A scalable approach to personalizing your broadcast campaigns with Butterfly Twists

In this session Frank Eribo, Co-founder & Creative Director at women’s footwear fashion brand Butterfly Twists, explained how the business achieved great results by exploring segmentation campaigns.

Butterfly Twists had previously been oriented toward distribution via stores and wholesale – and started the shift toward e-commerce about 18 months ago. “We could see the journey of the customer especially was changing,” said Frank.

The business wanted to engage with customers in a deeper way than just promoting a sale in a generic “batch and blast” email campaign, but as a small team with limited time, every action had to count.

Working with Ometria, Butterfly Twists began to learn more about its customers and how to identify segments it could retarget and engage with on a more personal level. One important early initiative involved emailing consumers for feedback: Butterfly Twist ran two different questionnaires at the same time, one for customers who had browsed but not purchased, and one for those who made purchases. This was not a revenue-generating exercise but one to gather valuable insights to help optimize future campaigns.

The pandemic-related lockdown presented an opportunity to try new campaign approaches and the business experimented with broadcast segmentation based on a number of criteria, such as purchase history, site visit behavior, lifecycle stage and location.

Shoe size data proved critical to better understanding the customer. Previous generic emails led people to products that were not necessarily in stock in their size, and proved wasteful and frustrating for the customer. Using the data allowed Butterfly Twists to “put the customer in the right place to buy the right item” and presented opportunities to further segment the offering.

Revenue driven by broadcast segmentation jumped 108% year on year between March 1 to October 1, 2020, order volume rose 105%, and 86% of generated revenue came from lapsed and at-risk customers. Campaign activity generated 78% more revenue than the highest-revenue campaign of the previous period, despite the targeted audience being a third of the size.

Key lessons: 

• Don’t assume that essential data for your customer persona has been shared with your email partner
• Segmenting only makes sense if you can vary the content – understand why you’re segmenting before you do it
• Keep testing and learning – not all audience segmentation will be successful