With the declared goal to “Do Something Creative Every Day,” Paper Source is committed to offering inspiration and innovation to their customers as they celebrate life’s special moments, both big and small.
They are also committed to the same values of creativity and innovation in their customer marketing.
However, the drastic shifts in everyday life we have seen in the past year made it harder for brands to stay on trend when communicating with customers. It required retailers like Paper Source to adapt their marketing practices at breakneck speed constantly.
That’s why Paper Source’s marketing team looked for a campaign management platform to test, learn, and scale their CRM operations in an agile manner to continue to acquire, engage, and retain customers as – their behaviors and needs frequently change.
They partnered with us here at Optimove. The following is a detailing of how successful this partnership has been.
The Challenge
Understand new and existing customers in a rapidly evolving environment
Increase marketing agility in orchestrating multichannel acquisition and retention campaigns
Test, optimize and scale new CRM strategies
Facing the COVID-19 pandemic
When stores were forced to close, the Paper Source marketing team needed to pivot its strategy to focus on eCommerce growth quickly, especially since the stationary retailer saw a significant increase in new customers—many with different purchase patterns than their predecessors. Retaining this new cohort became challenging and highly crucial.
“We really needed to understand who these customers were,” said Elizabeth Owens, VP Marketing, Paper Source.
In turn, Paper Source chose Optimove as the CRM marketing orchestrion platform that would serve as the central hub for all its personalized customer marketing efforts.
Three creative Optimove solutions
1. Responding to sudden eCommerce growth
With Optimove, Paper Source’s marketing team was able to analyze customers based on a combination of online and offline data. This allowed them to discover what behaviors were representative of in-store-only customers as they migrated online.
Optimove’s Track and Trigger provided Paper Source with visibility into customer behaviors online – allowing the retailer to understand why customers were coming to its site, which led to realtime optimization of reactivation and acquisition strategies.
Paper Source’s marketing team excelled in leading the company through a 3.1X increase in migration from in-store only customers to online, as well as a significant influx of new online-only customers.
2. Use CRM insights to boost acquisition
Acquisition and Retention are two parts of marketing that usually fight over prestige and budgets. But in this case, we used one to improve the other.
So when Paper Source rolled out both cross-sell and basket-increase campaigns to further cement new customers’ brand loyalty, these insights also helped drive smart paid acquisition campaigns on social.
For example, the marketing team created ads that would promote the best performing products for first-time purchasers, leading to a return on advertising spend (ROAS) of four and a very large impression share. Both results being higher than baseline results for the company.
“Optimove helped us discover customer traits and preferences, create and test insight-based campaigns across marketing channels, and optimize our strategies based on the results,” says Owen.
3. Executing on a test-first mindset
Using Optimove Streams, a capability that accurately measures the incremental impact of a complete marketing strategy (as opposed to measuring the impact of one campaign), the Paper Source team was able to test a “light” version of the program. Streams allowed the team to build sophisticated “if/then” scenarios and email campaigns to be tested against super-control groups.
As a result, Paper Source’s team identified the impact a point-based loyalty program would have on business KPIs, as well as which KPIs the program would impact.
Results (with numbers!)
Thanks to their smart, efficient usage of different Optimove capabilities, Paper Source’s marketing team can now gain immediate insights to:
How customers who were acquired during the pandemic differ from earlier ones
The impact of a new marketing campaign; what products perform better for customers (and use it to improve acquisition)
The differences in Lifetime Value of customers based on their first purchase
Learn which customers are at a higher risk of churn (and act on it)
This activity resulted in:
126% increase in customer reactivation rate
80% increase in customer conversion rate
Average increase of 2.3 orders per customer (from realtime emails promoting curbside pick-up)
There are plenty more opportunities in store for the Paper Source CRM team to keep growing revenue with Optimove.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
