The Goal:

Creating an effective email marketing strategy for Knife Aid and increasing their ROI with a special eye for improving reorder rates.

What We Achieved For Knife Aid:

  • 25x higher email marketing profits in the first quarter alone.
  • 10% increase in email marketing revenue.
  • 5 new workflows in the first 30 days.

How do you turn a startup like Knife Aid into a thriving e-commerce business?

You send some really good emails.

Our journey with Knife Aid started mid-December 2019 and over the years has gone from good to great to amazing. Let’s see how email marketing has grown this Shark Tank superstar into an eCommerce powerhouse. 

After their Shark Tank episode aired, Knife Aid founders and successful entrepreneurs Marc Lickfett and Mikael Soderlindh were on a high. But they had one problem. Aside from the viewers watching that day, not too many people really knew about their company. They had a solid idea, but what they needed was a solid marketing strategy

That’s where CodeCrew came in. After a couple calls with Mikael and some good ol’ fashioned negotiation, we made the cut. We were then given free reign of Knife Aid’s email marketing program. With their recent Shark Tank episode they had gained a ton of contacts. However, they hadn’t yet made the most out of the goldmine that they were sitting on. 

Right off the bat, as with all our clients, we made certain that their program was fully legal. This included ensuring that GDPR, CASL and LGDP contacts from the EU, Canada and Brazil were providing double opt-in consent. 
Once the legal aspect was taken care of, we got to work creating Knife Aid's flows. This included a Welcome Series, Cart Abandonment Series and Browse Abandonment Series. Plus, a handful of other more proprietary workflows that we knew would pour gasoline on the program’s ROI. We also threw in some purchase-based follow-up triggers for contacts who were ordering a few specific products. We then built out a flow or two that would make the lives of Knife Aid’s sales reps a lot easier.  

Knife Aid Knife Aid

Knife Aid - 30 days. 5 workflows. 13x revenue. Phew.

In the first two weeks alone, Knife Aid’s new email program brought in 13x higher earnings than the previous month. Even better? The previous month’s earnings included both Black Friday AND Cyber Monday.

In the first quarter of 2020, their email program had made 25x more profit than it had in its entirety before we hopped in. But wait, there’s more: in just the first 3 months, Knife Aid’s email program had grown from garnering 6% of all revenue to becoming 16% of their overall income stream. How’s that for a great start?

Once we got the basics out of the way, we got down to (even more) business. In 30 days, Knife Aid went from zero workflows to five fully functioning automations. Each with its own custom-designed and custom-coded messaging, A/B tests all around, conditional splits galore - the full bells and whistles. 

The importance of knowing your audience

Over time through consistent testing of our campaigns and workflows, we saw that Knife Aid’s audience was split into two distinct groups - purchasers and non-purchasers. They each responded pretty differently to Knife Aid’s interactions. 
- Non-purchasers needed a why - for them it was important to fully understand Knife Aid’s values and offering before purchase. 
- Purchasers had already experienced the joys of professionally sharpened knives and so a reminder message worked better for them. As with any great product or service, all you need is a reminder to hit your inbox at the right moment - the rest takes care of itself.

In terms of workflows, over half of our audience had opened their Welcome, Browse Abandon and Cart Abandon emails. We also saw a click rate of 5-11% and an order rate of 6-7%, or as we like to say, cash in the bank.

As of  2021, we had grown to understand Knife Aid’s audiences as if we knew each and every subscriber in person. And as a result, we’ve really been able to give them the value they’re looking for.

Subscribing to success

In conjunction with our findings on contacts’ reorder timelines, the Knife Aid team saw that people wanted their knives sharpened far more often than we expected. And so, we created a unique email process for their new subscription service - regular, hassle-free knife sharpening reminders.

Although 2022 is still young it’s already apparent the subscription model has turned into a huge success for Knife Aid last year, not just in the email channel, but overall. 

As we like to say here, “onwards and upwards!”. 2022 is aligning really well with this motto of ours, both for the Knife Aid team and its awesome service, as well as our relationship, and of course, the Knife Aid email program. 

For more mind-blowing case studies and email marketing stats that go off the charts, please visit our Email Marketing Case Studies page.