How we grew Patagonia’s email list by 300%
Our email acquisition strategy for Patagonia Europe
Email is one of the best ways to leverage return from your marketing strategy. As a cost-effective solution to omnichannel remarketing, it’s a go-to always on campaign for all our clients. This means we can reach high-value email subscribers across multiple platforms.
In 2020, we used email capture as part of a gated content release for Patagonia’s film Il Pescatore. Based on the success of this campaign and our other work with Patagonia, they asked us to devise a holistic email acquisition strategy to help them grow their EMEA subscriber list.
Strategy to Grow a First-Party Email List
We did a deep dive of Patagonia’s current email capture tactics and after an in-depth analysis, we laid out a broad strategy for email acquisition going forwards introducing new tactics and optimising their existing ones. It was in two key parts. The first was the organic changes they could make to improve their website’s organic email acquisition rates. And the second was an always-on digital advertising email acquisition strategy.
We made a few suggestions of how to better optimise email acquisition from the current website. These included:
- Add ability to opt in during checkout
- Add a permanent embedded sign-up form segment to the homepage
- Make the sign-up in the footer more prevalent
- Add ability to opt-in when registering for events
- Reposition the pop-up as a sidebar
- Match the copy and image used in sidebar pop-up to the section of the site, for example:
- Serve the pop-up with an image of a surfer in the surfing areas of the website
- Serve the pop-up with an image of a skier in the skiing areas of the website
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Always-on digital advertising
For the always-on digital advertising email acquisition strategy, Patagonia assigned us an annual budget for subscriber growth. A key aspect of a successful campaign is finding the most successful platforms and over the past four years of lead generation ads with Patagonia, we’ve tested various.
For email acquisition campaigns we run with other clients, we’ve found that Meta is one of the most successful platforms, keeping click-through rates and conversion rates high. However, this go-to platform is out of the question for Patagonia. Since their Facebook boycott in June 2020, we’ve experimented with other advertising platforms to uncover a broader spread of placements that can deliver similar or even better results.
Luckily, we have a broad range of experience in-house to test various alternatives to Meta.
In 2021, we started email acquisition ad campaigns on YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat, Pinterest, X and Google Discovery. We quickly found that Discovery was the most effective with a click-through rate 13% higher than most of the other platforms. Happy with this result, we rolled this campaign out across 15 different markets in the EMEA region.
In 2023, we saw that Pinterest introduced in-platform lead forms. We tested this new feature on Pinterest and on Snapchat, comparing the results against the high benchmark set by the Google Discovery placements. We saw that CPA was unreasonably high and we ultimately returned to Discovery placements.
Email lead ads in 2024
We continue to be agile through the changing landscape of digital advertising. In 2024, the risks involved in being too invested in one platform came home to roost, Google sunset the use of in-platform lead forms in their Discovery ad placements so we quickly pivoted our approach to test PMAX placements for email acquisition.
We have so far seen that early results from the PMAX email acquisition campaigns were as good as and, in some markets, better than the Discovery placements they replaced. Pleased with the results (which are currently cheaper than Discovery!) from the first six weeks of testing, we have rolled out this strategy to all 15 markets again.
Further optimisations
Other than platform testing and pivoting over the years, we have also tested audiences and creative.
For audiences, we took a three pronged approach targeting a mix of people including: prospecting, which utilised refined interest targeting to reach people interest in the core sports Patagonia targets; lookalikes, built from the highest value owned audiences including previous purchasers and email subscribers; and finally owned, consisting of highly engaged followers, website visitors and customers who had purchased but were not part of the email list.
For creative, we matched image assets in the ads to the interests of the audience. For example, climbers would see climbing imagery and surfers would see surfing creative, meaning the ads felt meaningful and relevant to the potential subscribers. We also made sure to refresh the creative every 6 months to reduce any chance of ad fatigue and to continually test for better results for the campaign.
Results
The hard work paid off; the results were much better than expected and we’ve consistently delivered a CPA at 25% of the maximum CPA bid we were tasked to achieve. Over the last 3 years, our strategies have contributed to more than 50% of Patagonia’s EMEA email audience!
Considering that, unlike most other brands, Patagonia doesn’t offer an incentive to sign up and they don’t advertise on Meta, the results are excellent. There’s no “10% off your first order”, just a highly refined email acquisition strategy to join a mailing list that delivers world-leading creative in the form of a well considered email sent to an audience that cares.
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Read how we grew a quality first-party email database for Outsiders Store.
Learn more about our work with Patagonia Europe.
