At Marigold Engage by Sailthru, we believe our customers are our partners. So we’re always excited to highlight their success on this blog and within our Case Studies and White Papers. Today, we’re featuring the results seen by Open Sky around their Email Preferences Page in this guest post by Open Sky Product Manager Melissa Perri.

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We get a lot of emails. You probably just got 3 emails while reading that short sentence and 13 emails while reading this longer one. We don’t have time to sift through all the information to find what’s important to us. Personalization is key. At OpenSky, we tailor what messages we send to our users. One of the ways we do that is through our Sailthru-powered Email Preferences page where our members can choose which emails they receive.

We send millions of emails every month, and they’re a considerable revenue driver. When OpenSky launched it was easier; we had fewer products, which meant a reasonable amount of emails. We alerted users that a new product was on sale the few times a day that they were posted to our site. But as we grew, our product catalog doubled so we had to change our old email strategy. As we interviewed our customers, we developed different user personas. Some only shop their inbox and multiple alerts. Others like daily or weekly reminders to check out what’s new and browse the site. As our email tactics evolved, Marigold Engage by Sailthru helped us create a better experience for both types of OpenSky members.

OpenSky sends a mix of retail and social messages to our members. Our Email Preferences page includes customization for all these types of email, down to the categories you are interested in and the days you want to hear about them.

Allowing users to customize their emails helped us lower our unsubscribe rate by 12%. Using Google Analytics’ tracking tools, we found that category customization is important for our members, but they aren’t as interested in customizing their emails by day of week. We’re using this information to iterate on this page so our users get messages they want.

We’ve done many other experiments using Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s tools. We’ve tested email send times with Horizon Send Time. Instead of sending an email at the same time to everyone each day, Horizon Send Time picks the optimal time for each user and sends it then. We also use Sailthru’s simple A/B testing on email templates to determine which content works best with minimal work. Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s API lets us add member data to emails so they see useful information about their reward status level, items they’ve left in their cart, and updates to categories they love. 

We’re excited about the positive results we’ve seen with the Email Preferences page. Using tools from Marigold Engage by Sailthru, OpenSky has been able to customize our emails so they meet our customers’ needs, and we’re eager to see what will be coming out soon. 

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OpenSky is a shopping experience that matches individual taste with the exceptional finds of industry insiders. Users can connect to insiders in Food, Style, Beauty, Healthy Living, Electronics and Home Décor for exclusive information, advice and insider product recommendations. Since it launched on April 5, 2011, OpenSky has attracted 2 million members who are making more than 30 million connections to the site’s 100+ insider, such as Martha Stewart, Bobby Flay, Cynthia Rowley, Liz Lange, Tom Colicchio, Molly Sims and Tony Horton. OpenSky was recently named to the list of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.