How I Helped a Wellness Brand Generate £19,000 in One Weekend with Email Marketing

In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of how I helped wellness brand Onyx generate £19,000 in sales over one Bank Holiday anniversary weekend through email marketing, without pushy tactics, spammy discounts or shouting at their audience.

I break down the exact strategy we used, including:

• Why we didn’t start with sales emails
 • How trust-building content increased engagement
 • The power of brand tone and audience clarity
 • How lifestyle-led emails primed customers to buy
 • Why open rates and click-through rates matter more than vanity metrics
 • The role of automations and flows in driving consistent revenue
 • How thoughtful campaigns can outperform aggressive selling

If you’re a founder, freelancer or marketer wanting to turn email into a revenue channel that actually feels good, this episode will give you practical ideas you can apply straight away.

You can find me at:
 www.gemmaclifton.co.uk

www.instagram.com/gemmacliftonmarketing

Join the waitlist for The Marketing Collective:
https://gemmaclifton.com/marketing-collective-wait-6630

Or get in touch if you’d like 1:1 support with your marketing strategy, email marketing or brand growth.

If you want support with your marketing from a real person (not AI), you can find me here:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gemmacliftonmarketing

Join the waitlist for The Collective (opening soon): https://gemmaclifton.com/marketing-collective-wait-6630

