Introduction

The path to ecommerce profitability can mimic your favorite hike: rolling hills, valleys, and plateaus that make you wonder, What’s next?

Like your trusty canteen, email is one avenue that marketing trailblazers can consistently rely on. Half of email subscribers purchase something from marketing emails at least once per month. As a result, email marketing earns a tremendous ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.

To perform well in the email marketing realm, you must have high email deliverability rates. You want your email to reach your subscribers’ inboxes directly and stay out of the spam folder. Seems simple, right? Unfortunately, this process isn’t as straightforward as it may seem.

Of the 270 billion emails sent around the globe every day, nearly half of those messages are spam. To fight the influx of spam messages, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have gotten good at blocking suspicious emails from users’ inboxes. While this is great for users, this spam response can make it harder than necessary for email marketers like yourself to land high inbox placement.

As your partner in inbox placement, Bloomreach can help you navigate the path to 99% email inbox placement. This guide will walk you through how even small changes in email inbox placement can significantly affect your annual revenue.

Along the way, you’ll meet three outdoor fitness companies of all different sizes, and see just how much impact high email inbox placement can make on their bottom lines. By “email inbox placement,” we mean the main inbox that people actually check, not the promotion, social, or spam boxes that most emails end up in.

Another note: While these are all real outdoor B2C companies, we’ve changed their names for anonymity. And because these are not Bloomreach customers, we should also mention now that, for all in-tents and purposes, we’ve used assumed percentages from publicly available databases, as well as Bloomreach industry and customer data to inform this study.

Happy trails!

Minor Improvement (GOLA)

Before hitting the trail, it’s important to warm up. Dynamic stretching is essential — and not only for your body. Encourage your team to stretch the limits of current deliverability metrics, so you can start to scale and grow with low monetary investment and high ROI.

Even minor improvements can yield big results. Take a look at a well-known athletic brand that sends 7.3 million emails monthly, which we will call “GOLA.” GOLA maintains a healthy monthly revenue of nearly $2.5 million thanks to email conversions.

But, consider what could happen if GOLA boosted their email inbox placement rates from 97.3% to 99%. With 99% inbox placement and the same unique open, click-to-open, and click-to-conversion rates, GOLA would enjoy 332 more monthly conversions by sending the same email to more contacts in their mailing list.

Assuming that each of those 332 customers spends $100 with GOLA, this athletic brand could rake in over $33,000 in extra cash per month. That’s just under $400,000 per year, thanks to less than a 2% bump in email placement. What an easy way for GOLA to hit its revenue goal-a!

Significant Improvement (Fallspice)

Scouts (and digital marketers) believe that you should be prepared for anything. With ecommerce landscapes changing rapidly, it’s nice to know that you can rely on email inbox placement to propel revenue forward.

“Fallspice,” a direct-to-consumer swimwear business, relies heavily on revenue driven by email. Every month, Fallspice earns an estimated $2.1 million from email conversions. Here’s the kicker: They’re only reaching 93.6% of main inboxes (not promotion, spam, or other inboxes), meaning that Fallspice unknowingly leaves millions of dollars on the table every year by not optimizing inbox placement.

By simply improving inbox placement to 99%, Fallspice could gain 813 additional conversions every month. At $150 average order value, Fallspice would generate $121,000 in additional sales. Over a year, this additional income would reach nearly $1.5 million!

Wondering why these numbers differ from that of GOLA? Gains and losses influenced by inbox placement will increase as a company grows. Improving inbox placement rates with the right data and marketing technology is crucial to your business goals. Just imagine how much growth you can be directly responsible for when you’re able to drive an additional $1.5 million in revenue (besides your best happy dance).

Improvements on an Enterprise Scale (Athena)

It’s a good thing you remembered your hiking boots. Before we reach our destination, we’ll have to climb to the peak of Mount Athena. From the summit, you can see winding rivers, lush canopies, and waterfalls of extra revenue.

“Athena” is a force in the outdoor fitness industry, with a supersized email contact list to match. When Athena sends an email to its list of over 884 million subscribers, the company typically delivers to 97.7% of those inboxes and yields over 3 million conversions.

It’s hard to imagine that Athena could reach even greater heights, but with 99% inbox placement, the company would automatically register over 40,000 more conversions monthly. Assuming every converted customer spends $100 with Athena, the fitness brand could generate an additional $4 million every month.

Much like Fallspice, Athena’s results differ from GOLA because of scale. As a significant enterprise-level organization with nearly 1 billion email contacts, Athena sees eye-popping wins (or losses) as a result of email deliverability metrics. Just 1.2% more emails delivered is all Athena needs to earn an extra $48 million in sales revenue every year. New hiking gear for everyone!