Four well-exe­cut­ed email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns in 2014 tar­get­ed read­ers when they were ready for con­ver­sion and over­whelmed read­ers with val­ue.

From an aban­doned cart cam­paign that aid­ed in 25 per­cent increased email rev­enue to rein­vent­ing email mar­ket­ing to old lists, these email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns hold lessons for all types of busi­ness­es. Get ready to be inspired.

1. Tim Ferriss Amasses 300K Email Addresses Before Sending a Single Email – Then Grows It 60K More

Tim Fer­riss, author of “The 4‑Hour Work­week,” angel investor and high­ly praised busi­ness and lifestyle pod­cast­er and blog­ger, nev­er used email mar­ket­ing before this year. Fer­riss put up his book web­site and blog in 2006 and 2007, respec­tive­ly. Each had a stan­dard email cap­ture for vis­i­tors to enter their email address to get more from him. It was­n’t until August of this year that Fer­riss checked to see how many email address­es had accu­mu­lat­ed: 300,000.

He set out to use email as a test­ing envi­ron­ment, and a way to reach fans where oth­er chan­nels were becom­ing crowd­ed – like Face­book’s throt­tling of organ­ic reach for brand pages. Fer­riss sends emails once a week or so, and nev­er takes email best prac­tices on faith.

“Up to this point in time, and I might test this, but every blog post that I sent out has been put in its entire­ty in the email. That vio­lates a lot of best prac­tices that I’ve been told I must fol­low, for click-through rate and seek­ing adver­tis­ing and blah, blah, blah,” Fer­riss told Mar­ket­ing­Sh­er­pa.

Before Fer­riss ever sent an email, he invit­ed feed­back from blog read­ers, the very audi­ence who would be receiv­ing emails. He wrote a post titled, “Tim Fer­riss Rethinks Email,” where he laid out the email pro­gram, promis­ing VIP sta­tus, access to live Q&As, free stuff, and no spam or b.s. Opt­ing out is also dead easy, with a promi­nent unsub­scribe.

“We almost tempt­ed peo­ple. We prac­ti­cal­ly encour­aged peo­ple to unsub­scribe, to min­i­mize headache for every­one,” Fer­riss said. “It’s not about the size of your audi­ence, the size of your list. It’s about the size of your qual­i­fied, inter­est­ed audi­ence or list.”

The results: 60,000 new sub­scribers since Fer­ris­s’s announce­ment blog posts, and emails that see a 35 per­cent aver­age open rate.

2. Product Hunt Grows Email List Into 2 Million Website Visits a Month

The prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions site, Prod­uct Hunt, curates apps, web­sites and tech gad­gets, where users can vote dis­cov­er­ies up in Red­dit style. Since its Jan­u­ary launch, the site’s traf­fic has grown by 50 per­cent every month. Prod­uct Hunt actu­al­ly start­ed as an email list by the site’s founder Ryan Hoover, who col­lect­ed prod­ucts and sites, and shared them with some friends.

As more peo­ple want­ed in on the habit-form­ing emails, it became clear to Hoover that he was on to some­thing. In an inter­view with First Round Review, Hoover explained that when he decid­ed to build a site, the email list was the most impor­tant asset he had, and would be the spring­board for dri­ving traf­fic. Notable mar­ket­ing tac­tics that make Prod­uct Hunt emails so addic­tive include upvotes of list­ed prod­ucts, pow­er­ful social proof, and deliv­er­ing on the promise of fresh dai­ly con­tent.

The results: In Novem­ber, Vero report­ed that Prod­uct Hunt had 70,000 email sub­scribers, and that emails were respon­si­ble for 2 mil­lion month­ly vis­its to the web­site.

3. Kentucky Derby Turns Mystery List Into Major Asset

The Ken­tucky Der­by is the longest con­sec­u­tive-run sport­ing event in the coun­try. 2015 will mark the 141st run. When Kate Ellis joined the lega­cy horse race as mar­ket­ing ana­lyst last year, she found they had a mys­tery email list. “I was kind of thrown … into man­ag­ing our email mar­ket­ing, and we had all these lists, just left­over lists,” Ellis told Mar­ket­ing­Sh­er­pa. “Not sure where they came from, who the peo­ple were or what they’re inter­est­ed in.”

