JOANN completed its migration to Cordial in just 41 days

The challenge

JOANN is the nation’s leading fabric and craft retailer. They have a large product offering and an even larger customer base. They send millions of emails, text messages, and push notifications each day that include unique coupons tailored to their customer’s buying preferences. 

In early 2022, the JOANN marketing team was faced with a significant number of challenges as they tried to optimize their digital marketing efforts and expand into new messaging channels. They were experiencing deliverability issues, had a disjointed view of their data, and were dealing with lengthy production timelines. On top of that, they were under pressure to find a new technology partner who could help them improve their cross-channel messaging as they wanted to transition from their legacy cloud provider before contract renewal.

JOANN has millions of subscribers across three different channels and sends billions of messages per year. They knew they needed a technology partner who could support cross-channel messaging and efficiently process their vast amount of data and messages. They were also looking for a partner who could help them overcome their past deliverability challenges and streamline their day-to-day operations so that their team could focus on more strategic initiatives.

The solution

Cordial provided the advanced data management and cross-channel messaging technology that JOANN was looking for. The JOANN team felt confident that with Cordial’s platform and highly-skilled Client Experience team they could tap into the power of their data and maximize their customer’s brand experiences.

To start, the Cordial team went through a data discovery process with the JOANN team and began organizing and documenting all of their data. This document became a thorough way to detail each of their import and export jobs, the setup of every integration, and every data point being collected. This document is maintained by the Cordial team and is updated each time a new data point is introduced or a new solution is built.  This helps both the JOANN and Cordial teams stay organized and operate more efficiently by providing them a resource that they can reference when onboarding a new team member, or building a new data automation.

After helping JOANN organize their data, the Cordial team turned their focus to JOANN’s messaging templates. Similar to the documentation built around their data, the Cordial team began building a “messaging encyclopedia”. This encyclopedia was combined with the data documentation to create a comprehensive “Integration document” that provides their production team a framework when they want to create new messages in Sculpt, Cordial’s drag-and-drop message builder. This encyclopedia contains documentation on all of their batch and automation messages including audience segments, which Sculpt templates and blocks are being used, the data points being referenced in each block, and an overview of how each block functions (i.e. conditional logic). 

Additionally, Cordial and JOANN worked together to optimize their hosted coupon pages. These hosted pages are sent with every email and contain offers that are unique to each customer based on their browsing and purchasing history. Prior to coming to Cordial, this was a manual and time-consuming process that took their team days to fully assemble. By leveraging one of Cordial’s integration partners, the JOANN team has been able to fully automate this process to deliver dynamic coupons in both a digital and printable format to their customers – elevating the customer experience and driving more purchases. This once cumbersome process is now able to be completed in just a couple of hours.

Once JOANN’s data, messages, and coupons were in order, it was time to begin working with Cordial’s Deliverability team to warm-up their new IP and sending domains. With JOANN’s daily sending volume being in the millions, a typical warm-up plan would entail gradually increasing their daily volume over a 2-3 month period. However, since JOANN’s contract with their previous provider was quickly coming to an end, this warm up needed to be completed faster. On top of that, there were prior deliverability challenges that the Cordial team needed to consider. The Cordial team devised a plan to safely increase their daily volume within the deadline provided including:  

• Running JOANN’s subscribers through an email validation tool to ensure they were only importing high-quality contacts into Cordial
• Monitoring each of JOANN’s IP addresses and their associated engagement metrics throughout the day
• Providing a performance report each morning so they could quickly adjust the plan as needed should they start to see any performance issues
• Informing SpamHaus of JOANN’s new sending domains, IPs, and mailing practices to help mitigate issues during their ramp period.