Email Strategy,
Joss & Main

The Challenge

As Production Manager of lifestyle brands at Wayfair, my role was to devise new engaging tactics for email and digital advertising.

In this example, the team and I were tasked with hypothesizing and strategically testing email content types that could outperform the expected promotional (product sale) email campaigns.

The business rationale was that promotional emails were starting to show fatigue, and this type of content creates a “race to the bottom” on pricing with competitors, while also missing opportunities for customer engagement.

Approach

Promotional (sales-based) email campaigns are good for business but often offer little value to the consumer. For Joss & Main—a DTC brand recognized as a major authority in home décor and style—we recognized an opportunity to offer customers valuable content via email. This strategy focused on educational "How-to" articles and advice covering style, décor, and trends.

This approach also solidified the brand’s position as an “expert” in the customer’s mind, a trusted source of home and styling information.

We hypothesized that this tactic would not only be engaging but would also help justify premium pricing (in stark contrast to promotional sends) and increase sales.

Leveraging these insights and hypotheses, I led my team in designing a “how-to” series of emails.

We ensured that the email design was editorial in feel, mobile-first, and incorporated inviting discovery-based messages to drive readers to the site to engage with the long-form content and shop the products featured in the articles.

Results

• These content-based sends regularly outperformed promotional sends in A/B testing and supported customer engagement and education efforts by funneling readers to the website, where they could learn about and shop for related products.

• Additionally, these emails helped identify a segment of Joss & Main’s email audience that was interested in only editorial content, thereby increasing overall email channel engagement rates and reducing the brand’s unsubscribe rate.