Fashion & Apparel

Eddie Bauer saves over $500K annually and drives significant growth

How Cordial helps Eddie Bauer streamline their business, while reimagining their messaging strategies.

$500K

Annual savings in tech costs

7%

Increase in average order value

18pt

Higher conversion rate

Company

Eddie Bauer is an American clothing store chain for outdoor adventurers that’s been in business for over 100 years.

eddiebauer.com

Industry

Fashion & Apparel

Key Channels Used

Email SMS Mobile Wallet/Push Open Channel

Being in business for over 100 years, Eddie Bauer has become an American staple for outdoor adventurers. They’ve built a loyal customer base and continue to inspire people to get outside and enjoy nature, creating an outdoor culture that’s open to anyone.

The challenge

As Eddie Bauer’s customer base grew, it was getting more difficult and expensive to manage all of their campaigns and data across multiple partners. Additionally, they wanted to increase the personalization of their loyalty certificates for Eddie Bauer’s Adventure Rewards® program. It was time for Eddie Bauer to find a partner who could more efficiently use their data to create better cross-channel campaigns, faster and level up their loyalty certificate campaigns.

Eddie Bauer turned to Cordial to streamline their cross-channel marketing solutions, including SMS/MMS, email, personalization, and data services. By moving to Cordial, Eddie Bauer was able to go from three platforms down to one. By simplifying their tech stack, they saved over half a million dollars and could more quickly and accurately execute their campaigns. Furthermore, Cordial’s data platform—backed by our hands-on solutions team—had incredible flexibility to help Eddie Bauer seamlessly integrate with several of their preferred data partners to consistently deliver on their goals.

Two years into the Cordial partnership, Eddie Bauer made a conscious decision to pivot away from an “always on sale” promotional strategy to a more precise, personalized promotional approach to increase conversions and margin. As their data strategy and customer engagement partner, Cordial was there every step of the way to consult with Eddie Bauer and help them get it right. Eddie Bauer had a strong data set, and in Cordial, a messaging platform that helped them increase relevance and deliver the right promotion to individuals based on their interests and behaviors.

The solution

Together, Eddie Bauer and Cordial analyzed data and built new integrations so Eddie Bauer could talk to their customers based on their tighter, more strategic promotional plan. Eddie Bauer looked to Cordial to help develop a robust, strategic roadmap with innovative messaging programs to help them get the most out of the platform and drive growth for their business. Below are four examples of net-new, customer-centric promotions that were built leveraging Cordial’s technology:

Eddie Bauer used Cordial Architect to isolate a sale-centric audience and sent them a promotional message that featured full-price items and a simple 50% off any one item offer. The offers were managed as Cordial Supplements and issued as single-use promo codes to help Eddie Bauer effectively manage their promotional budget. Overall, this approach drove an increase in conversion and average order value (AOV) leading their team to repeat it several times throughout the year.
Eddie Bauer ran a promotion to drive store traffic rewarding those who spent a certain amount in-store with a free backpack. Eddie Bauer used Cordial Supplements to upload store details and personalize the emails for each customer with the nearest store name, address, and “get directions’ functionality. They tested two different dollar amount thresholds to see if they could get a higher value purchase with the promotion.
Eddie Bauer ran a Buy Now ($75 purchase) to Save an Extra 20% Later. Again, featuring full price content with a threshold to save. They strategically ran this in a slow end-of-season timeframe with the redemption period happening when new seasonal products loaded. They used Cordial’s Podium orchestration to trigger the unique 20% off codes for customers who met the purchase threshold, set up reminder messaging for customers who didn’t, and reported on customer redemption.
To engage brand loyalists, Eddie Bauer did a lot of work to incorporate their Adventure Rewards program into routine messaging. Cordial built automations from 14 different data sources by integrating with a handful of vendors to dynamically render a loyalty rewards amount, expiration date, unique barcode, the nearest store address, and a map of the store location—for each customer. Cordial delivered this level of personalization in email and SMS and even leveraged the data for paid search and direct mail.

"We’ve reimagined our loyalty customer messaging strategy with Cordial. Using all of our data sources, we’re sending relevant messages to our most valuable customers, on a 1:1 basis, about the things they care about most. With this level of personalization, we’ve seen a major increase in engagement across the board."

Angela Gow, Director, Digital Merchandising and Email

The result

Using the narrower promotional strategy paid off in engagement, site visits, and conversion for Eddie Bauer. They saw meaningful increases in revenue year-over-year for all of 2021, especially during the quarters when they were testing these newer more brand-centric tactics. AOV increased 7%, their conversion rate grew by 18 points, and the average purchase per message increased 8%. More importantly, they were able to add these new tactics to their roadmap, with plans to include them in future automated journeys and triggers.

Eddie Bauer made the most of their tech investment by tapping into Cordial’s thorough knowledge of the platform and Eddie Bauer’s business. To further increase agility on their team, Eddie Bauer partnered with Cordial for full-service program management support, saving them 33% a year in production services. In doing so, Cordial has been able to reduce turn time in half from six to three days and improve the accuracy of their campaigns to 99.9%. Additionally, Cordial continues to provide strategic support to Eddie Bauer, building out their analytics and messaging roadmap to drive ongoing improvements in conversion and revenue.

Want to learn more? Watch Christy Parrish, Cordial, Director of Client Success and Angela Gow, Eddie Bauer, Director of Digital Merchandising and Email speak at the ANA Email Evolution Conference about Eddie Bauer’s journey in leaving discounts behind: