Online activewear retailer explains how an email marketing transformation has driven up engagement, conversion and customer consistency
Simply switching email marketing platforms has seen online activewear retailer, Abi and Joseph, increase its subscriber base by 66 per cent and lift engagement rates by 12 per cent.
At a time where offering personalised experiences and communications can make or break the customer relationship, Abi and Joseph found itself limited to sending bulk emails out to its entire database without any marketing automation. Danni Cook, Marketing and graphic design, said the women's activewear retailer really wanted to provide its customers with the personalised experience they deserved, but couldn’t.
“There was no syncing our email marketing platform with the back end system of Magento. Every time we had a new contact, we’d have to upload it manually. There was no automation or customer data syncing, making it hard to create that personalised experience,” Cook told CMO.
“If someone signed up on the website, it was fine, but our Win a Wardrobe competition contacts included 10,000 entries per competition, twice a year, and all those contacts would have to uploaded manually in the old system.
“When it came to producing campaigns, it was just designing an email, linking to a page on website and sending it to our customer database, which was 60,000 contacts back then. No automation, no programming, no dynamic content – it was literally just a bulk send.”
Enter dotmailer, and Cook couldn’t be more pleased with the results so early in the transition. The abandoned cart campaign has been a particular success with a click to open rate of 35 per cent, and the recent ‘Win a Wardrobe’ competition resulted in 11,700 entries and managed to collect 8500 new subscribers.
The ability to automatically transfer customer data into its database also helped the retailer to build a contact list exceeding 100,000 subscribers, an increase of 40,000 contacts since migrating to dotmailer. This has not only reduced the costs associated with its email marketing, it has allowed the emails and customer journey to develop consistency.
Other notable numbers include receive peak open-rates across email marketing of 24 per cent, a 12 per cent increase from the previous platform.
“Statistics show Australia has the highest abandoned cart rate in the world, so it was crazy we were not targeting those people. That was one of the biggest challenges for us with the old platform,” Cook said.
“About a year ago, we decided to do an entire website revamp, and as part of that we looked at the best platform for both ecommerce and for email marketing. It opened our eyes to see what was available for us. Dotmailer was recommended by our IT company.”
The implementation got off to a rocky start as Abi and Joseph was simultaneously changing to Magento2.
“We were going to hold off until Magento2 was running, but we then decided to do it straight away, because dotmailer brought attention to the sales and automation we were missing out on. So we did it together, and ultimately, it didn’t take long at all,” Cook explained.
“We saw a difference straight away. We ran our biannual Win and Wardrobe campaign, and we got so many new subscribers. We also found we 30,000 customers’ data in Magento we hadn’t been utilising. That’s a lot of customers.
“Previously, any competitions or surveys required the employment of an IT company to create an entire landing page. But this time I could set up the entire program through dotmailer, it was a really simple process.”
Building on its early success, Abi and Joseph plans to implement a new birthday email campaign, with data currently being collected through its newsletter sign-up forms, and further its marketing automation to build on what’s already been achieved with a re-engagement program and post purchase cross sell.
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