How Fridja builds relationships that lead to e-commerce sales with email
Ben Fridja, founder of the home appliances company that shares his surname, believes small e-commerce businesses have a superpower that bigger brands can’t match.
People like to buy from people. When they buy from small businesses, they know they are buying from someone with a passion. It’s why people follow influencers rather than watching TV. People live for these micro-connections.
This belief is the cornerstone of Fridja’s marketing strategy, which focuses on building relationships with the people who buy his clothes steamers and juicers, rather than only pushing for sales.
The strategy has resulted in high engagement metrics, generated strong sales from email, and transformed how he releases new products.
We had the opportunity to catch up with Ben to discover more about how he uses email in his business.
Integrates his online store via the WooCommerce plugin
Connects with customers using beautifully designed newsletters
Encourages sales with in-email product boxes
Generates pre-orders for new releases with campaigns
Shares user-generated content and reviews with email content blocks
Grows his audience with forms and pop-ups
Increases customer satisfaction and loyalty with an automated post-sales sequence
1. Choosing MailerLite and getting set up
Fridja’s journey to effective email marketing began with choosing the right platform. Ben tried various providers before settling on MailerLite, citing its balance of technical capability and ease of use.
I kissed quite a few frogs before I found MailerLite. I was with Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp and a few others. But I had so many problems. MailerLite is the first platform that is techy enough to do what I need, but easy enough that I don’t end up making massive mistakes, which I have done with other platforms. MailerLite has 100% worked.
The Fridja store is powered by WooCommerce and connects to MailerLite with our WordPress plugin. The integration powers many key features including automations based on shopping behavior and syncing store customers with MailerLite.
Ben set up the integration and then hired an email marketing expert to build out his strategy. He still creates and sends each campaign himself.
MailerLite has pre-built e-commerce integrations with top platforms including WooCommerce, Shopify, Prestashop and BigCommerce. These enable e-commerce-specific email marketing features such as:
Syncing customers who accept email marketing with MailerLite
Creating email automations based on when someone buys a specific product or from a product category
Creating abandoned cart automations that encourage people to finish checking out
Using product blocks to automatically add images, prices, descriptions and buy buttons to your emails
Tracking how many sales and orders each campaign brings in
See more about how MailerLite can level up your e-commerce marketing.
2. Building campaigns with a personal touch
When your email marketing philosophy is all about building connections, sending an email stuffed full of products isn’t going to cut it.
Instead, Ben brings a personal touch with anecdotes, user-generated content, and helpful videos that work alongside more promotional content. This blend ensures each email builds a connection with the reader while also bringing in sales.
Ben uses plenty of strategies to get the balance between personal and promotional in his emails, including:
Writing the emails himself and signing them with his name
Keeping the content fun with personal anecdotes
Sharing user content from Instagram and Tiktok
Adding product boxes with links to product pages
Including offers and discounts
Finishing every email with a message letting people know they can respond
Adding reviews from platforms such as Amazon for social proof
Ben knows this strategy is working because he has a high open rate, gets a lot of responses from his audience and generates sales from his campaigns.
3. Transforming Fridja’s pre-order strategy
One of Fridja’s standout email successes was using the newsletter to generate pre-order sales for its latest product: a new self-feeding whole fruit juicer.
This led to the brand’s most successful ever product release—at the time of this interview, Fridja had sold preorders covering 25% of sales before the stock arrived and was only mid-way through the launch.
Ben puts the success down to the ability to promote his new product to an engaged audience of people who are already interested in his brand.
Being able to tell people that we have a new product has generated so many sales. Whereas before we’d just put new products on our website and start selling once they’d arrived, we’ve managed to jump the gun and presell lots of products. That’s purely because of MailerLite.
Bringing in sales before the product release was not only a nice revenue boost, but it also reduced the nerves around whether a new product would be a success. Before he started email marketing, it would sometimes take weeks for new releases to gain traction.
Start promoting the offer a month before release to give people plenty of opportunities to buy
Offer a discount to people who pre-order, Ben offered £50 off to anyone who bought the product before its release
Promote the deal repeatedly to increase the visibility of the offer and give people more opportunities to buy
4. Enhancing the customer journey with automation
Ben uses MailerLite’s automation features to ensure customers have a memorable experience, even after making a purchase.
By building customer satisfaction and increasing the value the customer gets from the product, Fridja can improve customer loyalty and potentially generate repeat sales and recommendations.
We don’t just want the customer’s money. We want them to love the product and tell their friends and maybe come back and purchase something else or buy a gift. Email marketing is critical for that.
When a customer buys a product from Fridja, they receive a post-sales automation tailored to the product.
The exact automation depends on the product, but it typically consists of something like the following:
Immediately after purchase: Receive a video that shows what the product does.
Three days later: Get a video showing how to set it up.
A week later: Receive helpful content relating to the product’s value. For example, when people buy a juicer, they get relevant recipes.
Beyond a week: Continue to receive helpful product-related content.
The idea is to ensure that the customer has all they need to get value from the product and keep using it over the long term.
MailerLite’s automation builder guides you through the process of creating automated workflows. Just choose a trigger and actions and then create emails using the same Drag & drop builder you use for campaigns.
You can trigger automations based on factors such as when someone:
Fills in a form or popup, which is great for welcome emails
Buys a specific product
Buys from a product category
Abandons cart
Clicks a link or opens a campaign
Reaches the anniversary of a date in the profile
Is added to a particular group
This enables you to create compelling sales funnels that generate e-commerce sales. We also offer 15 pre-built automation templates you can use to shortcut getting started.
Fridja has other email automations set up too. During Black Friday, the brand offered an extra 10% off to anyone who signed up for the email list.
The automation sent a coupon to each person who filled in the form which encouraged sales while allowing the brand to start building a relationship with the subscriber.
5. Continuing to grow with email
Going forward, Ben has big plans to grow his brand and add further products to the lineup. Email will continue to be essential to this strategy, as he looks to continue building relationships with his customers.
Email is crucial as it’s a direct conversation you’re having with customers, be it 10 or 10,000. If you like a small brand’s product then you want to keep in touch with them. It’s something that I enjoy as a customer with other brands, and I hope that our customers feel the same.
You can find out more about Fridja and the brand’s lineup of clothes steamers and juicers by heading to the website.
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