By divid­ing con­tent into buck­ets and pay­ing close atten­tion to which sub­scribers were inter­est­ed in what fea­tures, she was able to learn more about the peo­ple behind the email address­es, and give them the kind of con­tent they were look­ing for.

For a three-month peri­od run­ning up to the 2014 Ken­tucky Der­by in May, every issue of The Der­by Insid­er week­ly emails fea­tured three types of con­tent: equine-focused con­tent about the hors­es in the event, lifestyle-focused con­tent cov­er­ing the fash­ion and par­ty scene of the Ken­tucky Der­by, and wager­ing-relat­ed con­tent like expert picks for the top horse geared for the bet­ters.

Seg­ment­ing the list and tar­get­ing the con­tent for each, Ellis and her team learned lessons like, “that might be true of this seg­ment, but what we’re learn­ing over here is that there’s anoth­er seg­ment that’s inter­est­ed in some­thing else, or we’re learn­ing that that seg­ment might actu­al­ly be a lot larg­er than we think it is,” Ellis said.

The results: An aver­age read rate of 37.35 per­cent, an aver­age click-through rate of 19.44 per­cent, and a reduced opt-out rate of 64 per­cent. On top of the email per­for­mance, wager­ing on the Ken­tucky Der­by grew 1 per­cent, and the web­site saw 19 per­cent more vis­its.

Derek Hard­ing, founder and CEO of Innovyx, says this cam­paign “is reflec­tive of the sit­u­a­tion in which so many mar­keters find them­selves.”

Refer­ring to the sit­u­a­tion that Ellis found her­self in, Hard­ing says he believed it end­ed well because Ellis was “method­i­cal in her approach and strate­gic in her exe­cu­tion. She start­ed by tak­ing stock of what she had; know­ing what you have to work with and mak­ing the best use of those assets is vital – and she set about learn­ing what she did­n’t yet know. She also tack­led the basics first.”

Hard­ing adds that while the “con­tent is king” state­ment has been uttered so often that it’s now a cliché, “it’s also very true,” and that Ellis start­ed with the con­tent.

“Rather than going straight to a com­plex behav­ioral approach, she start­ed with good con­tent and a cal­en­dar, then added in small amounts of seg­men­ta­tion based on behav­ior as the learn­ing accrued.”

Hard­ing men­tions that the one thing he may have done dif­fer­ent­ly is the cre­ative side. “The cre­ative is nev­er men­tioned in the case, and with good rea­son, it’s not strong. But even that goes to show: you don’t have to do every­thing per­fect­ly in order to be suc­cess­ful.”

4. Office Supply Company Grows Revenue 25% with Abandoned Cart, Time to Reorder and Coupon Campaigns

JAM Paper & Enve­lope had real­ly neglect­ed the email chan­nel since jump­ing into ecom­merce with a web­site in 2007. Until this year, the com­pa­ny’s email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns con­sist­ed of week­ly to month­ly batch-blast emails to every­one on its list. In 2014 the com­pa­ny launched a series of strate­gic cam­paigns to tar­get seg­ments, and moved from man­u­al­ly upload­ing emails to an auto­mat­ic email signup process on its web­site.

Accord­ing to Andrew Jacobs, JAM Paper Direc­tor of Ecom­merce, in an inter­view with Mar­ket­ing­Sh­er­pa, the com­pa­ny’s email pro­gram went from one email a week in 2013 to 40 to 60 emails in any giv­en week today, includ­ing aban­doned cart emails sent out an hour-and-a-half after aban­don­ment, and time to reorder emails that see up to 50 per­cent con­ver­sion rate.

The results: JAM Paper’s email rev­enue is up 25 per­cent from last year. The aban­doned cart series had an aver­age open rate of 31 per­cent, 12 per­cent click-through rate and 23 per­cent con­ver­sion rate. Since the “time to reorder” email series began, it’s had an aver­age of 45 per­cent con­ver­sion rate.

What email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns do you think real­ly deliv­ered in 2014?