When launching Burton Goods, Brian Holmes expected it would take a year before he could pay himself a salary and make his first hire. He did both in half the time.
Holmes says he hit the milestones six months early because of email marketing. He credits email for funding the leather goods company during its infancy. For the first five months of business, newsletters drove all revenue.
“Email marketing is the only thing that kept the business going in the early days,” he says.
Holmes had something that few new businesses have: a subscriber list from his first company that sold similar products. He knew that re-engaging them the right way was critical to starting Burton Goods off strongly.
In Seguno, he didn’t just find the technical assistance he needed. He found a partner to support his business growth.
Building a new brand: from changing priorities to leaving Mailchimp
Before Burton Goods, there was Pad & Quill, a leather accessories business that launched in 2010. Explosive growth eventually transitioned to mounting debt. Holmes filed for bankruptcy in early 2024.
His passion for designing well-crafted products wouldn’t die. As he was shutting down one business, he was planning another. The second venture would be a tribute to his father, an engineer and designer with the middle name of Burton who loved leather.
Holmes still specializes in cases for Apple devices and bands for Apple watches. He has approached Burton Goods differently in a few key ways, such as owning customer service for the first six months to reconnect and strategizing to create higher-quality products.
The most significant change is in suppliers and software vendors. He wiped the slate clean.
It meant replacing Magento with Shopify, an ecommerce platform that didn’t require coding experience. It also led to ending a 14-year relationship with Mailchimp and finding an email marketing provider that would provide support.
Trimming a list to reach more customers
According to Holmes, marketing a tech accessories business was vastly different in 2010. Various tech and fashion websites, news publications, and strong Google rankings provided exposure. Pad & Quill didn't spend a dollar on ads for the first three years.
Fast-forward to 2024. Press coverage of accessories is nearly non-existent, ranking for SEO is more difficult, and ad prices have skyrocketed.
Burton Goods needed to take advantage of what Pad & Quill left behind. “The newsletter list is significant. It's key to our business.”
Though Mailchimp was easy to use and did what Holmes needed, he found its customer support lacking. So, he contacted other email marketing prospects to ask how they would assist with re-engagement. Seguno was the only one to respond.
Jumping back into emails would have severely damaged the new Burton Goods domain and email deliverability. Building Burton Goods’ sender reputation heavily relied on engaging Pad & Quill’s best customers to establish credibility in the eyes of email service providers. In other words, only a tactical approach would do if he wanted his emails to land in the inbox.
Seguno’s multi-month plan started in January 2024 and included:
- Dissecting the list based on engagement data. Seguno’s deliverability expert identified the approximate top third of recent purchasers and those who open and click on emails. He divided the resulting batch into four re-engagement groups, with the first group comprising the strongest customers.
- Sending an introductory email to each group, with spacing between batches. Holmes wrote about the closure of Pad & Quill and its reincarnation, including a blog post link with more details. He provided a discount in appreciation of previous support and invited them to unsubscribe if they wished.
- Ramping up by focusing on specific domains. Batching and sending the introductory email continued based on the email service provider (e.g., Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.).
- Continual monitoring and list cleaning. Seguno adjusted the process based on spam complaint spikes and Google Postmaster Tools’ downgrades, removing unengaged contacts along the way.
“Even though our list is smaller, we're reaching more people than before. Seguno has helped me trim down the list so that I’m constantly reaching an inbox of people who actually want to engage with the brand,” Holmes says. “We’re engaging more intelligently with our subscribers.”
By April 2024, Burton Goods had a stable email list — though still smaller than Pad & Quill — with healthy open rates. The gradual ramp-up helped Burton Goods maximize a new product launch: cases for the iPad Pro May release. That, Holmes says, is when “things really took off.”
Saving time on newsletters by staying in Shopify
“Our open rate last week was 47%. That's crazy,” Holmes says as he checks his Seguno reports. “Our open rate is easily three and a half times what we saw in Mailchimp.”
He knows that list cleaning is behind the lift. Near its end, he sent three to four Pad & Quill emails per week out of desperation. From all he’s learned from Seguno’s experts, Holmes recognizes that the company’s sending reputation was likely poor, with open rates around 16%.
Email deliverability aside, Holmes says the Seguno suite interconnection with his Shopify site makes completing tasks much quicker and simpler.
“I would always be searching for images to place into my newsletters,” he says, explaining that Mailchimp didn’t connect to his Magento site. “I just log into my Shopify site, I go to Seguno and into a newsletter, and it says, ‘Which image do you want from your products?’”
Where the creation process in Mailchimp took about 45 minutes, Seguno emails take 15 to 20 minutes. Saving 25 to 30 minutes per newsletter — once or twice a week — is “everything.”
“My whole life is doing every part of the business. So anywhere I can save time is huge,” he says, explaining it allows him to concentrate on more significant initiatives like designing new products and get back to necessary daily operations like shipping orders.
More Seguno features Holmes finds helpful:
- Easy-to-use starter templates to speed email creation, such as featured products; after noticing a “simple note” template, he’s added the non-stylized email newsletter to his rotation
- The “add-to-cart” button that automatically deposits the product in the shopping cart upon click-through
- A clipping feature that warns when his newsletter length is getting long and might be chopped by the email provider
Holmes is also leveraging a handful of Seguno’s automations. They make up nearly 19% of all email-generated revenue, with the welcome automation bringing in half the money. The email features a unique discount code created with Shopify discounts.
Seguno: getting more + saving money
With Seguno, Holmes gets more than email marketing and strategic support. His paid plan includes apps for product reviews and popup forms.
He finds the reviews feature particularly valuable. Like email, it’s easy to navigate because of the Shopify embed aspect. He checks feedback daily to guide both customer service and product improvements.
Reviews regularly appear in Burton Goods emails and play an important role elsewhere. Displaying social proof on the store’s site is integral when two-thirds of the strategy — ads and organic search — is aimed at customer acquisition.
“Having those stars up there is huge because those are people who have no experience with your brand,” Holmes says. “I think it's a significant part of conversion for people coming in through ads and organic."
Before Seguno, Holmes paid an extra $200 monthly for ShopperApproved, a customer reviews app, on top of $1,100 per month for Mailchimp. He estimates that Seguno — product reviews included — costs 50% less.
What does saving so much money mean, especially after closing a business because of debt?
"You're able to make decisions. You're able to look at new prototypes,” Holmes says. “You're not in a rush to sell product.”
Holmes wants to expand the product line by 20% to 25% in 2025 by introducing a new leather accessories category. Aspirations also include adding a “Made in America” line of goods.
Using email to inform customers about Burton Goods’ development will significantly contribute to turning those goals into a profit. Holmes knows he can count on Seguno’s human support if he needs strategic advice to maximize new launches and company developments.
“When you're an entrepreneur and starting a business, you're looking for good partners. It's the bottom line. You're looking for people who will partner with you to help you reach your revenue goals and make customers happy. And Seguno's a good partner in that.”
