Email Lessons From Brands Doing It Right

Why Study the Brands Doing It Right

Good email is not a mystery. The brands winning at it repeat the same handful of moves.

We paid our team to analyze all 98+ emails Olipop sent over a year. We broke down what Alex Hormozi learned after ignoring email for 13 years. We scaled a luxury massage chair brand from $8k to $66k a month.

The patterns are the same across all three. Here they are as principles you can copy this week.

Prefer to watch? Here is the video version:

A Real Sale, Broken Down: $75,090 in 6 Days

Principles are easy to nod at. Here is one run end to end.

An apparel client came to us with terrible deliverability, little to no strategy, and ZERO segmentation. As is, their email and SMS program was barely going to be profitable. We jumped in for their Fourth of July promotion.

Six days later: $75,090 in sales.

The structure was 6 emails and 5 SMS messages spread across 7 days. We launched two days before the holiday, on purpose. Every inbox floods on the 4th, so you want a jump start while there is still room to be seen.

Here is the cadence we ran.

Day 1, sale launch. Widest audience: the 365-day email and site-engaged segments. Simple subject line, "4th of July Sale, 20% Off Sitewide," patriotic graphics, and real lifestyle photos instead of boring product shots, with original prices crossed out. Over 94,000 opens for a 53% open rate. 604 clicks, 92 orders, a $61 AOV, and $5.75k from email alone. The SMS went to anyone who clicked in the last 90 days and pulled $8.7k. That send cost about $450 to deliver and returned $8.7k, a 19.4x ROI.

Day 2, value push. We cut the segment down to the 90-day engaged and excluded anyone who purchased in the last 14 days. Once the sale is live you always exclude purchasers, so you are not cramming more messages down the throat of someone who already bought. This send leaned on social proof, over a million happy customers, plus sizing help, which matters a lot for apparel. It brought back $3.5k from email and about $4k from SMS.

Day 3, FOMO. Wide audience again, minus purchasers, pushing "last chance, sale ending soon" and promoting products outside the hero range. This was the best placed-order rate of the whole promo: 316 clicks, 66 orders, a $64 AOV, $4.3k from email and $4.1k from SMS.

Day 4, final hours. Back to the wide 365-day engaged minus purchasers. "Final hours, 20% off, ends tonight." We showed each person the products they had already viewed, and if they had viewed nothing, we fell back to three best sellers. Email did $3k. SMS did $8.6k.

The cleanup. After it ended, we sent a "sorry you missed it" note to people who did not buy, and a "thank you for making the sale a success" note to people who did. Then we ran a 1-day flash recovery to everyone who had not purchased yet: a new offer, $25 off orders above $120. That is close to straight profit, money most brands never think to collect. It added $3.4k from email and $6.6k from SMS.

Two things made this work beyond the copy. Timing, launch early before the inbox floods. And segmentation, a different audience on almost every send instead of one blast to everyone.

We have done bigger. One brand added an extra $514k a month from email. Another went from $131k to $2.4 million a month. Same principles, run consistently.

Lesson 1: Consistency Beats Cleverness

Hormozi ignored email for 13 years because he thought he would waste people's time. That thinking cost him millions.

It is backwards. If you provide value, people want more emails, not fewer.

His fix was volume. Send at least 2-3 times per week, more if the content is good. He wrote 24 emails in half a day once he committed, then realized he could have done that all along.

Olipop looks like the opposite. They send fewer than 2 emails a week.

Both are right, and that is the point. The number is not the lesson. Showing up on a schedule your list can rely on is.

Pick a cadence you can sustain and hit it every week without fail.

Lesson 2: Build the Brand, Not Just the Promo

Olipop runs 100% designed emails with ZERO plain-text. Every campaign leads with visual storytelling and brand consistency.

Their voice is playful and approachable, built for a millennial and Gen-Z audience, with real personality in every send. That voice carries across email and SMS, both powered by Klaviyo, so the brand feels like one thing everywhere a customer meets it.

This is why they can send fewer emails and still keep engagement high. Each one looks like them and sounds like them.

Contrast that with Hormozi's point for ecom. You need consistent touchpoints between purchases that are not just promotions. Value that keeps customers engaged until they are ready to buy again.

Both brands are building a relationship, not blasting offers.

Lesson 3: Match the Email to the Buyer's Intent

Someone looking at a $5.5k massage chair is not just another email address. They are probably buying for a second home. They need a different experience.

When we took that luxury brand from $8k to $66k a month, we threw out the standard playbook and built custom sequences for each chair they sold.

The gains came from treating the long consideration cycle as the strategy, not a problem.

Here is what that looked like in practice.

The result: every visitor became 4x more valuable.

Not from better tools. From treating luxury buyers like luxury buyers and giving a high-AOV decision the education and trust it needs.

Lesson 4: Segment by Who They Are and What They Want

Hormozi cites a 791% ROI increase from sending the right content to the right people.

Olipop's opt-in is a two-step progression. Email first, then an SMS signup option, with a 15% off incentive on an entry-intent popup. That step order raises subscriber quality instead of grabbing everyone at once.

On the luxury brand, segmentation meant a different sequence for each product and financing built into the abandonment flow.

Same principle at every AOV. Stop blasting one message to the whole list.

The Principles in One Table

Common Mistakes

1. Emailing only when you want a sale. Give value between promos or the list stops opening. Aim for value that lands in under 60 seconds.
2. Copying a cadence number blindly. Olipop sends under 2 a week, Hormozi sends 2-3 plus. Consistency matters more than the count. Choose one you can sustain.
3. Sending plain-text blasts to a premium brand. A $5.5k buyer needs design and positioning that matches the price, not a generic template.
4. One message for the whole list. Segmenting by intent drove a 791% ROI lift for Hormozi. Match the send to what the buyer actually viewed.
5. Treating long consideration as a problem. For high-AOV products, the slow decision is where welcome and abandonment flows do the selling.
6. Making unsubscribe hard. Dormant subscribers hurt deliverability. Let the wrong people leave so the right ones keep buying.
7. Not excluding purchasers mid-promo. Once someone buys, drop them from the "ending soon" blasts. In the $75,090 sale we excluded purchasers on every send after launch.
8. Ending a sale cold. The 1-day flash recovery at $25 off orders above $120 added roughly $10k in near-pure profit. Give non-buyers one last, different offer.

Get Expert Help

These principles are simple to name and harder to run across a full calendar of designed campaigns, flows, and SMS.

Our team builds the same intent-based, brand-consistent systems for DTC brands that scaled the numbers above.

Here is where to start.

See our pricing | Apply to work with us