How Brandless sends onboarding email

Incredible design, deep customization, and a balance of sales and fun

Kevan Lee

Published in

Aloha — Welcome Emails

5 min readMar 5, 2018

Good stuff, sold cheaply.
You can now afford nice things.
It’s all three dollars.

Brandless burst onto the scene last year as a modernized, minimal e-commerce shop, specializing in simple home goods. Their business model was simple, too. Everything in their shop is $3.00 each, and shipping is $3.00 total.

The branding of Brandless is quite eponymous: no logos, no art. Just words and colors. I was itching to review an e-commerce brand to see how they treat new customer emails, and I was especially eager to see any new and unusual ways that Brandless might go about it. Here is what I received when I placed my first order with Brandless last fall.

How often Brandless sends email to new customers

The first 35 days

Total: Seven emails, including three order confirmation/delivery emails

My best guess at Brandless’ email strategy

I’ve been a recipient of some very intense e-commerce email series, so Brandless felt refreshingly understated. No marketing messages arrived while I waited for my order. During my wait, the only times I heard from Brandless were shipping updates: the package has been sent, the package is here.

Another neat element: It seems that Brandless may cater its marketing messages to your past behavior at the site. Their UTMs certainly seem to hint this way.

There’s no exact cadence to the marketing messages. My first arrived one day after my order was delivered. The content was interesting: it could have been a “welcome” email of sorts since it spoke about the value prop of Brandless ($3 everything), or it could have been just whatever marketing message that happened to be in the pipeline that day. Certainly the other day’s messages felt that way; they were delivered somewhat randomly — different days, different times — and were messages that felt more like “check this out” and “this thing is happening now” rather than a coordinated welcome series.

It’s perhaps interesting to note: I was quite early to Brandless. I placed my order within a few weeks of their big announcement, and the emails slowly picked up steam as time went on. During the first 35 days, the frequency was low: 1–2 times per week. Afterward, it was more like every 2–3 days.

Did I just happen to get in before they doubled down on email?

Do their email campaigns pick up frequency the longer you go without ordering? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Learnings

Brandless sends image-rich, highly-designed emails, featuring stylized images of products. No simple plain-text here!
Almost the entire email is a collection of images (looks great, as long as you have images displayed in your inbox)
They use a pair of email services: Sailthru (a marketing automation tool) and ShipStation (for order fulfillment)
They have a regularly-occurring email: “✨ X NEW ITEMS WE LOVE ✨”. I received at least four of these my first three months.
They strike an almost 1:1 balance with product-first promotion and non-product promotion. For example, you’ll get an email about cold brew coffee one day and an email about #brandlesslife on Instagram the next. You’ll hear about dried fruit one day and humanitarian aid the next.
Here’s how they structure their UTMs, which hints at some pretty intense customization (‘term’ is my purchase date) and testing (‘content’ seems like an A/B test version):

utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Welcome%203%20%20Cold%20Brew%20%20Purchasers&utm_content=A&utm_term=072817%20Purchasers

3 email tips and takeaways from Brandless

Design a beautiful email to show off your products (just make sure you optimize for images turned off)
Mix humanity with sales. Don’t sell all the time.
Whenever possible, customize. Use a marketing automation tool if possible.

Here are all the onboarding emails (and beyond) that Brandless sends

Here’s more on each email that I received from Brandless during my first 35 days. Caveat: I’m sure tons has changed and will change with their marketing emails, so your mileage may vary when you sign up and see for yourself. 😊