This Week

Happy Sunday,

Welcome back to the 10th edition of the NordMedia newsletter,

Your weekly retention strategy reality check. 

It’s absolutely wild that thousands of you read this newsletter every Sunday. Appreciate you all 🤝 

This week we’ll cover
1. An email design spotlight.
2. How I grew an apparel brand form $0 → $650K in revenue in 3 months
3. Does deliverability or your subject line matter more? Why?

1. Weekly Email design Spotlight 🔥
Brand - Dilettoso
Email Focus - Driving Subscription Growth

Why did we design it this way?
The client provided a great image of their founder reaching for the product in a cabinet. we used this image to complement the email's message, which encourages users to subscribe. We added dimension to the hero section by cropping the pancake box image and layering it partially over the text box. For the subscription benefits in the body, we incorporated icons adjacent to the copy and boxed each benefit to emphasize them. Lastly, we placed the pancake box images at the end of the email for a nice closure!

Takeaways / Callouts / Important details:
It's always nice when clients have high-quality visuals readily available! The hero image was perfect for this email's message. Using icons to visually represent key offers and benefits is a good way to draw attention to important points + adds a touch of playfulness to the content.

What would you change about the design and why? Reply back and let me know.

Looking for more tips & help around email design? Checkout my FREE Email Design 101 board.

2. How I grew an apparel brand form $0 → $650K in revenue in 3 months 👇

About the company:
• 96% of sales come in Oct - Dec
• Inventory arrives in August
• Massive creative needs and requirements
• Large priority on list growth for YoY sales
• Needed to sell through inventory for proof of concept & profit scaling.
• Looking to achieve a 2.7x MER in year 1

How’d we do?:
• Ended the year at $650K in revenue at 4.2x MER
• Grew their email list to 19K people by end of December
• Sold through 98% of inventory by mid December.
• Built an absolutely killer website
• Tested various landing pages & offers that absolutely crushed once we found the winning concept.
• Grew Repeat order rate to an average of 3 orders during the seasonal period.

Results / Learnings:
• Brand signed on for another year contract and is now pushing $1.2M+ this year at a 3x MER
• We also learned to avoid discounts to early in the season as people will buy without these.
• Found winning strategy for offer & landing page
• The offer needs to be tailored to each demographic / category of sales.
• Needed to improve margins for YoY growth.

Sometimes the smaller brands we work with have the largest impact. The owners of this company had enough money for 1 year of proof of concept.

We crushed it for them, now we have a rapidly growing brand who’s extremely loyal for the initial help and guidance.

3. Does deliverability or your subject line matter more?

You can focus on your deliverability all you want. It can even be perfect.

But your subscribers might not be opening your emails simply because your subject line is 🗑️.

Not because they landed in spam.

Focus on your priority principles.

If your deliverability is healthy but open rate is less than 50 - 60% your subject lines need improvement. Start A/B testing... your subject line (typically recommend 2-3 times a week).

If your open rates are at 50 - 60% but your CTR is garbage... guess what? Test your design. Test your segmentation. Make sure that the email your sending resonates with the people receiving it. Just because they’re opening it doesn’t mean they’re interested; it means you had a good hook in your subject line.

There's always incremental improvement and lift that can happen. Remember - 1% better daily. That’s the goal.

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Thank you for reading! I appreciate you.

Best Wishes,
Kody