Email Marketing Approach

Conducting an Audit

First, our team needed to “check under the hood.” We conducted an email marketing audit to assess the overall condition of the account and identify areas of improvement. At the time of the audit, we discovered Goodwill had fewer than 10,000 subscriber emails, mediocre open and click rates, poor and uninformative subject lines, as well as email sends with inconsistent frequency. We also noticed some confusion among recipients since the emails were sent with a personal From Name (e.g., Jane@GoodwillSP.org).

Our Recommendations

First, our team got to work introducing regular promotional emails. In the last two years, we’ve sent emails regarding sales, events, classes, upcycle tutorials and anything else that would engage the community. And, with the exception of lockdown in early-mid 2020, we’ve also been promoting in-store coupons to lore email subscribers to shop at Goodwill. Although the frequency of email sends largely depends on the client’s events and social media calendars, both of which are managed internally by their team, we stressed the importance of consistently communicating to their subscribers. Our team recommended increasing their number of email sends to more than two per month, at the very least. On average, we send three to five emails per month, depending on events and promotions. Additionally, our team designed a more engaging email template and a landing page dedicated to signing up subscribers. Furthermore, although Goodwill was doing a fine job of collecting subscriber emails, we also suggested a fresh redesign for the exit intent pop-up.

Split Testing

We A/B tested From Names that are related to the organization and more identifiable to the recipients (e.g., “Goodwill Training and Promotions” and “Goodwill Promotions and Training”). Most recently, we started to split test the length of the emails in which we compare long-form copy versus short-form copy.

The Challenges

One of the challenges we face is that there aren’t onsite conversions we can track. Subscribers can be pushed to the website for more information but the actual action takes place offline. Our tracking to prove success is limited to user signups, unsubscribes, open rates and click-through rates, so we have to innovate based on these metrics. Another challenge we encounter is tailoring our content to address all subscribers. Since Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont’s territory is vast, not all events tied to a specific retail location apply to the recipient. We attempted to segment Goodwill’s list through a series of emails encouraging subscribers to select their email preferences. Unfortunately, less than a significant number of subscribers actually updated their preferences so the list isn’t segmented. We’ve since abandoned encouraging subscribers to update their preference out of concern that these emails would annoy subscribers, causing them to opt-out of receiving anything further instead.

The Results