Email marketing may not be as sexy as a clever tweet, a funny YouTube video or a Facebook post but it works — it’s cheap, more effective than social media, and the majority of people use it daily. Email is not only an important tool for customer engagement and retention but also for converting prospects to customers.

It would be nice to assume that users keep up to date with all the latest happenings and products of companies but the reality is they don’t. At Wallaby, when we were analyzing our user data, we were surprised to learn that many users had used the Wallaby mobile app but had not signed up for The Wallaby Card - an all in one credit card which maximizes your rewards. This provided us with an opportunity to market to them and learn what we could do better going forward.

What We Did

We identified a segment of customers who had used the mobile app but had not signed up for the card. We A/B tested different subject lines and a stand alone images versus an animated one. We scheduled the email to send out on a Tuesday morning around 9am pacific time — before lots of people start work on the west coast and right before lunch on the east coast. The link to signup included the user’s email address so that it would pre-populate on the form — reducing friction so the user didn’t have to type it in. We added sharing widgets and an incentive to share after they signed up.

The Result

Compared to the average signups in the past 10 months, we saw a 326% increase for the month we sent the email. The email itself had a 36% open rate, with about 18% of those clicking on the link. The email did not perform as well as it did from the A/B test results, where one email had a 40% open rate and the other had a 32% click through rate.

Despite the lower than expected click through, we were happy with the results and applied the same strategy in reverse — emailing users who signed up for the card but not the app — which also produced similar, positive results.

How We Could Have Done Better