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, thank you so much for coming today. So, this is going to be a masterclass on email marketing and how I took my client um to £19,000 worth of sales from email marketing alone in one weekend. So, if you don't know me, I'm Gemma Clifton, work at Gemma Clifton Marketing, and I help businesses with their marketing. So, whether that's creating strategies, plans, looking at the overall picture, how can we simplify everything? How can we make marketing easier and make it a process that you actually enjoy? And is then something that you then start to do more of? Because what I found is that people often find marketing difficult or they don't quite know what to say or they're a bit confused, so they then just retreat and they don't actually do as much as they want to. Now, one of my areas of special, like my areas of expertise is email marketing. So I've worked with email marketing now. I've been in marketing for about 15, 16 years, and in corporate, my background was email marketing, that was my specialism. So in part of the team, I would focus on the email marketing. I've done various courses and qualifications specifically for email marketing. And I find whenever I work with people, email marketing is normally one of the bits that doesn't like it hasn't quite caught up yet with the rest of the business. So they you may be marketing yourselves regularly on socials, for example, but email marketing is something that's a bit like lagging behind. It's like people don't they don't quite know how to use it properly. They'll promote on socials, but with emails they tend not to. I don't know why it's zooming in like this, it's really weird. They would uh promote themselves on socials quite easily, but then as it comes to emails, they'll literally just use it as a way to get like quick sales. Now, not saying that that's a bad thing, but it's just if you haven't if you're only using email marketing for that, it's not going to work in the way that you want it to. Now, as a tool, email marketing is fairly low cost, and it is one of the best the one of the ways to get the highest return on investment in terms of your time and to help you generate more income quickly, as compared to like social media, for example, just because of the amount of if you look at if you look at email marketing, people have to opt in basically to see your content. Yes, people follow you or they might like your content. Now, that's very different to them physically giving over information to say, yes, I'm vested, I am interested in hearing from you. Whereas, like a quick like is a different type of I like it, I can't say that I'm gonna buy from you. Whereas somebody who is given information is more likely to buy from you because they have given over their personal data. So I'm gonna go through, I've been working with a client now for about 18 months, and I'm gonna go through the exact strategy of how I've helped them with their email marketing over time, and in particular, this like recent sale that we've done. So I've met them. This is um brand called Onyx Wellbeing. They sell really beautiful yoga Pilates, home workout equipment, and it's really lovely. It sort of mixes interior design with functionality, it's all very pretty. It's been featured in so many different um publications like Glamour, Vogue, Red Magazine, like it's been everywhere, and it was um the yoga mat was voted, I think, the best yoga mat in 2024 by the independent. It's really lovely stuff, so I guess you go check it out. But when I started working with them, they didn't have an email list. Well, they did have an email list because they had a customer list, but they hadn't been emailing their audience. So we were starting at the very, very beginning, and as I go through how I've implemented this implemented their strategy. I this is applicable to everybody, so you don't have to be a product or a service business. Like you don't you can be any type of business to make this strategy work for you. Obviously, if we work one-to-one, we can then bes create one more bespoke, but the principles are basically the same, regardless of what business you're in. So when we got started, we basically didn't focus on any sales content for the first six months. Now that can be really daunting because people are like, Well, how I need I need money now, like I need sales now. How am I gonna I don't have six months to spend? And and that's absolutely fine. It's just we did a lot of prep work in terms of warming the audience up, and this is the thing, is like this is where most people miss it. Now, I'm not saying you have to spend six months, but investing a good amount of time into your audience to make it worthwhile will make it worthwhile in the long run. So, what what did that look like for us? It looked at lots of lots of content that the audience would would like to receive. So it's like educational content, supportive content, content that is engaging, uh content that follows trends and is relevant to our audience and doesn't necessarily sell. So we didn't have any calls to action of like shop now, buy here, go through to the website. It was all content that was going to be um readable for them to use. So we include lots of recipes, lots of workout, um free content, um, stretches, for example, uh trends that we are seeing, because we knew that that was then going to be something that our audience would want to see. Because the whole idea of doing this type of work is that it builds readership. As we build readership and we build our trust with our audience, they then start to expect the content and they look forward to it. Because that's essentially what you want. That's like the golden thing is that you want your audience to be like, okay, I'm actually really looking forward to their content because I enjoy it. Now, if you were to receive an email from somebody who only emails you when there's a sale or looking forward to a piece of content that you actually enjoy, which one are you more likely to buy from over time? It's going to be this one, isn't it? So we have to make sure we create content with our audience at first in mind, not sales in mind. So you have to reverse engineer what you were planning to do, which is sales, obviously, Onyx wanted sales. So we had to create the foundations first before we could get the sales. So going through, we created all this content. We also did this um a thing called a wellness edit. So what I do is a coursely edit where I'll go through and review trends for audiences. So um, the audience. So we'll look