Like most customer-centric organizations, John Hardy’s marketing team is determined to deliver customer-first experiences, industry-leading customer satisfaction, and nurture meaningful customer loyalty.
Because they, too, understand the strategic importance of smartly growing through their existing customers.
Especially since the shift in focus from wholesaling and brick-and-mortar stores to direct-to-consumer digital sales created major challenges – and opportunities – in how John Hardy’s marketers operate.
And so, to achieve its ambitious goals, the luxury jewelry brand realized that it needed an efficient way to integrate all available customer data and personalize communications via all channels.
The Challenge: Consistent, Coherent, Cross-Channel
John Hardy’s overriding goal was to create a much more cohesive brand story, across as many touchpoints as possible, by delivering excellent, consistent, coherent customer experiences across e-commerce and offline retail and even expanding the approach into wholesale accounts.
The challenges included rearranging teams, integrating and leveraging data, and choosing which software platforms to use and marketing channels to focus on.
The challenge also had to do with understanding customers and what they want while marrying all available retail store data with online data to ensure that all omnichannel customer experiences were optimized.
The Solution
So, John Hardy divided their Optimove-managed activities into three main areas:
1. Digital Marketing: Hyper Segmentation
John Hardy’s marketers now use Optimove to define different varieties of specific customer segments, or “personas,” and send highly personalized messages to each of these small groups of customers, using each customer’s preferred communication channels.
The marketers use Optimove’s demographic, behavioral, campaign response history, and predictive criteria to define the personas/segments that receive each type of message.
The company communicates with targeted customers using multiple digital channels, including email, Google Ads, paid social ads on Facebook, and SMS.
“Optimove makes it super-easy for our team to modify and test the creative and copy that is going to each different type of customer, ensuring that we are speaking to everyone in the exact way that we want,” says Jonas Malpass, Senior Manager of CRM & Digital Marketing at John Hardy.
2. Clienteling: Harmonizing Online with Brick-and-Mortar
John Hardy uses Optimove to drive a comprehensive clienteling operation. Marketers transfer details regarding individual customers’ preferences, behaviors, and purchases to in-store sales reps, weekly and monthly.
The reps use these reports to reach out to customers via telephone, email, and social media to follow up on recent purchases. They also reach out before a birthday, anniversary, or holiday; or simply inform them about a new product they’re likely to find interesting.
A particularly valuable aspect of this clienteling effort has been providing retail stores with details about online-only purchasers who live in the vicinity of stores. Calling or emailing these customers has generated positive feedback and has driven many online shoppers into John Hardy’s retail locations.
“Optimove lets us always put the customer first by only contacting them with highly relevant, personal communications. We’ve found this one-to-one outreach, made possible by Optimove’s customer model and segmentation, to be far more successful than the ‘batch and blast’ method of clienteling we had been using before,” says Malpass.
3. Realtime Communications
John Hardy marketers now use Optimove to run highly successful realtime, behavior-triggered campaigns, such as the ‘welcome series’ for bespoke ones for new customers, customers who abandon their online shopping carts, and on-site abandoned category browsing. The team has come up with a list of more than 40 realtime, activity-triggered marketing scenarios that they have gradually implemented.
More specifically, the team has found that customizing messages with details, such as the particular products abandoned in the shopping cart or the specific category the customer recently browsed, resulted in much higher response rates.
“We love Optimove’s realtime capabilities and how easy it is to run realtime campaigns as A/B tests,” says Malpass. “We are constantly running, testing, and improving behavior-triggered campaigns.”
Overall Achievements: 53%, 143%, and Other Numbers
John Hardy now delivers a customer-first omnichannel experience. It has clarity regarding which customers shop only in stores, only online or both; which customers have the highest predicted lifetime value; to which channels each customer is most responsive; the differences in lifetime value among different types of customers; and which customers are at greatest risk of churn.
Gaining access to this kind of information puts John Hardy in the driver’s seat resulting in:
53% increase in monthly average net revenue
143% increase in purchase amount through clienteling campaigns
Average sales of $901 per customer, from realtime cart- abandonment campaigns
