Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / How Email List Gamification Doubled Engagement for One Retailer
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to start today with a number: one of our listeners — a marketing manager at a DTC home goods brand called Willow & Ash — emailed me this data point. Their email click-through rate doubled over six months. Not from a subject line tweak. Not from a redesign. From gamification. Luna: Gamification inside an email — not a landing page, not an app. That's interesting. Most people think email is too passive for game mechanics. Lucas: Right. And that's exactly why I wanted to unpack their playbook. Willow & Ash sells things like bamboo cutting boards, linen aprons, ceramic pitchers — the kind of stuff you'd find at a boutique kitchen store. Average order value around seventy-five dollars. They'd been doing a standard three-email welcome sequence, then a weekly newsletter, then a monthly promo blast. Nothing broken, but nothing special either. Luna: So what did they change? They added a progress bar, didn't they? I've seen a few brands do that — 'you're only ten dollars away from free shipping.' Lucas: That's part of it, but the key is they didn't just slap a progress bar on a single email. They built a cumulative loyalty mechanic across the entire email relationship. Here's the structure: every subscriber starts at Tier Zero — just signed up, no purchases yet. The first email in the sequence welcomes them and shows a progress bar: zero percent toward Tier One. The bar fills based on actions — opening emails, clicking links, and of course, making purchases. Luna: So opens and clicks earn points toward the bar? That's different from most programs I've seen, which only count spend. Lucas: Exactly. They assigned point values: an email open is one point, a click is three points, a purchase is fifty points. Tier One unlocks at one hundred points. Once you hit Tier One, the next email includes a surprise — a free shipping code valid for thirty days. The progress bar now shows how close you are to Tier Two at two hundred fifty points, which unlocks a fifteen percent off coupon. And so on up to Tier Five. Luna: I love that the surprise happens after the unlock — not before. You don't dangle the reward; you give it. That's a powerful psychological switch. Lucas: That's the part their head of marketing called the 'magic moment.' When a subscriber opens an email and sees 'Congratulations, you are now a Tier One member. Your free shipping code is below.' No previous email had teased it. So the discovery itself felt like a reward. Luna: What was the actual impact on numbers? You said click-through doubled. Lucas: Over six months, overall click-through rate went from 2.1 percent to 4.3 percent. But the more interesting stat is that subscribers who reached Tier Two had an average click-through of 7.8 percent — nearly four times the baseline. And churn — people unsubscribing or going inactive — dropped by thirty percent. Luna: Thirty percent less churn? That's huge. Usually when you add more emails — like progress bar check-ins — you risk annoying people and spiking unsubscribes. Lucas: Right. And that's the trap most brands fall into. They add frequency without adding value. Willow & Ash actually reduced their total email send volume by about fifteen percent. Instead of sending a weekly newsletter and a separate promo blast, they merged those into one weekly email that included the updated progress bar and a single recommended product. Every email had a reason to open — 'check your progress.' Luna: So the gamification became the reason to open. The product recommendation became secondary. Lucas: Exactly. And they were careful not to let the bar dominate the design. The progress bar sat in a subtle banner at the top — maybe ten percent of the email height. Below it was the regular content: a product story, a recipe if it was a kitchen item, a customer photo. The bar wasn't the email, it was the frame. Luna: Did they see any fatigue after a few months? Six months is a long time for a single mechanic. Lucas: Good question. They did see a plateau around month four. Click-through stabilized around 4.2 percent. So they introduced what they called 'surprise bonus points' — double points for a weekend, or a one-time 'click this link for ten bonus points' hidden in the postscript. That gave the system a second wind. By month six, click-through had crept to 4.3 percent. Luna: The hidden postscript bonus — that's basically an easter egg. People love finding those. It taps into the same dopamine loop as a surprise reward. Lucas: Totally. And the best part: they didn't need any fancy software. They built this using their existing email service provider — Klaviyo, I think — plus a simple webhook that updated subscriber profiles with point totals. The progress bar was just a dynamic image generated from the point data. Total technical lift was maybe two weeks of a developer's time. Luna: So the barrier to entry is low. A brand could prototype this in a weekend if they have basic automation. Lucas: I'd say a week, but yeah — it's not a six-figure project. And the ROI was clear: the six-month increase in click-throughs translated to about a twelve percent lift in overall revenue from the email channel. Their marketing director told me the program paid for itself in the first three months. Luna: Let me push back a little, though. Doesn't this risk training subscribers to only engage for points? What happens when the novelty wears off and they realize the points only unlock discounts they might have gotten anyway? Lucas: That's the 'pointification' trap — you're exactly right. If the only reward is a coupon, you're basically running a loyalty program with extra steps. Willow & Ash addressed that in two ways. First, they made the Tier Five reward experiential, not transactional: a personalized video from the founder thanking them by name, plus early access to new product drops. No discount. Second, they made the progress bar reset after six months of inactivity, so lapsed subscribers had to re-engage to keep their points. Luna: The founder video is a nice touch — it's high-perceived-value but low-cost. And the reset creates a natural re-engagement trigger without a separate 'we miss you' campaign. Lucas: Exactly. That reset email — 'Your progress bar will reset in 14 days unless you take an action' — had a 62 percent open rate and a 28 percent click-through. Way higher than their standard re-engagement emails, which had been hovering around 15 percent click-through. Luna: Okay, so the mechanics are solid. But I want to go back to something you said at the top — this came from a listener. Is Willow & Ash willing to share more details? Could our listeners reach out to them? Lucas: The marketing director agreed to be named — her name is Priya Sharma — but asked that I not share her direct email publicly. She did say if any listener wants a one-page summary of their trigger logic, they can email the show and I'll forward it. I'll put that in the show notes. Luna: Good. And speaking of the show — Lucas, I know we don't do breaks, but I want to say something. We've been doing this podcast for over two years now, ad-free, and that's only possible because of listeners who chip in. If today's episode saved you even an hour of testing ideas that don't work, it's worth the price of a coffee. Lucas: Yeah, honestly. The amount of thought and research that goes into each episode — we do it because we love it, but listener support is what keeps the show independent. If this episode sparked an idea you're going to try, you can find the donation link at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, no perks — just a way to say 'this was worth it.' Luna: Exactly. And we mean that — the show stays free either way. Okay, back to gamification. One thing I haven't asked: did they A/B test the progress bar against a control? Because I'd want to know how much of that lift was the bar itself versus the fact that they reduced email volume and focused content. Lucas: They did run a three-month A/B test. The control group got the old email program — weekly newsletter plus monthly promo — with no progress bar. The test group got the merged weekly email with the bar. After three months, the test group had a 34 percent higher click-through and 18 percent lower churn. So the bar itself was responsible for most of the lift, not just the consolidation. Luna: That's convincing. And the fact that they published the results internally — Priya must have been thrilled to present that to the C-suite. Lucas: She said the CEO's reaction was: 'Why didn't we do this three years ago?' Which I think is the highest praise a marketing program can get. Luna: I'm already thinking about how to adapt this for a B2B SaaS context — maybe progress toward a free consultation or a case study unlock. The framework seems portable. Lucas: It is. The key is to pick a metric that matters to your business — not just opens and clicks, but actions that correlate with lifetime value. For Willow & Ash, a purchase at Tier Two had a 40 percent higher average order value than a first purchase. That's the real win. Luna: Forty percent higher AOV. That's the kind of number that gets budget approved for the next project. Lucas: Exactly. So if you're thinking about gamifying your email program, start with one simple mechanic — a single progress bar tied to one reward — and test it for three months. You don't need five tiers on day one.