Boot Barn intelligently segments customers to send billions of 1:1 emails

How Boot Barn creates personalized content at the contact level and unifies data within one platform to create a best-in-class customer experience.

Boot Barn boots
Company

Boot Barn is a leading retailer of western wear and work-related footwear brands. Across its four major retail brands—Boot Barn, Shepler, Country Outfitter, and Idyllwind—the company is in the top 30 ecommerce sites, while also operating more than 200 physical retail sites across 33 states.

bootbarn.com

With more than 6.5 million contacts across its four major retail brands, Boot Barn’s primary method of communicating with customers and subscribers is via email. As such, they found themselves in the market for a cross-channel marketing technology partner that could help them keep pace with a number of key growth goals:

  • Enable tailored cross-channel messaging, including SMS, email, and push notifications
  • Provide a holistic view of customers across all touchpoints and channels, at a 1:1 personalized level
  • The ability to segment customers both within and across its suite of brands
  • The ability to easily integrate across its existing tech stack

In addition to its performance-oriented goals, Boot Barn was also driven by timing: its previous messaging platform had to be completely phased out in 2022. While that timing put pressure on the company to find a platform that could be onboarded quickly and easily, its innovative, forward-thinking marketing team was already looking for a solution that could also meet the needs of their growing vision for their digital marketing efforts.

Boot barn boots
"There’s a perfect marriage between what we’re looking to do with offers and what Cordial does. With over 6.5 million contacts, plus the ability to segment our audiences like never before, we are going to be sending a ton of highly personalized outreach. We’re potentially looking at something like 2 to 3 billion emails a year."

John Hazen, Chief Digital Officer

When choosing their new cross-channel marketing partner, the Boot Barn team essentially narrowed their choice to two platforms: Cordial and one of the “big four” legacy marketing clouds. Both platforms were weighed against a number of criteria including superior data management and analysis capabilities, the ability to create relevant marketing campaigns without the need for technical expertise, full tech stack integration, and a strong onboarding and customer support process.

As a well-established retailer, the company had a large amount of customer and business data from online and offline sources, but lacked the ability to use it to inform their marketing strategy. With Cordial, robust APIs provide quick, easy bi-directional data transfer, making Boot Barn more agile, from strategic decision making to triggering actions and outreach based on custom triggers.

Boot Barn’s prior platform required the support of substantial internal and external technical resources and lengthy, costly development cycles to build marketing campaigns. Since adopting Cordial, the company’s marketing team is now able to be self-sufficient in building cross-channel segments, orchestrations, and message templates, with every aspect designed to be scalable.

A key piece of the puzzle for Boot Barn is the ability to plug into the entire suite of tools used by their team, with simple integrations that provide full tech stack integration with bi-directional syncing and without data loss.

A strong onboarding process and support were important to Boot Barn to ensure that the project was not only kicked off well but that the entire Boot Barn team was comfortable with the solution and had access to expert help in the event of an issue or difficulty fully leveraging the tools.

In this AWS Partner Spotlight, see how Boot Barn leverages Cordial to segment customers for billions of 1:1 emails, personalize content at the contact level, and unify data within one platform to create a best-in-class customer experience: