Vineyard Vines

Business Challenge

To reach customers, Vineyard Vines formerly relied on batch-and-blast communications to promote products and make offers. These campaigns shared the exact same message and static images to millions of people, which wasn’t an optimal way to communicate with customers. The company aimed to integrate its online customer and products data to enable true one-to-one, personalized messaging.

Analytics Solution

Vineyard Vines partnered with Bluecore, a retail marketing automation platform, to implement a solution that correlates customer behaviors and their interactions with the company’s online product catalog. An artificial-intelligence-driven decisioning engine determines the timing and content of the next-best campaign to send to individual shoppers.

The decisioning engine takes the data about the customers’ interactions with specific products and decides what products to target to each customer next, based on its understanding of the individual and the collective wisdom of all customers. It understands which customers have price sensitivities (and therefore are motivated by discounts), what items an individual customer viewed, what those items have in common with other items the customer engaged with, which products are replenishable items and at what cadence a specific customer replenishes them, which activities predict a next sell, the right timing to contact a specific customer, customers’ lifetime value, and so on.

The platform also enables Vineyard Vines to send dynamic, personalized messaging based on customers’ online behaviors, purchase transactions, and their relative level of personal engagement with the brand.

Impact

Campaign results after implementing the decisioning engine have exceeded expectations. Examples include:

• An increase in reach for an annual St. Patrick’s Day email campaign from 3,000 recipients in 2017 to 239,000 in 2018.
• Expanded use of the platform to target customers who not only had previously browsed Easter-related products, but also customers who had a high affinity toward the products, increasing recipients from 5,000 to 150,000, the open rate to 77%, and the revenue per email by 759%.
• Identification of customers who are unlikely to open or click emails in order to target them on Facebook instead, resulting in a 182% ROI.