Verneri Brander
Prepare for an enlightening conversation with the growth master, Verneri Brander, as we dive deep into the world of business expansion, strategy, and success.
Prepare for an enlightening conversation with the growth master, Verneri Brander, as we dive deep into the world of business expansion, strategy, and success.
I’m a 23-year-old email marketing agency owner from Finland.
Between 2020-23, I studied marketing and information systems science in a university. During my studies, I had various little ”side hustles” like growing organic Instagram accounts, building online communities, and doing community management as a freelancer.
In 2022, I joined an agency mentorship and started doing e-commerce email marketing.
In 2023, I grew my LinkedIn personal brand from 0-5000 followers by posting a mixture of educational email marketing and lifestyle content while I was living abroad in Southeast Asia.
And now in 2024, I’ve finished my studies to fully commit to growing my e-commerce clients with email marketing.
Shortly after starting my university studies, I became driven by the goal of having my own business.
After trying multiple things, I found a mentorship program for aspiring agency owners. Since it was aligned with my studies and my past ”side hustles”, I decided to give it a go.
We ended up starting an agency together with my brother, and since he’d been doing media buying for multiple years, I began learning about email marketing to offer extra value for our clients.
At the start of 2024, I helped a 6-figure e-commerce store from Finland grow their attributed email revenue from 27% to 46% in less than 60 days after starting to work with them.
This particular brand has a good product and a consistent stream of new customers coming in every month, but they hadn’t tapped into the full potential of a robust email automation setup yet.
This made them an optimal client for me to achieve great results on a short timeframe.
I crafted a segmentation and automation strategy for the brand, built high-converting email sign-up forms, and activated the 7 most important email flows every e-commerce store should have in place. Doing the basics well is the backbone of every success story I create.
As I mentioned above, I think simplicity always wins. Too many brands are trying to overcomplicate their growth strategies when all they should be focusing on is getting the basics right.
In email marketing, this means focusing on the following 4 key pillars:
1. High-converting sign-up/pop-up forms
2. The core email flows
3. Engaging & high-converting email campaigns
4. Email list hygiene & deliverability
I always start my work with a comprehensive audit of the brand, its products, customers, and competitors.
Just like in movies, detectives build their ”crazy walls” of people they’re investigating, I figuratively build my ”crazy wall” of the brand I’m starting to work with.
Once I have all the details gathered, I can easily refer to them in anything I do.
Their role is becoming more and more important as technology advances and the amount of available data increases.
As an email marketer, most of my decisions are based on data. With a new client that lacks existing data, I build an initial email setup based on the insights I have from past experience. But as soon as the data starts flowing in, it drives all the subsequent decisions.
I’m also following the current AI revolution with extreme curiosity, as I expect it to have a huge impact on the future of data analytics.
One of the biggest myths is thinking that email marketing alone can somehow reverse the effects of a bad product or a negative customer experience.
It’s absolutely true that with email marketing, you can collect invaluable insights to utilize in product development and customer support. But it only works if these insights are actually put to use.
Simply put: no matter how exceptional your email marketing is, people won’t buy repeatedly if the product sucks.
With email marketing, the biggest value and emphasis is on long-term growth.
If you want to boost your revenue short term, sending more promotional email campaigns or offering incentives via on-site pop-ups can work well.
For sustainable strategy, however, you need a balance between promotional and value-focused content.
Depending on the business goals and unit economics, every brand needs to strike that balance for themselves by figuring out how much they need to give before asking for something in return.
For many brands, sacrificing margin on the first order by offering welcome discounts is worth it considering the profit they’ll make on the subsequent orders. But if you’re a one-product store, this is probably not the way to go.
Context matters.
While the general strategies of e-commerce email marketing are quite universal, each industry has its own unique characteristics you need to consider.
For fashion brands, you often need to adopt a more visual approach focusing on beautiful designs and image-heavy emails.
For self-care, it’s important to send educational content on product usage together with regular replenishment reminders to drive repeat sales.
When tailoring your strategy to your specific industry, common sense and logical thinking will take you far.
Email marketing is a customer retention tool, and user experience is absolutely crucial for optimizing retention. That’s why as an email marketer, everything needs to be looked at from a customer’s point of view.
As a customer:
Would I want to receive an email like this?
When would I like to receive it?
What would make the experience as frictionless as possible for me?
Asking questions like these ensures the growth never comes at the expense of customer satisfaction. Because if the customer isn’t happy, you won’t be growing for long.
I’ve curated my social media feed and created extra email accounts just for the purpose of learning as much as possible from my industry while avoiding any content I don’t learn from.
By following the industry leaders on LinkedIn and subscribing to a handful of leading industry newsletters, I’ve ensured I’ll consistently learn more and never miss the latest trends by a couple of hours a week of intentional consumption.
This is one of the most important aspects of e-commerce, and email marketing plays a huge part in it.
Without gathering consistent customer feedback and implementing the insights gained, there’s no way to succeed big time.
As an email marketer, I include multiple customer feedback touchpoints across the customer journey, and these insights can then be utilized not only in email marketing but across every department of the business.
Some examples of the feedback I usually collect for my clients:
-Pre-purchase surveys
-Cart abandonment surveys
-post-purchase surveys
-customer reviews
Don’t overcomplicate it. Identify the few key pillars that will move the needle for your business, and ruthlessly prioritize those over everything else.
Focus on a few key channels, including an acquisition channel like Meta or TikTok, and a retention channel like email, and master those before going after new and shiny objects.
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