Blooming good tactics

How a killer email strategy made me spend £733 on flowers

A deep dive into Bloom & Wild’s CRM strategy

Half of households in Britain bought cut flowers in 2021. Around the world, the global flower industry is worth a huuuge $60BN.

Not even the pandemic slowed business down as customers moved to mail order blooms.

Europe’s largest direct to consumer (D2C) flower company, Bloom & Wild, doubled its sales in the first year of the pandemic alone. Apparently customers sent flowers as “somewhat of a substitute for a hug” 🥹.

I resonate with that. I’ve been a customer of Boom & Wild for three years since March 2020. My first order was sent to my mum and my gran to cheer them up during the pandemic, as I couldn’t see them given they live 70 miles and 220 miles away.

Since my first order, I’ve spent £733 on Bloom & Wild. That’s across 23 orders to 12 people across six different occasions: birthdays, weddings, new babies, anniversaries, passing of family & pets.

My average order value (AOV) was £31, my monthly revenue per user over the time period £18.52 and my lifetime value (LTV) is £733 (and on the up).

It’s lot more than I planned to spend on flowers… but I don’t regret a single penny or petal.

My first order way back in 2020. Little did I know I’d send 21 more….

What I’ve realised is that my high LTV is 90% due to Bloom & Wild’s outstanding CRM strategy.

Low-frequency D2C products can struggle to get repeat orders. Especially when creating a new behaviour in customers — which for me was sending flowers.

This is why email is so crucial. It’s a communication channel that is platform agnostic — desktop, mobile, table, Apple, Android, you name it and you can receive an email on it.

Across the world, there are 4 billion daily email users. According to SaleCycle, 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once per month. It’s no wonder email is such a massive tool for increasing retention and revenue.

So, I dug back into my email inbox to work out what makes Bloom & Wild’s emails so good. Here’s the three things I found.

1) Seasonality, discounts & variable rewards

When a big date hits (like Mother’s day) my email inbox gets flooded. And to be honest, I delete most of the emails. What Bloom & Wild manages to do is send emails early — way ahead of time — to beat the rush.

On Mother’s day 2022, the first I even heard about Mother’s Day was from Bloom & Wild a good two weeks before the actual day. There’s a couple of great things about the email itself too:

1. The discount is up top in the email body (giving me what I want ASAP)
2. The discount is sizeable at 25% off (more than their normal 10–15% off)
3. They encourage me to take action early by pre-ordering (so I don’t forget later)

When I failed to purchase from the first email, they then sent me a second one week before the day reminding me again.

So, I purchased. Not one, but three bouquets. Why? In their email, Bloom & Wild reminded me to celebrate the other mother figures in my life: Aunts, Grans, friends too.

So, I bought three bouquets, one for mum, one for gran and one for my aunt.

Beat the rush to stand out from the crowd on busy holiday days. Note the authentic-looking email style from a real human. Makes me feel like there’s actually a person on the other end.

As well as great timing and sending more than one email around a key occasion, the third thing to note about Bloom & Wild’s seasonality is their focus on the less popular dates.

Gladioli season, Peony season, payday, the clocks turning back, World Friendship Day, Tuesday blues — you name it, they’ve made an occasion out of it.

Notice how all of these are optimised for mobile. Super important as the majority of people use email on mobile.

The last learning here is vary the discounts. If a discount is the same % off all the time, there’s no variable reward. You get bored, it feels predictable and you’re more likely to ignore the email.

A variable reward is when you change the prize each time. People respond best to random rewards, as it motivates them to keep searching for something better.

Therefore intermittent, random discounts will increase your open and click rates over the same discounts each time (check out Calm’s email sequence about what not to do…).

2) Keep it consistent & not too frequent

Scrolling through my email inbox, another thing jumped out at me. I have a lot of emails from Bloom & Wild.

I get their newsletter, which includes random discounts, occasions etc. As well as their more curated personalised series (more on this next).

I was going to analyse more of this, but there were so many I gave up.

I analysed Jan, Feb and March emails 2023, and found:

• I get between 8 and 12 emails per month
• I get a max number of emails of ~4 per week
• I never get more than 3 consecutive dates in a row
• There’s no clear pattern in the discounts
• Most common discounts are 20% and 25% off

The second point is very interesting. Certain sources say you should not send more than five emails per week.

You should also work out what cohort the user is in (power, engaged, dormant, pre-churn) and send emails accordingly.

