Zoysia Farm Nurseries is a specialty retailer of Zoysia grass, seed, plugs and complimentary lawn resources. A successful email marketing tactic for this client has always been B2C email marketing. Email campaigns typically consist of special promotions, garden/lawn care blogs and product features.
However, stricter CANSPAM laws and filters were making it increasingly difficult to reach consumers directly via promotional emails. To combat the deliverability and bounce issue, an email platform migration from Campaigner to MailChimp was the ultimate solution. By switching to an alternate email platform, deliverability saw a remarkable improvement, and the sending reputation soared.
Along with a platform migration, email lists were cleaned– any stale email addresses that had not interacted with a single email campaign in the past 2+ years were removed. A separate re-engagement email campaign was created and sent to these “stale” email addresses. This campaign gave recipients notice that they must re-opt in as subscribers, otherwise they would be permanently removed from the Zoysia email marketing list and wouldn’t receive any further email communications.

It can be difficult to know what to expect with re-engagement campaigns since there can be many variables as to why recipients haven’t engaged for an extended period of time. The email platform migration allowed for 98% of emails in the stale list to be delivered successfully. Final campaign results showed an open rate of 8.6% (10,228 total opens) and a 1.6% click rate (1,866 total clicks). There was a total of 409 re-subscribes as a result of this campaign.
In this case, not only were several hundred subscribers gained back, but Zoysia was able to get the attention of many on this stale list and make sure that they were aware of opportunity and benefits of being a subscriber. This way, best practices were met by both keeping an email list with only current and engaged contacts, as well as making sure that those who wanted to remain subscribers had the opportunity and a clear call to action to do so.
Learn more about successful email marketing platforms here.