Kate’s Clothing used weekly email campaigns, discount offers, linked product banners, post-send reviews and engagement-based segmentation to promote products and reach subscribers. Benchmark Email’s January 6, 2021 case study reports campaign metrics above its stated retail-user averages on opens, clicks and bounce rate, but not unsubscribes. Those are vendor-published figures without the methodology needed to verify the comparison or attribute outcomes to any single tactic.
Why Kate’s Clothing used email marketing
Benchmark Email described Kate’s Clothing as an online alternative-fashion retailer selling gothic, steampunk, vintage and maternity styles. Owner Kate Whitegroatt said the newsletter’s goals were to increase sales, promote products, and share general and exclusive news and updates. At the time of the case study, the retailer had just over 7,000 subscribers; that is a 2021 figure, not a current list size.
Whitegroatt said email let the business link directly to products and use visual banners and discount codes to guide subscribers to its website. That mattered, she said, because some subscribers had joined through the site without engaging with the retailer on social media. She also reported that weekly campaigns contributed substantially to sales and that orders often rose on send days. The case study supplies no order history or causal analysis to test those observations.
What the retailer did in its campaigns
Used discounts and product links
The retailer sent weekly campaigns with varying content, including exclusive discount codes, brand promotions and sale messages. Whitegroatt said discount newsletters performed especially well. One campaign example in the case study paired a discount-led subject line with a visual banner linked to the relevant page on the store’s website.
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Reviewed opens and link activity after sending
A few days after a campaign, the team reviewed opens and link activity to see which links attracted clicks and consider changes for the next send. The case study describes campaign review, not a controlled experiment; it does not establish that a particular subject line, offer or banner caused a result.
Segmented by subscriber engagement
Whitegroatt said the retailer had recently begun grouping subscribers by engagement. Most messages went to the most engaged subscribers, while the team occasionally sent to the full list to try to re-engage less active readers. She reported increased activity and said the approach helped reduce spam marking and unsubscribes, but the case study does not independently verify those effects.
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Changed creative when themes returned
The case study says the retailer varied weekly content and refreshed layouts, banners or wording when it repeated a theme, aiming to keep messages engaging rather than sending identical creative repeatedly.
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For Kate’s Clothing’s latest campaign sent to its full subscriber list, Benchmark Email reported the following figures and compared them with averages it attributed to its retail users in the same 2021 case study:
| Measure | Kate’s Clothing full-list campaign | Benchmark Email retail-user average |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 27.91% | 17.62% |
| Click-through rate | 36.23% | 1.87% |
| Bounce rate | 0.19% | 6.31% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.134% | 0.109% |
In the vendor’s comparison, the campaign’s open and click-through rates were higher, and its bounce rate lower, than the stated retail averages; its unsubscribe rate was higher. The 36.23% click-through figure is reproduced as printed in the case study. The article does not define the metric or explain the unusually large gap between that figure and the 1.87% average, so it should not be reinterpreted as a different measure.
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Benchmark Email’s case study does not report campaign audience size, metric definitions, cohort size, the dates covered by the retail averages or how the figures were calculated. It also offers no independent verification. The numbers therefore describe what the vendor published, not a fully documented apples-to-apples benchmark or proof that segmentation, discounts or another individual tactic produced the results. Read the original case study for its examples and attributions: Benchmark Email’s Kate’s Clothing case study.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the case study can—and cannot—show
The account is useful as a concrete example of how one retailer combined promotions, product links, campaign review and engagement-based targeting. Whitegroatt’s comments explain the business’s rationale and reported experience; they are not independent evidence of causal impact. Because the report dates to January 2021 and gives no current subscriber count, it should not be used to infer the retailer’s present email practices or performance.
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