Up to 60% of businesses change the frequency of emails based on past purchase activity. Therefore I may be receiving more Bloom & Wild emails because I’m a pretty engaged user.

What’s good about Bloom & Wild’s frequency is that they are always on my mind, if I’m late to send someone a present I can likely do next day delivery and get it there on time.

Yes, it is definitely overwhelming at times and I do delete a large number of them.

But I don’t unsubscribe, because I know that the best discounts (25%) come via email, and I want that variable reward. I know that I’ll need the discounts one day.

The key learning here is consistency. I expect these emails and whilst I delete them, if I act on one per month, that’s a win for Bloom & Wild.\

I ended up sending a bloom roughly every couple of months, so their emails have a 1 in ~16 to 1 in ~24 purchase rate. Not bad.

3) Personalisation but make it better

It’s no secret personalisation is key. But Bloom & Wild take it further in two important ways.

Genuinely useful reminder emails

First, I can add reminders for peoples’ birthdays in my account. When I was first asked to do this, I was given a big discount for each person I added to incentivise me (£5 off each time, and for a £18 bunch that’s 27% off).

Adding reminders likely increases users’ retention and repeat order rate significantly. Therefore Bloom & Wild push this strongly in the new user experience.

Then they send me reminder emails one week before each birthday. There are over three different templates for the reminder emails, all including:

• The name of who’s birthday it is
• Their birthday date

Different template are either to keep things fresh or they’re just AB testing and I’m on the receiving end.

What’s great about this is that you don’t have to use their product for these emails to be useful.

Bloom & Wild now act as my personal birthday calendar for my family and friends, reminding me of upcoming birthdays, whether I buy from them or not.

Delivering user value in a way that also delivers business value. The emails of dreams.

Encouraging unsubscribes on specific campaigns

Most brands I’ve worked with are scared of unsubscribes. Its seen as a taboo for people to unsubscribe from any email.

I don’t see it this way.

For every unsubscribe, you’re increasing the quality of your email list. With a well-trimmed email list, you see higher engagement rates (e.g. send to click conversion), which ultimately sends a good signal to the email domain.

According to Ronny Kohavi on a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast, up to 50% of campaign being sent at Amazon were doing more harm than good. His team measured the hidden cost of spamming users and came up with a metric for the lost value from unsubscribes.

Whilst it was a few dollars per unsubscribe, the team at Amazon was able to understand that sending more wasn’t necessarily better, an insight that ultimately led to building the unsubscribe from specific campaigns feature.

Bloom & Wild seem to understand this nuance too. They take personalisation to such great lengths that they encourage you to unsubscribe from emails you don’t want to receive.

On Father’s Day, Mother’s Day and Grandparents Day (that last one was new to me…), Bloom & Wild send a ‘sensitive occasion’ email.

This soft and conscientiously written email series encourages you to opt out of emails if these dates are difficult for you. You may have lost a parent/grandparent, you may not be on good terms with them or another reason all together.

Love the copy here, feels very gentle.

Bloom & Wild allow you to personalise based on your circumstances, no questions asked.

This is another level of personalisation that I think many brands don’t have the guts to act on.

What this shows to me is that Bloom & Wild are in it for the long run, they understand the audience and they understand how important unsubscribes are to manage to maintain a quality list of engaged users.

But ultimately they understand that not all people are the same, and that as a business you need to be able to cater for those differences.

A killer email strategy in 8 steps

To sum up, Bloom & Wild’s personalisation, consistency and play on variable rewards are one of the big reasons I’ve spent so much with them. And is the reason my LTV is likely to continue rising above £700…

They not only deliver a great product, have excellent UX writing and an acute understanding of the customer, but they encourage me to be a better friend, daughter, niece, granddaughter, sister and neighbour.

Here’s a summary of how they achieve a fantastic email strategy and drive repeat revenue from customers:

1. Beat the seasonal rush by sending emails way ahead of time (2 weeks before)
2. Send more than one email around key dates
3. Don’t make your discounts predictable, keep them random for a variable reward
4. Don’t send more than 4 emails a week, and make sure you’re consistent
5. Send varying frequency of emails based on a user’s cohort (don’t keep bombarding if they’re not being opened)
6. Personalise your emails as much as possible: subject, body, timing
7. Find out what makes users retain, and incentivise users to take that step (in Bloom & Wild’s case, birthday reminders)
8. Tackle unsubscribes head on: encourage people to unsubscribe from specific campaigns, so they don’t churn all together

See any cool app growth or CRM strategies? Let me know in the comments 👇