Where else can you get ironic t-shirts that bear the likeness of cult favorite Grumpy Cat and Walter White and get in early on the Underwood 2016 groundswell? Sure, BustedTees isn’t for everyone, but if you’re among the in-the-know crowd (and you binge-watch Nexflix), BustedTee represents your kind of humor.
“We strive to always have our finger on the button of pop culture,” said Jonny Cottone, Interactive Marketing Director, BustedTees, an Internet-based retailer of humorous t-shirts and novelty items.
“Started in 2004 by employees from CollegeHumor.com, the pop culture part of BustedTees’ business was flourishing with quirky and unique t-shirts,” explained Courtney Eckerle, writing for MarketingSherpa.
Although aware of its global audience, BustedTees was only sending a daily email at one time every day. Email marketing had always been a top revenue generator for BustedTees, according to Cottone, yet he and his team knew they weren’t maximizing the value of the channel.
“BustedTees is a global business with customers located throughout the world,” he said.
Yet they timed their one-email-per-day for an American audience.
To solve this issue, as well as better serve its international customers, the BustedTees marketing team developed a plan to move toward personalization of its email program, Eckerle reported:
“Working with a vendor, BustedTees started out by segmenting its sends by time zone, delivering emails at a reasonable time for all subscribers.
It decided to take personalization farther, and use its past data on individual open times to develop a personalized send time for each subscriber. This would allow the daily BustedTees email to reach customers at the time that was best for them — no matter the time zone.”
A Lesson in Timing for SMBs Marketers
What small-to-midsize marketers can learn from BustedTees is to apply personalization along every stage of their sales funnels. The result is an easy three-step policy you can steal:
- Step 1: Segment subscriber list
- Step 2: Test for optimal send duration
- Step 3: Implement a personalized send time
Sales and Marketing Must Work Together
One other takeaway:
“Most of our sales are timed, let’s say 24 or 48 hours, to create a sense of urgency. So, it was figuring out when, even though it’s a personalized send time, we should be hitting someone so that they’re getting the most amount of the sale possible,” Cottone said.
The results helped the t-shirt business bust out of their strategy rut:
- 8 percent lift in email revenue overnight from personalized send time
- 17 percent increase in total email response rate
- 11 percent higher click-through rate
- 7.6 percent increase in post-click site engagement
BustedTees isn’t the only international brand teaching smaller marketers a thing or two about personalization. Read what MasterCard has been up to recently.