at fashion, for example, interiors, food, like food and nutrition, and other like beauty trends, for example, and then we'll compile that and we'll have that into like a bit of a round of like the wellness trends for quarter three. And that's been really good. That's like a really good like trust-building exercise. And for those in the wellness space, like you'll probably naturally pull on that information anyway. Like, you probably got um uh lots of that like information to your like at your disposal because you're in the space, like lots of yoga teachers I work with, the Pilates instructors, they've they all know like all of the upcoming trends of what to what to be using, um, and they are like able to share that quite easily. Now, that's something that it doesn't take a lot of time to compile, but is actually really something engaging that your audience will want to receive. So that was something we've started to do as a regular thing that our audience then come to expect because they're wanting to see what's going on in like the wellness space. So we have to get a bit creative, and it's trying to think of ways that your audience want to receive information and you can support them in a way that builds that trust. So that's the first bit is like not just focusing on the sale, you've got to focus on the audience and what do they want, and you nurture them because you're nurturing over time that um that relationship, and you then want them to you look after them, and then in the future they'll sort of look after you. Now, when I do speak to people, they've got they use emails in two ways. So it'll be like don't email at all, and then it's like quick sell sell sell. I'm gonna have like got an offer on, I want to like hammer my email list hard. Now that's one side. So with uh the strategy for Onyx, it was more like trust building, but people can go the other way as well, in that they can send out emails regularly, but they haven't actually got a sales or call to action or something that drives the audience to be able to do something. They could be receiving all these lovely, beautiful emails which are regular and they actually know like and trust them, but then there isn't that bit over the edge which helps turn them into a customer, helps them do the next thing. Now, with marketing, there always needs to be something of like what's the next logical step? So if you're creating an email, okay, what's the next logical step? What do you want them to do? What is the point of it? Like, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this email? Obviously, to make sales, but if you're just creating these really lovely newsletters and it's been like three, four months sale, or a couple of weeks, or like you're doing it regularly, now I'll be like, okay, so what is the point of this? So that is only a temporary thing where we build up the audience and we don't have a call to action, or we don't have something that we physically want them to do because we're warming them up, we're nurturing them, and as we develop into further on in our strategy, we want to have a clear thing that we want them to do. So look at your own emails and be like, okay, which camp do you sit in? Are you more on the sales side of it, or you're more in like the nurturing uh trust building, but you've taken it too far and that you haven't actually given them anything to do, you've just given them nice emails to read, which is great because either way, it's not a bad problem to have. Because if you're sales oriented, it'll become easier when there is a sales um focus, but then also when there is nurture focus, you are going to be more uh better equipped if you are on the in this camp, for example. So have a look at your own emails and see what see what you what side you the book best lean to because what I found sometimes is when I work with personal brands, particularly coaches, they are very keen to deliver education, they're keen to deliver advice, but their audience has sort of got used to just reading these emails and not having to do anything. So, as we go through, I'm gonna go through this in a little bit about optimization, it's gonna be how do we optimize our emails to make them work for us, and this often involves training our audience in how we want them to behave. So it's a bit like a toddler, you kind of have to like lean them in a way or like guide them to what you want them to do. So if you want them to click on this uh read this blog post, or you want them to get people to listen to your podcast episodes, for example, or you've got like a lead magnet, or you've got something that you want to do, you can't just chuck a link in there and expect them to click it straight away. You've got to create um like sort of a template, like a rhythm or a flow that over time they will start to rec recognize that that is what the intention of the email is, and they will start to do that over time, but it takes a little bit of like working. Like so it's just something that sometimes our audiences get you so used to reading a massive long prose of like text that when we do have a link in there, it gets a bit like oh, that's different, and they were a bit like hesitant or a bit resistant to doing that because it looks a bit different. People and humans are like creatures of habits, they they like the same thing, but sometimes when we put a pattern disrupt in there, like we start to do things a bit differently, it can take a little bit of like bedding in for people to realise that actually what the purpose of this is. So, okay, so the first six months with Onyx, we went through nurture, relationship building, all of this stuff because this just helps over time and you build that trust with your audience, which is great. So we don't we don't focus on our revenue first, we focus on our relationships first, and then the revenue will come, okay. After that, we then well, like basically at a similar time, we focus on our brand voice and our audience positioning. So as we were as we were sending all this information out to begin with, like the emails that were going out regularly that were to do with like nurture building and relationship building, we were using that information and data to basically support our findings and like to support our knowledge and understanding of our audience. Now, when I work with somebody, we always go through audience first and then we look at our messaging. So understanding your audience is really key, and you might think you know your audience really well, but actually, when we start to look at the data, we start to