Case Study: FAE

FAE is an international fashion label producing contemporary women’s swimwear. Their aspirational branding celebrates the female form with cheeky cuts and luxury fabrics.

Before contacting us, FAE had already grown their social media following into the hundreds of thousands with plenty of excellent, original content. But there was a need to help convert more of these fans into paying customers.

One of FAE’s most underutilised channels was email. While they were beginning to collect email addresses and use MailChimp to send campaigns to their email list, they were yet to put any automation in place. They were becoming reliant on store-wide sales to create hype and, as a result, were at risk of cheapening the perception of their premium brand.

We set out to build some more effective capture points on the FAE website, and create more targeted touch points and opportunities for potential customers to convert.

DATA CAPTURE

Our first port of call was to build up FAE’s email subscriber base. To do so, we implemented a series of new capture forms on their website – including an email subscription header bar, a ‘Refer a Friend’ landing page, and several targeted popups that appeared at different stages of the customer journey.

DOTMAILER IMPLEMENTATION

FAE’s branding is extremely visual. Like most fashion labels, they rely heavily on beautiful photography to market their products. From analysing social media engagement, we also knew that FAE’s audience responded incredibly well to highly personalised content.

For these reasons, we recommended a change from their existing email marketing platform to Dotmailer. This would allow us to:

• Make the most of Dotmailer’s flexible campaign editing tools;
• Better meet the needs of each individual through advanced personalisation; and,
• Create extensive marketing automations based on a wide variety of triggers.

The transition to Dotmailer was relatively simple, and we immediately identified three key opportunities for automation.

WELCOME SERIES

Once a potential lead subscribed, we wanted to immediately add them to a Welcome series. This would educate them on the FAE philosophy with branded content, and nurture them towards their first purchase straight away.

ABANDONED CART SERIES

By integrating Shopify with Dotmailer, it was easy to detect when a customer had added a product to their cart but not gone ahead and completed their purchase. Knowing these leads were ripe for retargeting, we implemented an automated abandoned cart recovery series, to help nudge the customer towards conversion.

The three-part series encouraged the customer to complete their purchase through compelling content and increasingly attractive incentives. Customers who went ahead and completed their purchase were automatically removed from the series.

BIRTHDAY SERIES

To capitalise on FAE’s personal tone and highly engaged audience, we implemented a birthday automation series. This series provided the customer with a discount code for their birthday, and reminded them when it was close to expiring. Those who used the code before their birthday would still receive a Happy Birthday email, with a personal note asking how they liked their new swimsuit.

In the three months since implementation, our data capture tactics have increased FAE’s subscriber base by more than 30%. Email now makes up almost 15% of FAE’s website traffic, and has a conversion rate of 5%.

The drastic increase in personalised touch points throughout the customer journey has also impacted FAE’s customer loyalty. In just three months, the number of repeat customers has increased 29%.

In the first month after implementation, the Welcome Series had an incredibly strong open rate; over 40%. This resulted in a 7% click-through rate and a huge level of engagement and sales with their new email subscribers.

The Abandoned Cart Series had an even stronger performance – recovering almost 7% of total carts and generating thousands in added revenue.