Instacart IPO'd for $10B - what emails got them there?
Check out 150 emails over a couple years
Let’s dive into my inbox and pull out an archive of 150 Instacart emails. These emails are from a few years ago, so don’t get mad at me if things are different now. (I will try to do a “refresh” soon to update with their newer emails.)
Quick takeaways (open the Miro for more in-depth analysis):
The majority of Instacart emails are programmatic
They have the size and resources to build these triggered, dynamic emails. When you’re sending to tens of millions of people, this is how you scale effectively. You physically don’t have the time to manually create or curate all the different product recommendations, discounts, or promotions
There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Don’t feel bad if you don’t have the resources to create these types of sends yet. They take the right tools, data engineers/scientists, clean and usable data, and meaningful amounts of time.
Types of emails: New items, popular items, lists of products of different types (e.g. personal care or produce), new store launches in your area, deals of the week, seasonal/holiday sends, and other ad hoc sends.
Use standard templates and modules to make email creation efficient and designs bulletproof. Don’t try to create a new design for every email.
Test different discount amounts for different user types.
Instacart gives new users a larger discount, and existing users a lower discount.
New users need more motivation to place their first order. Don’t erode your margins and devalue your product by over-discounting.
Test $ dollar amount off vs % percent off
It’s a basic test, and common advice is to use whichever number is bigger, but every audience is different.
For promotional content, try sending first without a discount and then if they don’t purchase, send again with a discount.
Or try with a lower discount amount, then increase the discount over time if people don’t purchase.
Instacart did this for their Super Bowl campaign.
Do you resend emails to people who don’t open them the first time?
Instacart does (or at least did). People have mixed opinions, and it's a less precise strategy with the difficulty of assessing a legitimate email open now with Apple MPP.
Invest the time and resources to create automated, dynamic email sends
If you ever send recommended content to users, try to invest the time to figure out how you can automate this process to create an evergreen dynamic email. Be sure to test to validate it’s effective over time, but this is a better use of time than creating one-off emails.
Segment recipients based on past behavior
Seems basic, but so many fail to have meaningful segmentation strategies.
It can be as basic as they bought X, so send them Y related products. Usually, you start with something simple that works and then build out further to make it more complex. Starting with complexity before the initial validation of the strategy, can lead to big-time wasted $ and time