look at research, we start to look at trends, we start to look at actions that people are taking and feedback, we are able to do that so much quicker than we think we can. Okay. So in this time, it was a lot of tweaking, trial and error, progressing as we go, so we can help improve our emails and improve our messaging overall, not just across emails, but across socials as well and across like PR. So that really helps. So we need to make sure that each time when we're looking at our content, our email content, we are analysing the data, looking at what works and looking at how we can improve it or how we can take some of this information and apply it elsewhere. Okay, so my chair's really squeaky and it keeps making a funny squeaky sound. So working on like the constantly refining like the brand tone, um, the brand voice, looking at audience makes it so much easier for you to create more content. Now, this probably I'll just chuck it in here anyway. But something I always get to my audience to do is be like, right, so when you're focusing on your your audience, are you focusing on one person or are you focusing on a group of people? Because often when you're talking to a group of people, you're not really speaking to anyone, but if you're speaking to one person, you're speaking to that one person specifically, and that will alone attract more people. So, my analogy of this is that imagine you're in like a coffee shop queue and you've got two people you've just met up, or two friends, and they're just like, Oh my god, this happened, oh my god, and they're speaking directly to one another, and their energy is like incredible. Now you want to try and lean in on that because you're like, What's she saying? Oh no, like what's going on? What are they talking about? Where did they go? That sounds great. Now, if you were just in a group of friends, you would not be like, What did you do this weekend? Like, you you would talk even though you're in a group, you would still directly talk to one person. So I always like to think of like, yeah, when you are speaking to one people, people around you naturally chip into the information anyway. So, although you're focusing on one client, like one audience member, like you're not only selling to one person, you're selling to a group of people, but you're talking in your messaging directly to one person because you're more likely to attract other people if you are direct and specific speaking to one person. So that's just like a little side note. It's really throwing me. I don't know why it keeps zooming in and out, but hey, we we move. Right. So as we built up the uh relationship building like content, we then started to strategically insert sales content. So this would involve using the base the base of what we had with like um like the trended trend content. We did a lot of uh features around like what our community is loving right now, where we would take the data from their website and be like, okay, the um the beige is doing really well, um, and then we'll then talk say about that colour way and say how it could be trending because of this, or it's um a neutral colour that goes with this type, these different aesthetics, and we'll talk about what people as a community are purchasing, and then we'll then start to insert links. We'll start to you include product for uh imagery, we'll start to talk more about the products, maybe have like a product spotlight. We would have um an Onyx Loves feature, which is where we'd like might feature a particular product, like talk about the specifics of uh different product sets or product groups, and then we can then start to weave them into our content. So it wasn't just like here's here's all of our latest products that are in blue, for example. It'd be like, Okay, this um this season, people are loving the colour, this cornflower blue. It's like a panatone colour of the year. So we've um talked about what's relevant, talked about what people are enjoying, and then what woven in some product features and product data, which will then tie up nicely with like, okay, this is what um I think when I did the colour panettone of the year thing, I'd like took inspiration from uh people at the Grammys, they were all doing like red carpet stuff. So um you're obviously what um outfits matched. It was like just trying to make it relevant to your audience and and what works, um, but then also weaving in our product features as well. So whether that's nicely links, we'd um I'll go through this again in optimization in a minute, but we'll add links, we'd might add videos, we might add um some testimonials just to try and help build that trust over time and weave in what actually people want and what we want them to do. So, do we want them to go across the website and just browse? So it wasn't like a hard sale. Like, do we want them to go and find out more? Do we want to watch videos of how this is used in um by studio owners, or do we want them just to go in and go purchase it and see what it's like? Okay, so as we should strategically start to play and see what um people respond best to, we can then refine our strategy as we go. So it is like this generally across marketing is that when you are creating, you need to be able to look through the lens of okay, what is working, what can we do more of, or what can we try that's a little bit different and see if that works. If it doesn't work, don't worry about it. If it is working, okay, what can we do more of, or how can we improve this and make it better? So constantly having this like idea of improving over time and playing and sort of having a bit of fun with it does make marketing feel so much lighter as well. The times people are like, Oh god, it just feels so hard. I'm like, it's good feels hard because you're making it feel hard. If you make it feel like try and have a bit of fun with it, it will feel so much lighter, it'll feel so much easier. So that's what I always try and get my clients to do is like what works best for them, or what can they do more of that will make it feel fun and enjoyable. Okay, so yeah, so when so when we did eventually hit our sales weekend, because Onyx don't ever do sales, it was only on their birthday that they um ran a sale campaign. Now, last year in the weekend it made £6,000. So I was expecting when I logged on this time back probably about eight, something like that, because audience has grown a little bit. So when I logged on and it said 19,000, when I collated all the data, I was like, that's incredible. Now it honestly is down to all of these factors that we