De Uitdaging

As a Digital Marketing Lead at Somnox, I myself (Baginda) work on a number of different areas. Among other things, about our paid ads, especially in the area of Facebook ads, but also in terms of content. Content on our blog, but also the content in our emails. Content is important to us because, as I said earlier, we firmly believe that we can help people through content education. Email is our biggest channel when it comes to the number of “followers”.

E-mail is therefore an important channel for us. Over the past 2 or 3 years, we have done everything in terms of email marketing ourselves, without asking for professional expertise from others. Of course, I've always read and learned a lot about it, but I had never worked with a professional party in that area before.

In the run-up to Q4 of 2020, we decided that email should be a key driver of our sales, even more than before. This required an increase in deliverability (how often your email arrives in someone's inbox). In addition, I knew that our flows had to be in the right place, our campaigns had to be opened and clicked, etc. All these things together led me to the next step in our email marketing: Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the software that is widely supported in the e-commerce and Direct-to-Consumer landscape. Klaviyo is the platform you should use for email marketing.‍

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Expertise and unburdening

That was the point where help from experts was very welcome. We wanted to set up our email marketing in Klaviyo as a project, but I quickly noticed that it was outside our comfort zone. For example, you should change your entire email service provider from A to B. We realized that a little help would be nice, to take email to the next level, and see if that would have an impact at all. After all, it couldn't have yielded anything either. However, after many discussions with Ewoud, I was convinced that Polaris would be the right partner for us to unburden us and find that out.

In short, our challenge was to take email e-commerce performance to the next level with Klaviyo. After the due diligence that I did before, Polaris turned out to be the best possible partner for that.

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We started working with Polaris at the end of 2020. First, they helped us with the technical transition process to Klaviyo. That was the first step that had to be properly arranged so that we could collect all the data properly. With the help of that data, we can now use e-mail in a smarter and more data-driven way. With that switch, Polaris helped us in the first month. To be honest, I was amazed at the speed at which Polaris can switch. I really enjoyed working with that cooperation and the speed at which we were able to switch. As a result, we were able to put Klaviyo live quite quickly, even before our major sales period began. So I really liked that that could be addressed quickly and that the will to work and the initiative from Polaris were great. In that regard, it was a good first month!

In the background, Omar from Polaris was working on the second part of our collaboration: setting up various flows that should provide better email e-commerce performance. We have created a number of flows for this, including: the cart abandonment sequence, browse abandonment sequence, new subscriber flow. When someone signs up for our sleep test they end up in this final flow.

That flow package was the deliverable. Beforehand, I wasn't sure what to expect from that, but Polaris's transparent approach quickly made that clear. I have experienced that Polaris divides the process into four parts: strategy, production, iteration and analysis/reflection. I really enjoyed working with that, because I could see exactly what Polaris was doing and why they did what they did. We also worked with various tools, such as Concept Board, where I could easily give a comment that was then included in the process. That worked very well and is a good example of the speed in the production phase of those flows.

As a starting point, I passed on the flows and best-performing campaigns that we had already run to Polaris. That input was included in a new strategic proposal including the accompanying detailed copy. We were then able to provide feedback on that again via Google Docs. As far as I'm concerned, it worked nicely and quickly, so I could invest my time in other important tasks that were on my plate at the time.

Strategy

Polaris helped us with the strategy for cart abandonment and browse abandonment flows. We went through that relatively quickly, because there was time pressure from Somnox in connection with our major sales period in Q4 2020. We were able to take a little longer for the strategy of the new subscriber flow or our “sleep test flow”. Before that, I worked a lot with Omar, who did the onboarding, among others. After that, I worked with Bogdan. Especially when setting up the sleep test flow, I saw clearly why Polaris Growth is a good partner for us for the strategy behind the flows. At least three months for this first collaboration, but we are now looking at whether we can extend the cooperation afterwards.

It's simple: Polaris has the right knowledge in the areas of strategy, production, iteration, but also in analysis. For example, I sat down with Bogdan for conversion rate optimization. The way he did that made it very clear to me why we wanted to change a certain subject line, email copy or design. That, in turn, taught me as a marketer, and that was also one of the team's motives to say: “We're going to do this”. On the one hand, to improve that performance, and on the other hand, so that we, as Somnox, could learn from Polaris. As far as I'm concerned, that worked out well, because I've learned a few things about email marketing that I didn't know before.

This also means that if the cooperation remains this, I will always remember it. I am therefore grateful to Polaris for that.

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