English
Missguided Heals its Mailing List with Bloomreach Engagement
Missguided is one of the United Kingdom’s most popular online fashion retailers. From its start in 2009, Missguided has quickly grown into a $200+ million ecommerce giant, selling trendy clothing and shoes to fashion-conscious consumers.
The Challenge
Like many online fashion retailers, email is one of Missguided’s most important communication channels. From letting customers know about new styles, to highlighting short-lived discounts, email newsletters are one of the best ways to drive customers back online to make their next purchase.
But to make email newsletters work properly, you need a strong mailing list. And when The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect and greatly damaged Missguided’s carefully curated mailing list, a solution was needed ASAP.
We made the decision to move to Bloomreach and we were up and running with the ability to send over one million emails to customers within seven days.
Nicola Fox
The Solution
Missguided quickly got to work on building a new mailing list but it lacked the customer data to do so the way it truly wanted to.
When it was time to send a newsletter, it had no choice but to send full email blasts to the entire database of email addresses that had been collected. This was not an ideal solution for many reasons, one of the most obvious being the spam traps that Missguided was encountering.
Customers who weren’t particularly interested in these emails were marking the messages as spam, triggering GMail’s spam filters. And several ISPs went as far as to completely block Missguided from sending emails to their networks at all. Open rates took a significant plunge as a result.
Missguided looked to Bloomreach for help on correcting the health of its mailing lists. Thanks to a long-standing cooperation, Bloomreach was able to rapidly create and implement a solution that showed results nearly immediately.
Missguided first had to change the audience of its newsletters. Instead of relying on full database blasts, it opted to only email the customers who were actually interested in receiving emails. To achieve this, it had to find out exactly who these customers were and then combine all of that information into a new list. Bloomreach Engagement, which is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), made this easy.
Bloomreach Engagement stores all customer data and events in a single customer-centric database. The core of this is our single customer view, which organizes customer data into individual profiles. The SCV made it easy to see which customers were engaging with emails and which ones weren’t.
It then just took a few more clicks to create filters based on recent engagement with emails. Customers who had interacted with an email in the last month or two were kept while customers who had not were filtered out.
The Results
To test the new list, Missguided sent seven emails out over the next week. Two were sent to the entire database, while the remaining five were sent to the new filtered mailing lists.
The results were clear and obvious after the test week — the emails sent to the filtered mailing lists had significantly improved open rates and click-through rates. The open rate was 3% higher for those on the filtered list and the click-through rate was 0.5% higher compared to messages the week before that were sent to the entire database.
One of the most surprising results was learning that 92% of the revenue generated from emails came from 50% of the emails sent. Despite the size of the mailing list being significantly reduced, the amount of revenue generated from email was not much lower. Well worth reducing the mailing list considering Missguided would now avoid spam traps and ISP blocks much more frequently.
