Astrid & Miyu

Astrid & Miyu

Test and learn: the Astrid & Miyu approach to CRM

Astrid & Miyu is a jewelry brand on a mission to ‘revolutionize the jewelry experience’ whether their customers are engaging with them online, in their ever-growing number of stores, or through one of the many experiences they offer, like piercing, tattoos, welding or engraving.

As a fast-growing brand, expanding globally in a competitive market, Astrid & Miyu takes a highly agile, experimental, test-and-learn approach to everything, including CRM.

We spoke to Lucy Kemish, Global Senior CRM Manager, about this approach and how using Ometria as their customer data and experience platform, and Attentive for text messaging marketing, supports and strengthens this strategy. 

Speed to market is everything

Ometria helps CRM teams like Astrid & Miyu move with speed and efficiency when bringing their CRM strategy to life. The team can see all their customer data, insights, and CRM performance right there in the platform, speeding them up by streamlining the process and removing the need to rely on other teams to get to their data.

Everything we do has a test-and-learn approach too, and we are learning valuable lessons. I understand that not all environments allow for complete agility, you may have a 10-person sign-off process for example, or a long lead time with your graphics department, but having trust in your team to make decisions, and trust in technology to do what you need it to, can free up some of that time.’ 

Growth and expansion

Astrid & Miyu also have an experimental approach to expansion, using pop-ups to test the appetite of local consumers. In 2019, they ran successful pop-ups in New York, which led to them opening a flagship store. 

‘This success of our pop-ups, combined with a strong online appetite from the US market helped us make the decision. And the same goes with Europe, earlier in the year we ran a pop-up in Berlin, then later hosted a piercing party there too – both were hugely successful so we’re going back for an extended 4-month pop-up later this year.

This kind of process starts off as a test-and-learn but quickly becomes muscle memory when you repeat similar initiatives. The rollout becomes easier, quicker, and slicker, so you become more agile each time.’ 

Having a strong and successful digital presence that demonstrated the appetite and underpinned their pop-up strategy, helped to guide and strengthen Astrid & Miyu’s growth strategy.  As part of the new store opening in New York, Astrid & Miyu used Ometria’s Facebook Leads integration to create hyper-personalized lead gen campaigns to welcome everyone with relevant content and drive brand awareness in their new location. 

‘Previously, we would run lead-gen campaigns via Facebook, collecting new leads then have to manually upload them into Ometria – which has its obvious flaws. Now, these leads flow straight into Ometria meaning we can give them a great journey from the outset and increase our chances of conversion.‘

Next-generation experiences

‘A huge part of business, aside from the products, is the appointments and services we offer in our stores. We started out offering piercings back in 2018, as it just made sense with our product offering and we saw a huge demand for it. Then in 2019, tattoos and welded solid gold bracelets were launched. This helped grow the business substantially and took the brand in a direction that was just beyond shopping, we were delivering experiences.’

Not only are the experiences of piercing, tattoos, and weldings central to Astrid & Miyu’s brand and strategy, but their stores also place importance on the shopper being able to experience the jewelry, making it available to touch, handle and try on. 

The same value is placed on the customer experience when it comes to online too. By gathering data on their growing customer base, and joining up the in-store and online experience by bringing customer appointment data into Ometria, Astrid & Miyu are able to enrich their customer profiles based on their lifecycle stage, providing the best experience no matter where a customer engages with the brand. 

‘We are also able to see online and in-store transactions all in one place which is really helpful. The same applies for loyalty, which means our store teams are able to see a customer’s tier level and reward points for their purchases. This allows for a really consistent experience whether you’re shopping online with us or in-store, either buying products or having an appointment.

Continuing a test & learn approach, so you keep experimenting and learning is important, but building strong data foundations is equally as important. Being able to see a whole customer profile in Ometria, taking into account their appointment history is so powerful.’ 

Their anniversary of purchase campaign is a pitch-perfect example of how Astrid & Miyu weaves incredible experiences out of relevant customer data. This campaign uses Ometria’s merge tags to include details of the last product ordered, the date of first purchase, the number of items purchased, and relevant product recommendations to encourage future purchases. 

The future of ‘the Astrid & Miyu experience’ 

Astrid & Miyu have recently started using SMS, powered by Attentive. Using the segment-sync feature between Ometria and Attentive, the brand is now able to push the segments they have set up in Ometria into Attentive to use in their SMS strategy. 

“We quickly incorporated customer behavior and on-the-ground valuable intelligence into our SMS strategy for appointments. In London, our customers will book appointments for piercings weeks in advance, giving us the opportunity to send pre-appointment comms around what to expect, and to engage them pre-and post-appointment. In New York, our store manager noticed that we got a significantly higher volume of walk-ins, people would turn up and see if they could get an appointment there and then. As a result of this feedback, we pivoted quickly and experimented with using SMS to send messages about same-day availability to our database in New York. Having SMS available for this was super-handy, it requires minimal resources, and we know it’s a channel that we had seen our audience engage with well.”

Astrid & Miyu plan to continue experimenting more with cross-channel customer journeys. “We are using SMS this gifting season to deliver a two-way conversation gift guide. With Attentive, you can set up flows that allow the customer to directly respond to your messages if you ask questions. For example, ‘who are you shopping for this holiday season?’. Something all of us have probably struggled with in the past is identifying why one-time shoppers didn’t come back, a lot of them were perhaps gifters. If you can gather data on who your customers are shopping for, that allows for future-proofing and retention. So for example, if we gather this data at Christmas, and we know we have a group of customers shopping for their mother, we then have a point of contact with them next year on Mother’s Day. So whilst we are delivering an interactive gifting experience with the customer, we are also future-proofing our relationship with them. You can do this with email too of course, but I am excited to try this with a new channel this year.”