Email Marketing: High Converting Flows for Luxury Brands with Hannah Spicer (episode 141)

by Chloe Thomas

Hannah Spicer has been helping luxury brands sell more online – especially with their email marketing since 2004, including roles at Harvey Nichols, Stella McCartney, De Beers, and Kurt Geiger. She now runs her own consultancy, Hannah Spicer Consulting, specialising in email marketing for an equally impressive list of luxury and fashion brands.

Hannah Spicer Hannah Spicer Consulting Email Marketing

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Luxury Email Newsletters

Doing email marketing for luxury brands is not at all different. You still need to send engaging content and make sure your emails are optimized for high open and click rates, with the latter being Hannah’s key KPI for emails.

There are, however, different challenges that come with email marketing for luxury brands. There’s more focus on brand and look, as well as feel and design. Hannah also mentions that there’s a reluctance to do discounts and promotions.

Even with these challenges, Hannah says it’s still fun getting into this kind of targeted email marketing.

Email Automations for Luxury Brands

Ideally, Hannah says you should be reviewing your flows and automations on a monthly basis, but if this isn’t doable, doing it quarterly would be good. 

Abandoned cart flows are still important for luxury brands, but Hannah mentions there’s pushback on abandoned browse emails. For the latter, she suggests sending out well-timed emails with messages that serve as reminders for your customers to visit your site again.

The Post Purchase Email Flow

If there’s anything Hannah suggests you focus on this year, it’s your post-purchase email flow.

Provide them with information on how they can get the most out of their purchase, how they can take care of the item they purchased, and how to get the most value out of it.

Also, while some luxury brands think customer reviews are not quite right for them, feedback is important. Customers want to feel heard, especially if they’re spending a lot of money on your products.

Post-purchase emails can be automated when you have the right tools and have carefully thought about the whole customer journey.

Email Marketing to VIP Customers

Even for luxury brands, segmenting customers is important. And although they may be a small group, these VIPs bring in the bulk of your sales. So, thinking of what you can do for your top-tier customers is going to be an exercise in creativity.

Come up with fun and thoughtful things you can do for your top customers, and think of how you can delight them.

When to Discount

While there’s reluctance from luxury brands to give discounts, Hannah says don’t avoid offers altogether. Instead, make them feel targeted and exclusive.

Luxury brands still look to grow their database and convert subscribers into customers, so don’t be afraid to use promotions, but do them in a way that will make sense for your brand.

Insider Tips

If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with email marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

Find the right tool for you, and Hannah mentions she’s a big fan of Klaviyo because it’s really built for eCommerce businesses.

She adds that when you’ve already chosen your email platform, work on the timing of your pop-ups, then focus on four key revenue-driving flows. These are your welcome series, abandoned cart emails, abandoned browse flow, and post-purchase emails.

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve email marketing performance?

With emails, you can get so much information from the data because you can track everything. With this, you have the opportunity to constantly perform AB testing. And when you test, make sure you’re reporting on the performance on a regular basis to know what’s working for your business and what’s not.

If someone listening wants to learn more about email marketing is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?

Aside from the resources you can find on Klaviyo’s website, follow Hannah on Instagram for videos and posts on how you can optimise flows, data capture, and other email tips.

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in email marketing?

Hannah mentions three things:

  • More brands are going to consider SMS as something they can use in tandem with email.
  • Data cleansing is going to be important.
  • Building out more data on your customers is going to be critical.

Interview Links

Thank you to Genie Goals for the intro!

Hannah on Social media:

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