Trusted Shops Reactivates 21% of Unengaged Contacts Thanks to Marketing Automation

An effective reactivation strategy thanks to marketing automation

More than 30 million people use the services of Trusted Shops in order to identify secure websites and make better buying decisions. By displaying the Trustmark, companies demonstrate that they meet a wide range of quality assurance criteria, offer real security via buyer protection, and provide valuable transparency through authentic reviews.

Email Marketing B2C Manager Tanya Angelova and her team were looking for a reliable and GDPR-compliant email marketing tool with strong marketing automation features to facilitate sending out Trusted Shops’ weekly newsletter to their hundred thousand subscribers.

On the lookout for a GDPR-compliant email marketing solution with first-class marketing automation features

Trusted Shops was a former customer of Newsletter2Go. The German email marketing tool was then acquired by Brevo in 2019. Customer Success Manager Lena has also switched from Newsletter2Go to Brevo and was one of the key factors why Trusted Shops decided to go with Brevo. “Lena always does everything in her power to help and support us in any matter. The support we get as part of our BrevoPlus plan is excellent, and the migration from Newsletter2Go to Brevo also went smooth,” says Tanya.

Brevo hosts its servers in Germany and is fully GDPR-compliant, ensuring a high level of data protection. For a company like Trusted Shops, which stands for security and transparency, this was an essential factor. “Finding a GDPR-compliant solution was highly important to our legal department! Brevo scored highest in this aspect compared to other email marketing tools because they host their servers in the EU and there is no data exchange with America,” Tanya points out. Another key factor in favor of Brevo was the option of uploading an unlimited number of contacts to the database without any additional costs.

Expanding the potential of their customer base through reactivation campaigns

The onboarding and data migration went smoothly thanks to Trusted Shops’ Customer Success Manager at Brevo. In particular, the company was please to have a new template designed for their newsletter. “This gave our newsletter a brand-new look and feel”, says Tanya. The newsletter is sent out to a hundred thousand subscribers every Monday, informing them about current trends in online shopping, security, fake shops, and more.

Here, the email marketing team also relies on dynamic content as well as the segmentation function of Brevo. “Combining dynamic content with contact segmentation works really well! This way we are able to not display a promotional banner about our paid product called Buyer Protection Plus to customers who have already purchased our product. The banner is designed to encourage them to buy our solution. This way, we avoid showing customers content that is not relevant to them,” explains Tanya.

Various automation scenarios were also used to provide information about how customers use certain products from Trusted Shops. For instance, a four-step onboarding workflow for new customers was created. Here, the first step thanks the subscriber for signing up and for their trust in the company. This email also confirms the registration and therefore provides the customer additional security. As the workflow continues, contacts learn more about Trusted Shops, their services, and their company values.

In the fall of 2020, a reactivation campaign was run. For this purpose, a workflow with three dispatch points was created. The aim of the campaign was to reactivate contacts who had not engaged with the weekly newsletter for six months. These unengaged contacts received an email with a subject line that read, “Our gift for you.” If they opened the email, they were sent a second email four days later, which included a report on how to spot fake shops. After seven days, customers who did not open the first email were also sent this second email. Once a contact opened the second email, they were automatically put on a list of reactivated contacts. As a final reactivity test, subscribers who had zero engagement in the following six months were sent a farewell email including a three-question survey about the newsletter and Trusted Shops products. As a result of Tanya’s efforts, this campaign alone reactivated over 10,000 contacts.

Reactivating 21% of unengaged contacts

Thanks to the reactivation campaign, Trusted Shops was able to reactivate 21% of unengaged contacts. “Our newsletter is a real success story! Our open rates here are 30% and for our newsletter about fake shops, which comes out once a month, they are even 36%,” says Tanya. The Trusted Shops newsletters also have a click-through rate of 9.6% and a click rate of 2.9%, along with a very low unsubscribe rate of 0.15%. The aim is now to build on this success. Work has already begun on developing a Preference Center, which will be used to identify particular interests of customers in more detail. Customers are asked which topics interest them the most so that future email campaigns can be even more targeted.