As a culinary artist and long-time pizza lover, Andris Lagsdin spent years researching how to make the perfect crust. With inspiration from Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold, coupled with years of experience working in steel manufacturing, Lagsdin created the right tool to bake the ideal pizza crust—The Baking Steel.
While Baking Steel’s sales efforts are largely focused on promoting The Baking Steel, its flagship product, the company also sells baking steel variations, pizza ovens, and cooking accessories that allow people to make a delicious pizza from the comfort of their own homes.
The company’s goal is to become a 100% direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, which currently sits at around 80%.
As Baking Steel transitions down its DTC path, and ever since COVID influenced the rise of stay-at-home pizza chefs, the company has experienced tremendous growth—increasing monthly sales by nearly 1000%. As a result, the small marketing team needed an email service provider that would support its rapid growth and shifting DTC focus.
Baking Steel needed functionality and 1-to-1 service to support their growing company
Before Baking Steel’s rapid growth, its marketing team was using Mailchimp—simply because it was the platform that it seemed everyone else was using.
While Mailchimp offered basic email functionality and minimal design options, the team at Baking Steel quickly learned they needed a much more powerful platform. The team wanted a tool that would easily integrate with Shopify, allow for quick and beautiful design, provide strong automation and segmentation tools, and offer personalized customer service.
Of all the features Baking Steel needed, more robust reporting was on the top of the list. It was important for the team to have the real-time visibility into campaign performance that they weren’t getting with Mailchimp.
“We jumped on the Mailchimp bandwagon before finding Omnisend. Mailchimp was fine, but now that we know what Omnisend can do, we realized what we were missing. We also didn’t have the customer service aspect with Mailchimp that we get with Omnisend. The team at Omnisend offers consistent follow-up and provides useful recommendations.”
—Craig Hastings, Culinary Director at Baking Steel
An email provider with excellent customer support and performance
“We needed to grow our email lists, and nobody was helping us at Mailchimp. We decided to see what else was out there. We read reviews on Omnisend and decided to give it a shot. We naturally formed a great relationship with the team at Omnisend.”
Hastings was impressed with how easy it was to transfer to the Omnisend platform. He also formed a strong relationship with the customer success team and received email marketing tips and education about Omnisend’s features.
Two primary reasons why Baking Steel chose Omnisend was because of its outstanding Shopify integration and reporting features. Hastings didn’t want to deal with the complications of a third-party Shopify integration and liked that Omnisend had a one-click integration.
In terms of reporting, the team got more visibility into the ROI of Baking Steel’s overall email program.
“We love the reporting aspect of Omnisend that we didn’t get with Mailchimp,” Hastings says. “It was amazing to see that when we sent out an email about our 72-hour pizza dough, we got $1,700 in sales from it. We could look at the heat map to see where customers were clicking, the history of a particular customer, and compare our Google Analytics and Shopify data to see how that customer came to be, which helps inform future campaigns.”
Omnisend’s rich features made it possible to automate messages for customers, segment lists, and create high-performing automated workflows.
For example, Baking Steel currently has three post-purchase series set up with three messages in each workflow; one is for Baking Steel buyers and another is for griddle buyers. The last is for people who purchased accessories. The ability to segment lists and automate emails makes it possible for Baking Steel to reach diverse customers with targeted messages.
“The segmenting feature combined with reporting is really cool. We can see what a person bought in the last six months, and then send a recipe that matches the product they bought. It makes it possible to really dive in and get it right with customers.”
Increased email marketing metrics, sales, and reporting
The real-time and in-depth look into email marketing metrics was a hit with the small marketing team at Baking Steel. They particularly liked that they knew exactly how much revenue an email generated—something they didn’t have before Omnisend.
Overall, automated emails make up 33% of their email revenue while accounting for only 2.3% of email sends. Here is a deeper look into some of Baking Steel’s email marketing wins from different campaigns:
- Two new welcome series sequences generate high revenue per email. These two welcome series are driving a revenue-per-email (RPE) over $10 and $15.
- Excellent RPE for post-purchase series. The RPE for the automated post-purchase series mentioned above are 214%, 126%, and 278% greater than their promotional emails, respectively.
- High engagement metrics for automated messages. Compared to promotional campaigns, open and click-to-open rates are an impressive 139.74% and 40.28% higher, while the conversion rate is 563% greater. As for RPE, these messages see a lift of 3960%.
- Remarkable results from cart abandonment emails. Baking Steel’s three-message cart abandonment series generates 27% of email revenue while accounting for less than 0.5% of total email sends. With open, click, and conversion rates all significantly higher than promotional emails, these messages generate an RPE greater than $4—a nearly 8000% lift over promotional emails.
As Baking Steel experienced rapid growth, Omnisend provided a way for a small marketing team to generate big results. Omnisend, along with their dedicated customer success manager, made it easy to integrate with Shopify, draft messages, set up automation workflows, segment lists, and track their results. This goes to show, having the right team with the right tools at their disposal can make a lot of dough together.
