Origami Owl (2017-2022)

The Situation

Email marketing is usually the most stalwart workhorse in any brand’s marketing mix. Origami Owl was no different. They had a 1M+ email list, and for years email was their most lucrative channel. But after years of being on autopilot, it had slipped into a decline: rising unsubscribe rates, lower open rates and less revenue generated each year.

Biggest Risks

If email marketing continued to decline, the company’s overall revenue would plummet. This would also make Origami Owl more dependent on paid channels to maintain revenue or to grow. The CEO needed someone who could thoughtfully and strategically revive this once-healthy marketing channel and help stabilize the business.

My Approach

When I took ownership of our CRM and lifecycle marketing, my first step was to audit the entire channel. Looking at the data, I developed a four-pronged solution and built a team across IT, eCommerce and Creative to implement the new CRM strategy.

1. An outdated tech stack was severely hampering our ability to modernize this channel. In partnership with our ecommerce and IT teams, I helped us transition to a newer CRM, Klaviyo, that would enable AI-based segmentation, personalization and automated flows.
2. Origami Owl sold multiple product lines (jewelry, skincare, cosmetics and supplements.) I set up a customer preference center, so that we could properly segment our email sends instead of blasting the entire list about every product launch or seasonal sale.
3. I improved our email UX by teaching our graphic design team how to design within Klaviyo. We had been sending emails as a series of images designed in Photoshop, resulting in no live text and larger-than-necessary file sizes. Designing within Klaviyo also let us A/B test designs and figure out the best way to present information to our audience to earn the sale.
4. Knowing that we needed to take some of the sales pressure off of email inboxes, I introduced SMS as a new lifecycle channel. Once we learned which of our contacts responded better to SMS vs email, we moved them into an SMS-only segment and improved our email deliverability.

My Results

One year into my four-pronged approach, I had resurrected email marketing and successfully launched SMS marketing. Email revenue tripled (along with a 161% open and 30% click rate increase) and SMS saw a 134x ROI. For Origami Owl as a whole, this helped stabilize the business. The paid media team was under less pressure to generate revenue. Rather than retargeting ads, email and SMS could be the primary drivers of repeat purchases.