Email to 30% of store revenue

Rollupbanner sells roller banners, pop-up stands, flags and exhibition displays to businesses across the UK. Nobody browses for a trade stand. A date lands in someone's calendar, the stand has to exist by then, and the order gets placed the week that becomes urgent. More than a third of those orders never touch the website checkout at all. They get typed up by the team rather than placed by the customer, so email here isn't always closing the sale.

The email programme they had already made money. What it didn't have was anyone whose job it was, or anything running automatically behind it. Campaigns went out when somebody found a spare hour, which is how in-house email usually runs. We pulled the full order history rather than the last twelve months, then ranked what we found by what it was costing them.

Nothing followed an abandoned checkout. Someone who gets that far on a display order has a spec, a budget and a date. If they stopped, that was the end of it. Those are the warmest people in the business and nobody was speaking to them.

Discounts were doing the work the message should have done. Nearly two fifths of orders carried one, and the share needing a code had climbed steadily over the two years before we arrived. When every email goes to everybody, price is the only lever left inside it.

Everyone got the same email. Orders run from one banner to a full stand fit-out, and someone who'd bought that week got the same send as someone who'd gone quiet two years ago. Nothing told any of them apart, which caps what a campaign can earn before you've written a word of it, and does the deliverability no favours either.

Order confirmations were pure admin. They're the emails a customer is certain to open, and they weren't selling anything. In a business where displays get bought in sets, and people remember the second item too late, that's money sitting there.