Cox & Cox is one of the UK’s fastest growing furniture and homeware retailers. With collections that put design at the front and center, the brand has gone from strength to strength experiencing a 78% increase in revenue in the first three quarters of 2021.

As the UK started to ease its lockdown, Cox & Cox found its email engagement had dropped, and wanted to try and rectify this to maintain its strong sales record. Working with their Ometria Customer Success Manager, Cox & Cox looked at their customer data to identify a new approach.

“Typically if we were trying to improve our email performance we’d focus on a generic offer,” said Kate Sandell, CRM Manager at Cox & Cox. “But we wanted to avoid immediately resorting to discounting, and instead decided to do something more personalized.”

Looking at the customer data in Ometria opened up lots of possibilities for Cox & Cox, and gave them the insights needed to target customers with relevant content.

Cox & Cox used the Ometria platform to identify customers based on their lifecycle stage, as well as each customer’s category-based affinity to create an individually-personalized broadcast campaign. 

The variants all followed a similar structure, using segmentation to change the images based on the category that the customer had an affinity with. They also included a section featuring recommended products, personalized to each customer. This was built using Ometria’s recommendation engines which automatically populated the content. 

The copy of the email was then adapted based on the customer’s lifecycle stage using dynamic content, and if that segment included a relevant offer, that was included too.

Using 5 different lifecycle stages (Single Purchaser, VIP, Active, Prospect and Lapsed Customer) and 9 different browsed categories meant producing 45 different versions of this broadcast campaign. Normally building 45 versions of a campaign would involve a significant amount of resources for any team, but using the broadcast campaign builder within the Ometria platform made such a complex campaign simple to handle. 

“We already send automated campaigns based on the categories our customers browse, so this was a natural extension of that project. We were able to identify the customer segments and then easily build these campaigns within the Ometria platform. The data and insight Ometria gave us was invaluable. I’ve worked with ESPs previously that just didn’t allow you to do anything like this,” Kate Sandell said.

This campaign had the desired result for customer engagement. Open rates were closer to the highs achieved during lockdown. But more than that, the conversion rate of customers clicking on these emails was 91% higher than the average for similar non-personalised campaigns. This had a real impact on revenue too, with average order value being 40% higher than the average – particularly impressive given the range of customer lifecycle stages.