Sole Mates: How Pilothouse Helped a Designer Shoe Company Increase Email Deliverability, Performance and Customer Retention
About the Brand
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 had grown substantially — yet hadn't managed to find growth strategies for improving their deliverability, campaign and flow performance, or customer retention, or for growing their mailable list.
Summary of Results
First six months of the partnership, compared to the same period the year prior (YoY):
The Kickoff
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 to the desired level, so 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 had opened a Journee email. It is extremely important that customers can easily recognize the unique design elements and branding of a company — and 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 as 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 effectively hone Journee's messaging and create strong 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% 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.
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What Changed
Alongside the numbers, the partnership delivered consistent designs, strong deliverability, high click-through rates and high conversion rates.
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 — orders placed brand-wide were up 80% YoY in Q4.
Strong segmentation allowed us to expand their mailable audience reach without hurting our sending reputation, ensuring we stayed in the inbox while 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 it's been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
