Peak Design’s Email Marketing

Everyday Emails, Done Right

Peak Design makes tools for doing. Their carry solutions help creatives, commuters and adventurers keep their gear accessible, organized, and protected.

They design products to solve problems, look good, and have a minimal disruptive impact on people and the planet in both their creation and shipping.

That’s already a handful, all while using crowdfunding.

‘Crowdfunding is baked into the Peak Design DNA, encouraging us to take risks, prioritize innovation, speak honestly, and shun tradition.’, they say.

They launch their products on Kickstarter, and the numbers are insane.

This is amazing.

Their mission also really resonated with us:

• Make the best things
• Succeed at the expense of nobody
• Treat our customers as peers
• Offset our environmental impact
• Use our voice to inspire positive change

But even though I love their mission and their connection with their customers, their email marketing isn’t perfect yet. Let’s explore why, together.

Growing the Email List

You can send the greatest email in the world, but if you have nobody on your email list, no one is going to read it. If nobody reads them, your emails will be wasted.

It’s essential that email list growth is optimized, and that a strong Welcome Flow properly nurtures your new subscribers after they sign up.

To get people to sign up you need something that attracts them.

The Pop-Up

I get it. Pop-Ups have a bad name. And yes, they can be disruptive, annoying, and bad for the user experience.

But if you do it right, that’s not much of an issue… and they work!

Without a well-converting Popup, any traffic that comes to your site that you fail to convert? Lost to the wind.

You can of course retarget them with Ads and so on, but it’s ideal if you manage to retain them right away.

A Popup can help you do just that, with properly optimized ones converting 8-12% of your site’s traffic into Email Subscribers.

I never got a pop-up or notification at all. This could mean that Peak Design is not converting that many people to their actual email list. So the first thing they should focus on is some kind of notification, preferably a pop-up.

Not having a pop-up is a serious problem. The visitors that don’t sign up, are likely to not return.

We typically create one Popup for Desktop users, and a Flyout for Mobile users - then test the ideal timing to actually trigger them so they don’t actually hurt UX.

Most brands don’t really put in the effort to make the Popup / Flyout unique to their brand.

You’ve probably seen the endless “Sign up for 10% off” Pop-Ups. They work, but we don’t think they are ideal - first of all, you have to rely on the discount to convert, thus hurting your margins. Second, the kind of subscriber you attract through that only likes you for your discounts.

A unique twist on the copy that really shows your brand's personality will typically work a lot better.

Typically you can’t go super wrong with this:

Show the pop-up after 30–60 seconds after arriving on your website and also trigger it on exit-intent. Also, make sure the copy on the pop-up is personalized to your brand.

Newsletter signup

As we can see down here the newsletter signup does not look very promising. The signup form can be found on the bottom of the page, kind of hidden away. They should highlight their signup and make it personal to their brand.

As a potential subscriber, it is not very clear to me why I should enter my email here. What can I expect? What kind of emails will you send me? What’s in it for me?

The Emails

There was some discussion within Bullseye Persuasion about the emails.

When we sign up for email lists we use either dedicated email addresses or our Bullseye emails, but Johann got these emails sent to him on his private email. But he can’t remember signing up for their email list.

So as you may understand, there is some confusion about how we got onto their email list.

Email #1: “Hey there, the taxpayer”

The first email itself is written okay and looks okay. But it was the first email we got from them, ever. That is a problem. There is no introduction, I don’t know the brand, I don’t remember the brand and I have no idea who they are.

The email itself doesn’t talk about the brand. When you take a look at the third picture you can see it’s about a documentary. Apart from the Logo here and there (which you might not recognize if you’re not super familiar with the brand), the only time you see it is from Peak Design is at the bottom.

This email would have been perfectly fine if it were sent in between other emails. Now it is not, I don’t know who they are. The email itself is not horrible, but if there is no context, don’t send an email like that.

Johann replied to that email but never got a response, so the email address might not be monitored.

Email #2 “Amazon, ya basic.”

For the second email, they had some funny ideas and the copy is good but it does not fit together in a consistent theme.

Design-wise, it just goes image after image after image. That gets boring after a bit and doesn’t really work too well here.

We really like the creativity they put into all of their emails, you can see that the drive to do it well is there, but they’re not quite sure yet how exactly to do it.

Email #3 “Giverway > Giveaway”

If you look at the third email it is not designed that well. The copy and the goal behind it are okay, but it just does not do much for me. We might be wrong, the truth is always in the data, but from our experience, this could have been done better.

The email copy is good. But they need a theme to make it look good. The difference is text size is huge and compared to the big headlines the bigger chunk of pure copy almost seems puny.

Their biggest problem: Context

…or rather the lack of it.

Sure, we might have just forgotten how we landed on the list. But even if that were the case, there is still a massive thing missing here.

When someone signs up to your Email List, the single most important thing you can do is introduce your brand to them and nurture them into becoming familiar with your brand — and hopefully a paying customer.

We never got a single introduction email.

That’s big because typically the Email Sequence / Flow that has the biggest impact out of all Emails and Sequences is the Welcome Flow.

A well-done welcome sequence can convert really well. About 50% of the email marketing revenue comes from automation. The welcome sequence typically makes up a huge part of that revenue, usually like 25% to 50%.

Email marketing revenue usually takes up 30% of total revenue. Let’s say some company makes $100,000 each month. That means $30,000 comes from email marketing. The automations take up 50% of that revenue, which would add up to $15,000 coming from automations. If they have a well-done welcome sequence and they do convert 25% to 50%, that means they can make up to $7,500 each month just from a welcome sequence.

In conclusion, they miss out massively if they don’t get people to sign up for their newsletter!

So the first two things they should focus on are optimizing the Signup and creating a great Welcome Flow. The campaigns they are sending are okay, the design could get some more attention, but after all, it looks good.

I hope this article was useful!

If you’d like to see how you could increase your Email Marketing results, give us a visit to bullseye-persuasion.com

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See you soon & stay focused!