In early (pre-pandemic) 2020, Jonathan Adler was poised to have a good year. The home décor and furniture retailer had just deployed a suite of personalization solutions from Listrak in October 2019, and plans were in the works to launch a loyalty program.
But while COVID-19 was disastrous for many retailers, it actually served to boost business for Jonathan Adler. Consumers’ focus on sprucing up homes that were now doubling as offices and schoolrooms was a big success factor, but it also was multiplied by the retailer’s rollout of email personalization based on shoppers’ browsing habits and purchase histories.
Since implementing the Listrak solutions, Jonathan Adler has seen:
- 85% increase in email-generated traffic to its website;
- 10% increase in conversions; and
- 98% revenue increase from email.
“We got really nervous with COVID, but we actually went in the complete opposite direction; we’ve had an extraordinary year,” said Esme Hovekamp, Director of Marketing at Jonathan Adler in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Fortunately, we had strong marketing and personalization strategies that allowed us to take advantage of the organic growth we saw in ecommerce.”
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Ramping up its personalization capabilities is part of Jonathan Adler’s efforts to “expand our omnichannel experience and grow our digital space, which has been a huge focus for us over the past few years,” said Hovekamp. “We realized the best way to do this was to have a personalized, dynamic shopping experience, whether the customer is in the store, shopping on our website or chatting live. We’ve even gotten back into doing catalogs and direct mail, and we want to bring the digital experience from the mailbox into the online experience.”
Leveraging the Power of Product Recommendations
The Listrak solutions have helped Jonathan Adler personalize customer emails in a number of ways. For loyalty program members, “the solutions make sure that [a person’s points] are showing up dynamically in emails,” said Hovekamp. The retailer’s recent addition of product recommendations, which Hovekamp terms “very successful,” has been incorporated into a variety of email types, including automated emails triggered by actions such as online cart abandonment.
Additionally, recommendations need to be aligned with the customer’s interest in the various product lines offered by Jonathan Adler. The company started as a specialist in pottery, offering a large variety of vases, boxes, acrylic sculpture pieces and coasters, and then Jonathan Adler expanded into the high-end furniture market. “We’re a luxury furniture business and a unique décor business, and while there’s a lot of crossover between the two, it’s important that the customer shopping for décor be given recommendations for those products, versus for a sofa,” Hovekamp said.
Making greater use of the Listrak solutions’ capabilities has been an ongoing process for Hovekamp and her team. “We started off very generic when we were just getting things up and running,” she said. “Now that we’ve been using this for nearly a year, we’re working on optimizing conversion and building out more segmentation, and really controlling the conversation of who we’re talking to, and why.”
Jonathan Adler will be able to go even further with its next addition: Listrak’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The retailer already is moving its data into the system and expects to be live with it in Q4.
“I’m very excited to better understand who customers are based on their journey,” said Hovekamp. “We can look at things like what brought you into our brand and where we ‘prospected’ you from, and that will allow us to take these efforts to the next level.”