Client: Lilac Paper

Lilac Paper produces custom dental and medical planners with personalized covers. They contain a treasure trove of dental facts, making these cheery planners an essential tool for students and professionals alike.

While I’ve worked on backend SEO for their Shopify site and written blog posts, product descriptions, and even created IG Reels & shot product photos for Lilac Paper (those planner images? That was me), the main takeaway from Lilac Paper is this: Email Marketing WORKS. Every time (and I mean every time) I crafted a marketing email for Lilac Paper, the analytics spiked: web traffic increased, and so did the sales. It was too easy! Everyone should use email marketing to their advantage. Wanna make money? Send an email. It’s like MAGIC.

  • Lilac Paper Dental Planner with Stickers & Ruler

  • September's the best month, by the way.

  • Lilac Paper Dental Facts. It's why this planner is so valuable to students and pros alike.

  • Lilac Dental Planner. Images by Melinda Holland.

  • Everything you'd need in a dental planner.

  • A quick phone pic for social media. So many personalized cover designs to choose from, like this classy number.

  • A phone pic for social media in collaboration with an influencer.

The Power of Email Marketing

Use emails to nurture your audience, build trust & authority, and increase conversions.

Let’s nerd out on some backend Shopify analytics. I wish I could see the analytics for all my clients, but alas, it’s not something I’m often able to get my hands on.

After setting up Lilac Paper with Flodesk, I wrote and designed a welcome email to kickstart their email marketing. The email went out to over 8200 subscribers on May 20. You can see the email, below, branded with their lilac color. (Not every email I sent was lilac, but the very first one needed to be on-brand.😉)

Flodesk backend with email analytics.

Pro tip: Notice her hands are showing in the welcome email image. Body language expert, Vanessa Van Edwards, recommends showing your hands (ideally a palm flash) within the first three seconds of meeting someone to increase the appearance of your trustworthiness, honesty, and competency. Sooo, scientifically speaking, choosing that particular image (with both hands showing) definitely increased the email’s engagement. Just sayin’.

Below, a 36.5% Open Rate and 1.2% CTR. Not too shabby for a first email on a list that hadn’t been nurtured for years. Scroll down to see what the effect was on the backend of Lilac’s Shopify site.

Here we are in Shopify’s backend. Remember that the welcome email was sent on May 20. Notice the spike in website traffic between May 19 and May 21. Wowzers. What a way to jolt a site back to life. All from ONE email. Notice how sleepy the numbers are until the email is sent. We have a 94% jump in visitors and a 96% jump in web sessions, hence the spike in the graph. Uh-mazing.

Ok, Melinda. That’s nice. But did your “little email” actually bring in any money for the business? So you increased website traffic. Big whoop. Show me the money. 👇

Geez. Tough crowd. And, by the way, increasing web traffic is a big deal, silly. Keep scrolling.

Let’s look at the total sales after May 20. Notice the 154% jump in total sales, plus the jump in total orders and conversion rate. It’s a small biz, so we’re not in the billions. Yet. But you gotta start somewhere, and as long as the progress is upward, there’s no need to fret.

(Also, sidenote, if you get some unsubscribers while email marketing. Don’t stress. We’re culling the herd. You want the best fit on your subscriber list: the engaged people who want to be there; the people who will open and click through your emails.)

Upward trajectory. That’s what we want. The important thing to note is that the percentages keep rising.

Ooo. We caught a live site visitor on this screenshot. And the sales are still rising.

Will we break $3K? Yes we will. 👇 🙌 And this was from ONE email.

I’ve worked with clients who bring in quite a bit more than $3K—but—as mentioned before, try as I might, I couldn’t get access to those numbers. Sharing analytics with your copywriters and marketers helps us gauge the efficacy of our work. It helps us test different tactics, such as how well email subject lines are doing (A/B testing, anyone?).

Don’t Forget About SEO

SEO isn’t hard. You just have to know what to tweak and be diligent about it.

What should I focus on when it comes to optimizing my website for SEO?

H1s, title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL slugs…just to name a few.

We’re not going to take a deep dive into SEO and the definitions and best practices of the above terms because…I don’t want your eyes to glaze over and your head to explode. 🤯 SEO can be tedious, monotonous work—but it’s vital for raising your Google ranking, increasing site traffic, and decreasing your bounce rate. Strive to be number one for the keywords and phrases relevant to your brand on SERPs. Doing so builds trust with those looking for exactly what you offer, and increases your authority and brand awareness.

Want to discuss SEO and how it pays off in the long run? Shoot me an email or set up a call.

Here’s a look at making meta description updates in Shopify. Alt text and title tags were also updated to make the Lilac Paper site more accessible to potential customers.

A look at Shopify's backend for products and search engine listings.

👇 Here’s a peek at the analytics on the shipping provider’s end. The largest increase was right after the May 20 email.

Get focused and create a consistent email marketing plan. Create welcome sequences with 3-5 emails, abandoned cart emails, nurture sequences, upsells, holiday/sale sequences, and re-engagement sequences. They can be long or short. I’ve seen both lengths work.

Need help creating an email marketing plan? Email me.