Sole Mates: How Pilothouse Tripled Email Revenue for a Designer Shoe Company
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Introduction
Journee Collection has been carefully and creatively designing “shoes with your journey in mind” for years. They celebrate body positivity and self-love with comfortable and versatile products tailored to all sizes.
Since their humble beginnings in 2001, Journee has grown substantially – yet hadn’t managed to find growth strategies for improving their deliverability, campaign and flow performance, customer retention or growing their mailable list.
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Summary of Results
The Kickoff
Journee approached us, determined to grow their mailable list and improve their designs, deliverability, campaign and flow performance, and customer retention. We immediately noticed they had a serious deliverability issue – they were not in the inbox.
During the kickoff, we focused on creating high-quality templates as well as fully re-warming their IP to get them back in the inbox. A lot of their previous flows weren't performing at the desired level. We did a full flow build-out with updated templates and triggers.
The Strategy
Full Re-Warming of Their IP
First off, we needed to get Journee back into prospective customers’ inboxes. We focused on creating consistent designs that aligned with the website to make it clear to customers that they have opened a Journee email. It is extremely important that customers can easily recognize the unique design elements and branding of a company. This is exactly what we did for Journee.
Segmentation Strategy and Testing
Constantly changing segments during the earlier stages after the re-warm kept our mailable list as big and healthy as possible.
Email/SMS Copy A/B Testing
Implementing different concepts, templates, and copy language across Email and SMS, then split testing them helped us to effectively hone Journee’s messaging and create strong ROI, Conversion rates, and CTRs.
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Time Testing
We tested different days and times for campaign sends until we could zero in on the strongest ones and implemented 50% of the tests for all core funnel support flows to see which had the highest conversion rate.
Improving Customer Reactivation Automation
Next, we focused on retaining previous customers who had fallen off due to deliverability and included flow triggers to reach out and pull them back into the mailable list.
Rebuilding Loyalty
Lastly, we needed to rebuild loyalty flows and campaign concepts to elevate the programs and create long-time customers. Holding biweekly meetings with loyalty reps helped us stay ahead of the trends.
Results
Compared to the same six-month period the year prior, through a successful partnership, the team at Journee has benefited from the following:
- Improved template design and consistency
- Strong deliverability
- Higher click-through rates
- Higher conversion rates
- SMS ROI: 11.14%
6-month comparison
The Outcome
A huge factor in Journee’s success was cross-platform collaboration. This allowed all Pilothouse channels to work together to help grow their mailable list and customer retention while improving Journee’s overall performance.
Our approach led to significant growth for the company’s email (an 80% increase in orders placed YOY as a brand for Q4). Strong segmentation allowed us to expand their mailable audience reach without hurting our sending reputation to ensure we stayed in the inbox as well as sending higher quality emails. With creative testing (of both copy and design), we established a brand voice and design style that really resonated with their audience – ultimately leading to higher conversion.
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I was very, very apprehensive, of taking our Email out of house, and giving it over to Pilothouse. But, I can gladly say its been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
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