How a digital-native retail brand uses real-time data and triggered messages to build a loyal customer base and dominate the fashion industry.
Net-new triggered campaigns created
Revenue per email from triggered vs. broadcast emails
annual cross-channel revenue
Revolve is the next-generation fashion retailer for Millennial and Generation Z consumers, a trusted, premium lifestyle brand, and a go-to online source for discovery and inspiration.
Since 2003, the digital-first brand has leveraged customer data, digital channels, and analytics to transform the shopping experience and dominate the fashion industry. Propelled by a dominant presence on social media, Revolve’s strategies garnered them one of the most successful IPOs of 2019 with a market value of $1.2 billion. Now carrying over 500 of the world’s most coveted brands in men’s and women’s apparel, shoes, and accessories, the company is outpacing fierce competitors and setting the bar high for data-driven marketing.
In 2016, Revolve discovered that revenue per email had been declining, as email was becoming more and more competitive. Since email revenue was solely driven by list growth and increased deliveries, they knew that maintaining the status quo would result in revenue loss—even with a strong acquisition strategy. Tasked with improving email efficiency, the Revolve marketing team identified an opportunity to course-correct.
Revolve became frustrated with the limitations of their email service provider. They had found that segmented emails to targeted groups of customers were performing much better than the broadcast emails sent to all subscribers, but the marketing team had no way of getting customer data in and out of their email service provider. Executing any of their automated campaign ideas required significant engineering resources and took months to deploy. The race was on to deliver more personalized, highly relevant content, and the team knew they needed a new platform to enable them to quickly execute and test automated campaigns and truly engage in one-to-one personalization.
Lucy Zhu, Director of Retention Marketing
Total Email Revenue From Triggered Emails
Mobile App Subscribers
After exhaustive research, Revolve turned to Cordial in early 2017 to further personalize messaging for their customers, create advanced segmentation to support revenue goals, and trigger email campaigns based on accessible, real-time data.
Within six months, Revolve’s marketing team developed and launched 19 triggered campaigns based on real-time customer signals. These campaigns were entirely automated and personalized based on behaviors like cart and browse abandonment, or events such as birthdays and anniversaries. Revolve also used a combination of complex business and customer data to deploy personal, relevant marketing messages—for example, low inventory on favorite items or new arrivals from favorite brands. Despite accounting for a small percentage of total send volume, these triggered emails generated a disproportionately high 20% of total email revenue. By using key customer data to trigger messages at the right time, Revolve maintains an average order value of $279 (nearly three times the average fashion apparel retailer), with 79% of merchandise sold at full price. Revolve’s messaging strategy allows them to fuel revenue with personal, relevant customer interactions instead of relying on discounting.
With the addition of triggered campaigns, Revolve was able to grow total email revenue on an absolute basis in less than a year, without adding resources to create and execute each send. Thanks to Cordial, the team was able to launch automated triggered campaigns that delivered timely, relevant messages to customers, without requiring ongoing resources. Created once and sent an unlimited number of times, Revolve’s initial triggered emails contributed an average of 8x revenue per delivery, equivalent to a projected $11.7 million annual revenue within eight months of using Cordial.
The Revolve team also saw an opportunity to personalize their transactional emails (order confirmations and shipping notifications). Historically, these messages were impersonal aside from order information, and maintained low engagement rates. Revolve transformed these otherwise stagnant messages by incorporating content based on real-time data feeds in Cordial. Within two weeks of migrating from their legacy ESP, the team saw a 17% increase in engagement rates by including dynamic, relevant content into these transactional emails.
Prior to using Cordial, Revolve was searching for a better way to send relevant messages to each of their customers. With Enriched-contact supplements, Revolve can now avoid generic emails and text messages. “Cordial’s Supplements allow us to deeply personalize the content within our messages which directly contributes to the revenue performance from our messaging programs.” said Lucy Zhu, Director of Retention, Revolve. “Over $20M in revenue can be attributed to our use of Supplemental data just from triggered messages. It’s even more if you count the impact it has on the personalization we do throughout the rest of our program.”
Campaigns launched since implementation in 2017
Increase in engagement on transactional emails
The Revolve marketing team now has far greater visibility into the data generated by their email campaigns and is constantly testing to optimize. They’re fully empowered to ideate, implement, A/B test, and iterate on every single campaign without assistance from engineering. And email efficiency has increased dramatically since implementing Cordial, even though the team remains incredibly lean.
With the Cordial platform, Revolve has leveraged the power of automations to unlock new levels of customer engagement and revenue growth. In the last five years, they moved from a single automation to 200. Driving a customer-led marketing strategy like this one allows brands to hear what their customers are saying rather than what we want to tell them.
The marketing team Revolve has been using Cordial to deliver personal, relevant, and emotionally intelligent experiences for their customers since 2017, but this is just the beginning. They will continue to raise the bar for fashion retailers—using their proven email strategies to connect with customers across multiple channels like push, in-app, SMS, and more.