By automating its email segmentation with Optimove, Adore Me has more than doubled its number of active shoppers.

An abundance of new customers, attracted by a barrage of online ads and cable TV spots, was creating a welcome problem for Josselin Petit-Hoang, head of customer relationship management at online lingerie manufacturer and retailer Adore Me.

“The number of existing customers kept growing and growing so we couldn’t address all those customers the same way,” he says, though he declines to say how many customers Adore Me added. More customers meant more email addresses that the company could send out marketing messages to, yet Adore Me recognized that a message that worked for one type of shopper wouldn’t resonate with another.

Adore Me wanted to do a better job of segmenting and personalizing its campaigns. But segmenting campaigns using Adore Me’s existing systems was a labor-intensive process wherein Petit-Hoang would have to manually create specialized lists.

In January, the company started working with customer loyalty and retention platform Optimove to improve and automate its email segmentation. Optimove connects with a company’s customer relationship management system to help it better segment its email lists by customer behaviors and not on typical features such as gender, age or ZIP code, allowing Petit-Hoang to target messages to customers who are most likely to respond to those messages by opening the emails and subsequently buying. Petit-Hoang

Adore Me A/B tests all of its email campaigns to get a handle on the revenue each campaign generates before rolling out the campaign to a larger segment of its email list.

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“Some customers purchase more than others, some are younger, some are older, and we cannot treat them the same way,” Petit-Hoang says. “We needed something that would give us the opportunity to personalize the campaigns that we run so we could send different campaigns to different segments of customers.”

Petit-Hoang says Adore Me has seen noticeable improvements in its email marketing campaigns over the past 10 months.

The number of active customers, which Adore Me defines as existing customers who have bought within the past three months, has grown by 2.3 times year over year in that 10-month period.

Petit-Hoang attributes that increase, in part, to its emails that prompt shoppers who haven’t bought recently to buy again.

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“We are personalizing the incentive based on who you are,” he says. “If you are an active customer, you get an incentive to make you buy more. If you are inactive customer, we’re not trying to increase your order, we’re just trying to get you to shop.” For example, shoppers who have given Adore Me their email address but have never purchased are targeted with a discount on their first purchase, while repeat shoppers are offered incentives aimed at getting them to buy more.

Not only has the number of active customers grown, so too has the number of campaigns Adore Me sends.

When Petit-Hoang had to manually segment his email lists, Adore Me sent five email campaigns per day to lists that were broadly segmented. Now, armed with a tool that allows him to automate his email campaign segmentation, Petit-Hoang sends about 20 email campaigns per day to more specific lists.

For example, customers who unsubscribe from Adore Me’s VIP membership automatically receive an email informing them that they can shop on an as-you-go basis and not subscribe to the monthly service, he says. VIP members visit a virtual showroom that features products based on their sizes and preferences and from there decide to shop or skip the monthly offering. VIP customers can skip as many months as they want, but if they forget to select “shop” or “skip,” Adore Me charges a refundable $39.95 credit that applies to any products on the site and does not expire.

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Emails automatically send to former VIPs five, 10 and 15 days after they opt out, and they bring back more than a quarter of VIPs with a 26% reactivation rate, Petit-Hoang says. “Before, it was very manual. I had five segments and I couldn’t change them,” he says. “With Optimove, I have a list of all of my customers in the software with hundreds of customer attributes and it’s very easy to create segments. I can do it myself without the help of any IT guy.”

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