have built a really strong audience base who come to expect emails regularly, they are primed in that they know what to do, and we've just sort of given them information about products over time, we've made it a lifestyle product with all the content that we've created that makes it more appealing to purchase as well, and then also because they don't do sales often, when they do do a sale, it's like, oh okay, right, this is the once-a-year sale, we're gonna make the most of it. So when you are discounting yourself often, or you're discounting your services or your products, sometimes that can have a detrimental effect because people are waiting for the next sale, so they're like, I'll just wait, it's it's not a problem. So we want to make sure that as we're doing it, our audience is primed and that they know that sales are coming around often, making sure that the content is like something that they want to be a part of, like that they know the brand, so they know that when audience umyx come into their come into their mailbox, they know what is gonna like they know what they're expecting, okay? And we've given them lots and lots of opportunities for them to be aware of the sale that's coming as well. And this is something that we need to constantly be doing. If we're only messaging people once a month, is that going to be enough time to prep people and prime people that we're gonna be having a sale? Probably not. So, in the sales weekend, I think there are about eight emails sent over the three days of Spank holiday weekend. So we need to make sure that we have got we've told people what's going on because there is no point telling people there's a sale on the day of the sale. We need to prep them, we need to prime them, tell, build excitement because that then gets people thinking, okay, I'm gonna keep an eye out for it. Because when you've got people who are like, right, I'm gonna keep an eye out, the inboxes are busy, they keep an eye out, they're looking for Onyx, they're like, right, okay, I'm gonna know to look for it, they're gonna make sure they open the emails, they'll see what's in there. So we need to make sure that with our content it's readable, enjoyable, and it's also relevant, and like there's enough of it to make it worthwhile. Because sending an email probably once a month isn't enough to be at the forefront of their mind to be able to create that engagement, or it's gonna take a really, really long time. So with Onyx, we do emails sort of every five to seven days, and that seems to be the sweet spot. We've again trialed this and found that that seems to be the bit that works best. We've done working on like I'll talk about optimization in a minute, but we took find ways to make it all better. Make it better. Right, so optimization. Okay, so this is where like I said before, you look at the data, you look at what people are wanting. How can we improve the emails that are going? And it's this continuous cycle of like. Like, what's working? What can we improve? So we looked at last summer, so we were creating the emails in Clavio, and I then looked at basically how do we create the and make the emails look better more on brand? So we were using that in built-in editor. Actually, what's better is for us to create the graphics in Canva and then import them across. So that's what we were working on. We are looking at adding gifts, we were looking at the button placement. Do people respond better to buttons? Do they respond better to pictures? What if we embed videos? And having this continuous, like, look of okay, what can we improve? What's working, what's not working, makes it so much better. So over time, it doesn't feel like this really hard tour of like how do we get how do we get from like a 35% open rate to a 70%? It's it that feels like a really, really hard challenge. Whereas gradually over time, because we're continuously improving, the open rate is about 70%, which is amazing because people have started to uh get used to us, they've are starting to um expect the content, they're looking forward to it, all that stuff I've just mentioned. So we were looking at the things to basically tweak and improve if you're looking to improve your emails, would be subject lines. We've had a play with do we include emojis, do we shorten the messages, making sure your preview text is always always completed? This is the bit which comes up after your subject line, so it gives people an inkling of like what is in there. You can have, I think, up to 50 characters in that. You can have these gives you quite a lot, so you might as well make the most of that. Send times. Do people respond better to particular send at different send times? Like at weekends, I found that like the more the mornings work really well, or it's late evenings on like weekdays, just because of the audience we have. Again, you need to trial with your audience because they might they might actually prefer to have an email during the day on the lunch break, for example. So we need to go through all of that, and then um yeah, go through the design. Okay, we found that a cleaner design with the more aesthetic looking design worked better. We had less buttons to click, it was less fussy, it was a little bit more work, but we created it, and that's actually responded quite well. When we first started it, there was a little bit of a dip. Now, that's like I said before, humans are creatures of habit, so you might find something where you're like, Oh, it's not quite working. Don't retreat straight away. You stick to the process, you stick, you give it 30, 60 days, whatever, and just see how that grows. Then over time, things do pick up, if unless it's actually like not working at all. Okay, but most of the time, like you people just need to stick to stuff long enough to see a result and improvement, and then they'll move forward from there. We then looked at the click-through rate, where the buttons sit, what colours work best, what fonts work best, is it but is it photos they respond well to, or product links, or do they want the actual buttons? How um, how far in are the clicks? Um, the calls to action, are they above the fold or below the fold? All of these things we just have to review over time. Now it can seem like quite a daunting process to be like, there's so much stuff to look at, but it's just things you do little tweaks and improvements each time. Like I said, we've been doing this for 18 months now, and it just is something you then start to do. Like one month, um, we might focus more on open rates. So I'm gonna work really hard