Email Marketing
What Tahan's customers actually wanted to read
The story
Tahan Outdoors is eight years old and close to a household name in Malaysia. It began as a marketplace for white-labelled kit, then rebranded a couple of years ago after a hard look at what it wanted to be: a brand that serves the outdoor community with genuinely good gear, not just one that moves units. The position it landed on is specific and true, gear built for the tropics, the heat and rain its customers actually walk into.
The inbox never got the memo. Emails went out three or four times a week, nine in ten about a promotion, a clearance or a discount, the same message to everyone because there was no segmentation to speak of. Open rates were sliding, clicks with them.
We didn't start by making a better-looking email. That would have been treating the symptom. We ran a founder decode session instead, to understand what he wants this brand to be, and then measured the distance between that and what the emails were actually saying.
The discounting wasn't wrong, it was doing the wrong job. People like an incentive, and a brand has stock to clear. But a discount closes a sale. It does not give anyone a reason to want the thing in the first place. So we wrote three hypotheses and tested them in market.
One: if the subject line stops announcing the discount and instead opens a story, curiosity lifts the open rate. Two: Tahan's people are practical, so spending the email on specs and what the gear actually does should lift purchases. Three: many subscribers are new to the outdoors and unsure who to trust, so guides, checklists and how-tos from a founder who has done the trips should earn both the open and the order.
All three held. Customers wanted more from Tahan than a sale, and when we sent less, to better-chosen people, every number moved the right way.
The gap
The list had been built by a discount brand and was still being spoken to like one: three to four sends a week, nine in ten promotional, the same message to everyone. 46% of subscribers were unengaged, there were three segments in total, and no test results anyone could learn from.
What we built
- A founder decode session first, to find the distance between the brand's position and the way the emails spoke.
- Three tested content routes: story-led subject lines, spec and benefit emails for the practical buyer, and guides, checklists and how-tos for people new to the outdoors.
- 22 segments, so each send reaches people with a reason to read it, and fewer sends overall.
- Story and value first in the body, with the discount kept as the closer rather than the opener.
- Subject line and send time tests, a campaign planner, and a monthly review that feeds each result into the next month's calendar.
What moved
The work
Two campaigns from the new programme.
