Email Best Practice for Sampling Campaigns

Follow-up communication with your new customers is a crucial part of any digital sampling campaign. Emails allow you to gain valuable feedback on the samples, reviews for your website, and a chance to offer further incentives to purchase.

After running many hundreds of sampling campaigns, we’ve broken down our top tips for making your email follow up as successful as possible. 

‍

1. Timing your emails correctly
2. Content and design best practice

‍

‍

Timing

‍

There’s different kinds of email you’ll want to send following a new sample claim - some are to keep your new customer updated on the progress of their order, and some are to help you achieve your campaign objectives, whether that’s gaining reviews or increasing your sales. 

‍

Our tried-and-tested framework for email follow up consists of four emails:

‍

‍

Confirmation email

‍

Send: immediately.

This is a very simple email, but important to let your customer know you’ve received their request. Include details of when their sample should be delivered. 

‍

‍

Sample on its way 

‍

Send this when their sample has been dispatched - and think of this as your opportunity to get them excited about receiving your product. 

‍

‍

Review/survey request

‍

Send: 14 days after dispatch (depending on your delivery timelines).

‍

Following up a while after they’ve received their sample gives them plenty of time to try out your product or can be a good reminder if they’ve received it but forgotten to test it out. This is the perfect time to ask for some feedback, and if you want to get more detail in the form of a survey - this is your moment. 

‍

‍

Review Follow up

Send: 3-7 days after first request. 

‍

A gentle reminder to complete your feedback/review increases your open and click through rates (compared with campaigns only sending 1 email). 

‍

‍

Creating your emails

‍

‍

Content & design

‍

All the emails in your campaign should start with a similar template, in-keeping with the look of the digital campaign. This creates a cohesive experience for the customer, giving them a feel for the brand and making your assets stand out in a busy inbox.

For emails requiring action from the customer, ensure you only have 1 CTA (eg. leave a review) and that it is clear and placed high up in the email.

‍

Make the subject line catchy and enticing to encourage customers to open the email.

‍

‍

Subject lines

‍

Subject lines with a character limit of 30 or less performed above average for metrics including open rate, CTR and CTO

Subject lines with a word count of 1-5 saw the highest open rate

‍Email personalisation (using the recipient's first name in the subject line) can increase the open rate by 13-28%

Using emojis in your subject line means the email is 8% more likely to be opened

Use A/B testing to find out what works best for your audience 

‍

‍

Building your sampling campaign flow

‍

Using the tips above - you should be ready to get started building your digital sampling campaign.

‍

Having a simple, regular and quality campaign flow will help you achieve your sampling goals, whether that’s increasing product sales, gaining reviews, or engaging new audiences. 

‍

Get in touch with us to learn more about how the Odore platform helps you build and fulfill sampling campaigns more easily and cost effectively. 

‍