on spending more time on subjects. I'm gonna make sure that I look at the send times, I might split test them. We can go into that another thing, but all of this does help overall. But it's these little tiny micro um movements will then help move the needle forward. Okay, and then another part of the strategy I feel like I'm giving you a lot. I'm trying to keep this really short, is um automations and flows. So, with an email list, you want to get people in. So, we we had a pop-up on their website which created through Clavio, which was 10% off your first Onyx purchase. Great. Okay. People then go into uh flow, which is a welcome series where they get um entered into here here's your code, thank you for uh signing up. Here's a bit about Onyx, here's about our products, blah blah blah. All of it um goes into these like different emails, which are then drip-fed to them over the course of seven to ten days. They are automatically sent. So that's the first automation. That is so much easier because as a brand, it means that you then haven't got to welcome everybody that purchases from you. It's nice and it's easy, but it also means that that is doing somewhat of the hard work in the meantime about warming your audience up. So you haven't then when you go to send send an email to them, they're not like completely cold, they've already had a little bit of information from you, and they that's sort of like greeting them before they actually like get to know you. Okay. Other email automations we've had are one for feedback, trying to get feedback from people post-purchase, um, people who have got their abandoned cart. So people have like put stuff in their cart but they've left it. Um, people who are browser abandonment is another good one. Sunset flow, which is like if people haven't engaged in the emails for a while, we've asked them to only be part of the list. That's really important because you want to make sure we don't want to be spamming people. We only want relevant people on our list because there's no point having 10,000 people on your list if only 100 of them are actually engaged audiences. Because also with email, some email providers you pay for how many contacts you have, so you might as well get rid of the ones that aren't relevant. Um, other ones we're getting we're looking at, including are say, for example, they purchase yoga blocks, maybe they're interested in a yoga mat or some yoga accessories or something else, or how can we upsell to them, or how can we like show them what else is available that is of value that then might keep them in the world a little bit longer? Okay. Also, if people have purchased yoga mats, for example, we'll send out like automatically the cleaning instructions, all things like that. It just makes it like easier, and it's those little touch points that make people start to know, like, and trust you, especially if they purchase as well. They'd be like, Okay, that I feel like I'm not just a number. I'm like they've given that to me. Obviously, most people will know this as automated, but it's just nice to receive. Okay, so if you haven't got any welcome sequences or automated sequences, I would look at possibly setting up a welcome sequence or setting up like a check-in. So if they've maybe worked with you, um would do you have a check-in sort of like after 30 days? Do you would you want to ask for a review? Like, what could you be doing that could be automated, or could you be checking in with them after six months? Like, how how are you doing? So, if you're a PT, for example, ha, it's been like three months since we've worked together, how best can I help you? Or like, what are you looking for? Have your goals changed? And sometimes having that check-in, even when you do work with clients, helps to make them make sure you're all on the right track and like making sure that they're they're happy as they can be. And email's really greedy great for that. Okay, so yeah, so just to review, like we didn't go over um basically going over content that is non-sales specific to begin with. Then we started to weave in sales content, so we started to train our audience to receive emails um that did have a sale focus. We started to train them into what we wanted them to do, the next logical step, where do we want them to go, what do we want to explore? We wove that in. We then optimized our um messaging, and we used data feedback from emails that we sent. See how can we improve and progress as a time, and it's that continuous improvement. Can we improve our email open rates? Can we improve our click-through rates? Can we improve our design? All of these little things, bits of data are so important to helping us overall. Now, I'm really conscious of the fact that I think it's been a half an hour, and I don't want to keep you guys too long. Um, but if anyone has any questions, then feel free to message me um directly and then I can then I can help answer them. But if email marketing is something you're thinking, okay, I need a bit more help with, then there are a couple of ways I can help you. Um, I'm doing more one-to-one support where I work with you and we look at your current emails, what's going out, I'll do a bit of an audit, what's working, what's not working, what can we improve, and then we'll create a plan of action. Then I'll then help you create all of the strategy, like the plan of action for you to then go away and create the emails yourself. If you're needing a little bit more hand holding than that, then I can then help create the emails with you or for you. Or if you're just like, okay, I know I need to send emails, I'm pretty sure I can do this on my own, but I just need a bit of accountability and support. I've got the marketing collective, which is opening very soon, which is where we get together in a group setting, and each week we'll do co-working, body doubling, I'll review your marketing email marketing strategy or your plan. It's also for general marketing as well. So, like social media, what what have you got going out this month? We'll look at your strategy and we'll then review it as well. So we can then see what's worked. We can then work through the changes together of like hey, how can we improve this moving forward? Now, if that's something you're thinking, I would love to get involved in any of those, then please just drop me a message or an email and we'll go from there. But it's been so nice uh chatting to you, it's just been me chatting to myself. If you've got any questions about this, then I would love to hear them. And thank you so much. Bye bye.