plain text email works because it adds variation to the usual marketing emails containing heavy visuals and the simplicity here captures the ethos of the J skis branding and intimacy with its customer base.
More importantly, this J Skis email does two other things that are valuable for product-based businesses.
1. Using email to move factory seconds or blemished inventory.
Nearly every product business that cares about its quality is going to end up with product inventory from the manufacturer that is still functionally viable, but has cosmetic issues that prevent them from being sold as new. As this inventory piles up, it not only physically fills warehouses, but represents lost opportunity.
Building a page of this inventory and sharing it only with email subscribers lets J Skis earn revenue on these products and get them out of the warehouse. Because the page of the blemished inventory is not connected to the main website, it allows them to protect their brand from becoming devalued if they were to release it to the entire audience which would potentially add doubt to their product quality and pricing for their retail lineup.
2. Offering these blemished items to subscribers who have yet to purchase informs them about the reservations of their subscribers who are not yet customers.
Every product business has a large cohort of subscribers that has signed up but never bought – and a big challenge that those businesses face is determining why these subscribers have signed up, and how to get them to convert.
Offering a limited run of blemished products to the audience helps answer a question of: “Are these subscribers not buying because of the price?” without having to run a steep discount on the retail product and risk devaluing those products. If the subscriber purchases, they’ll know that price has something to do with it, and you may want to tag these as your ‘only at a discount buyers’. If they don’t, they may need to do a better job of nurturing and explaining the other value propositions of the products they offer.
Takeaways:
J Skis takes advantage of a combination of the intimate branding and feel they’ve developed through a plain text email and combines a segment of their audience with their extra inventory to create a compelling offer to those subscribers.
Not every business should offer their factory seconds and not every business should run plain text emails all the time, but the lessons here about pairing the subset of the audience with a unique offer can be taken to your business with success.
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