LPD Make It Rain Using SMS Data Capture For Black Friday

Little Party Dress is an online boutique that specialises in affordable pieces that make you feel fabulous. They’re big believers in creating a personalised and fun shopping experience. They focus on curating unique styles with a signature LPD twist; featuring bold prints, added sleeves, elastic waists, and pockets. They aim to make you feel comfortable, confident, and ready to step out the front door. 

Black Friday is the biggest sales event of the year for ecommerce merchants, with customers eager to hit the ‘add to cart’ button again and again. After all, you’ve got to spend money to save money (or something along those lines…). For Little Party Dress, Black Friday was an opportunity to build a further relationship with their base of passionate customers who love nothing more than rocking a vibrant new frock. 

We saw an opportunity to use the existing hype around Black Friday to collect further information from customers – in this case, their mobile number and consent to message them with BFCM alerts. We then saw an additional opportunity to segment customers based on whether or not they were part of Club LPD (Little Party Dress’s loyalty program) to enhance their customer journey. 

The first thing we did was build and launch data capture forms on the LPD website with a give and take approach. We would give the customers Black Friday sale information, in exchange for their mobile numbers. 

For loyalty program members, this meant offering exclusive early access to the sale via an SMS alert with a discount code to use at checkout. This incentive not only encouraged conversions but allowed LPD to further build their relationship with loyalty program members by offering the exclusivity that reinforced their VIP status. 

For non-loyalty members, we asked for their mobile number in exchange for an alert as soon as the sale began. Aside from the opportunity to create revenue during Black Friday, this opened the door for further, personalised SMS communication in the future. This means LPD will be able to deliver more targeted content to their customers, with the added personal touch and convenience of SMS. This will lead to turning these customers into loyalty program members – and then into loyal brand advocates. 

The next step was to build the two SMS campaigns in Postscript and schedule them ready to send for Black Friday. The first early access SMS campaign was sent the night before Black Friday to the loyalty members who gave consent. This message included a code for 20% off sitewide – the same discount that would be running throughout Black Friday for all customers. The second SMS campaign was sent the morning of Black Friday, alerting customers that the sale had officially begun.

As we predicted, customers were eager to sign up to receive an SMS alert for LPD’s Black Friday sales. In the span of a week, we collected a whopping 4,405 new mobile numbers from LPD’s excited customers. 

As anticipated, the SMS campaigns sent for Black Friday were a hit. For loyalty members, we saw a conversion rate of 67.1% (the benchmark is 1.5%) and $42.65 earned per message sent (where the benchmark sits at $1.23). 

For non-loyalty members, the conversion rate was 43.8% and the earning per message sent was $12.14 – still well above the benchmarks.