Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s Top Performing Emails from Q1 — And What Makes Them Shine

The holiday season moves at lightning speed and January gives marketers a chance to breathe easy and focus on their goals for the year ahead. New Year’s resolutions tend to be pretty standard: Being healthier and losing weight, saving money, learning new skills. For email marketers, the latter likely involves increasing clicks and conversions, using their emails to boost store or site traffic and eventually, revenue.

If you’re looking for inspiration, we’ve got you there. Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s brilliant Strategy & Optimization team has created a benchmarking tool that quantifies the millions of emails we send every single minute.

The team looks across our entire client base and compiles the open, clickthrough and conversion rates for each email. Each quarter, we identify the best of the best and then pass this knowledge onto our customers, providing them with insights to inspire their own email marketing programs. And while we can’t share specific figures, we can do the same for you.

Equinox, Minted and MATCHESFASHION.COM were among our superstars this quarter. See what made them shine:

Create An Email Serial Like Furthermore by Equinox

A digital magazine published by Equinox Fitness, Furthermore focuses on any and everything related to physical health, such as the science behind why people crave comfort foods to celebrities’ workout playlists. Furthermore covers a broad spectrum of topics, but tailors their emails based on people’s individual workout plans.

This focused newsletter is serial-style where each email continues where the previous day left off. That even includes the recommended active recovery related to day three. We love Equinox’s approach and see potential for many other brands to do something similar. For example, apparel retailers can spend a week promoting new spring styles one category of items at a time.

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Know Your Audience Like MATCHESFASHION.COM

One of the strongest luxury brands in our Retail Personalization Index, MATCHESFASHION.COM is so adept at understanding their audience that even generic emails seem tailored. As the luxury landscape evolves rapidly, there is one constant for these retailers: Your customers are always going to be fashionistas.

The digestible layout and strong images would make this email a fantastic example of content+commerce on its own. By centering it on New York Fashion Week, MATCHESFASHION.COM demonstrates a deep understanding of who their customers are, right down to the caption, “These are the pieces everyone is wearing at New York Fashion Week.” The brand then curated the top street style trends and recommended similar items, such as cashmere sweaters and crocodile-inspired handbags.

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Incentivize Action Like Minted

Online art marketplace Minted is big on community and fosters engagement by giving subscribers a say in which wedding invitations go to market. However, this email didn’t go out to every subscriber — just those on a wedding-specific list who have made purchases recently.

The best part of Minted’s email is the way they incentivized users to participate with a discount. It’s a simple strategy that benefits everyone. The customer feels like a valuable member of the community and potentially receives half off their next order. In exchange, Minted gets valuable data about what customers like and which ones are engaged enough to share that feedback.

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Download the ebook to see more brilliant email marketing tactics from General Assembly, Squarespace, The Sun and more!