Being one of the country’s largest online retailers of linen and homeware, I Love Linen is known around Australia for their excellent product quality and commitment to design.
What started off as a mission to achieve the perfect night’s sleep after experiencing lush linen bedding during a trip to France, now encompasses all things home. Having been featured in The Design Files, their high-quality design hasn’t gone unnoticed.
And their design philosophy doesn’t just stop at homewares, but is evident in their emails too.
How I Love Linen came to use SmartrMail
When I Love Linen launched, they originally relied on Mailchimp for their email marketing needs. However running on the Neto ecommerce platform, Mailchimp didn’t offer a native integration. This meant that setting up automated email flows such as abandoned cart recovery, welcome emails or any automation based on customer behaviour wasn’t possible. It also meant that managing subscribers between Neto and Mailchimp was a nightmare.
The opportunity to be able to chat with someone from support live was also important, but being in Australia often means that live chat isn’t a possibility from apps that cater primarily to the American and European markets. Being based in Australia however, SmartrMail allows for real time support instead of potentially having to wait until the next business day for a response.
It’s no wonder then that as soon as SmartrMail’s integration with Neto went live in late 2017, I Love Linen was one of the first Neto merchants to make the move.
First impressions with SmartrMail
Finally being able to utilise customer data in their Neto account including user groups, classifications and more was like a breath of fresh air for I Love Linen.
They were able to start immediately taking advantage of the massively expanded capabilities.
For instance, they set up an abandoned cart recovery email that automatically sends reminders to shoppers who place items in their carts but don’t complete checkout.
They also set up a welcome series that automatically welcomes people as soon as they sign up to their email list.
And of course, there was no more need to manually sync customer lists to add new subscribers to email lists.
“SmartrMail’s integration with Neto makes targeting customers based on their purchase history very easy.”
SmartrMail’s customer support
Over the years, I Love Linen has taken advantage of some of SmartrMail’s more advanced features, including the ability to upload your own HTML header and footer code into your email template.
The I Love Linen team also knows that if they ever need help with any of these features, they can rely on SmartrMail to provide any support needed.
For instance, when uploading their own HTML footer code, I Love Linen noticed that there were a couple of mobile responsiveness issues. Knowing that most emails are opened on phones, they reached out to SmartrMail to see if they could have a look at what was causing the issues.
We were then quickly able to identify what was causing the mobile responsiveness issues in their footer code and make the necessary changes. Leaving I Love Linen with a great looking email template that’s fully optimised for any screen size.
“The SmartrMail customer service is unlike anything I have experienced before from an ESP. I have never waited more than a few hours for a question to be answered, and never longer than 1 business day for an issue to be addressed/fixed.”
Again, having SmartrMail’s support team right here in Australia means that they’re able to chat live and have issues resolved in a fraction of the time.
Support isn’t limited to just technical help
I Love Linen’s first experience with SmartrMail’s support team may have been for a technical issue, but they soon realised that we provide a lot more than just technical support. We also help merchants develop and refine their email marketing strategy.
For I Love Linen, this involved helping them set up their winback campaign, upsell and cross-sell flows and abandoned cart recovery.
“With the assistance of the team from SmartrMail, we’ve been able to create a range of automated campaigns to target customers and upsell other products. The customer service team is great and reply to help requests very promptly.”
Just like we did for I Love Linen, informal strategy help is available for all users. As our success depends on your success with email marketing, we’re more than happy to offer this free of charge over our live chat or a 1-to-1 demo call.
For stores requiring additional help in actually setting up automations, we also offer a range of services where we do the work for you.
I Love Linen’s results
After several years of being with SmartrMail and over ten million emails sent, I Love Linen has achieved some impressive results.
Over a quarter of sales (28%) are attributable to their email campaigns with each email bringing in an average of $0.35.
Unsurprisingly, these stats become even more impressive when you look at some of I Love Linen’s automations.
Their abandoned carts, for instance, achieve an incredible open rate of 33% and a click-through rate of 20%. On average, these generate $14 in extra sales for every email sent. Their welcome email series, achieves an even more astounding open rate of 43%.
While email engagement is great, at the end of the day for I Love Linen, it’s about building and maintaining relationships with their customers.
“We are able to stay in contact with customers through email and have created some beautiful campaigns which SmartrMail has helped us send. The customer service is always helpful and if you have any hiccups or challenges, they will help you through to find a solution.”
Advice for other merchants
Whether you’re looking to get started with email marketing or have been emailing for years and are looking to improve your strategy, I Love Linen has this advice for other merchants:
“If I can leave one piece of advice, it’s to focus on targeted campaigns as opposed to batch and blast campaigns. When you have access to customer data, and can easily create automated flows based on this data, it will be much more beneficial than just blasting the same message to all of your subscribers.”
Replicating I Love Linen’s success with your own email marketing
As they stated themselves, I Love Linen’s success with email marketing is in no small part due to their targeted automated flows. Email blasts just don’t cut it anymore.
Fortunately, SmartrMail makes it easy to utilise your Neto customer data to send the right emails to the right customers with our deep integration.
And it’s not just Neto either, SmartrMail integrates natively with other leading ecommerce platforms including Shopify and WooCommerce,
Regardless of which platform you use, you can sign up for our 15-day free trial and start taking advantage of email marketing just like I Love Linen did.
Signing up to a trial will also let you jump on a free one-on-one call with our customer support team so that we can walk you through how to take full advantage of email marketing for your store.
