REEDS Jewelers' personalized online experience results in a 52% increase in revenue

From its beginnings in 1946 as a single store in Wilmington, North Carolina, REEDS has since become a true American success story as a full-service multichannel retailer with stores in 13 states and a leading ecommerce website, REEDS.com. The company strives to make every customer feel like family with personalized service, close attention to detail, lasting quality, and timeless style.

Challenge

Over its 75 years in business, REEDS has developed a reputation for delivering exceptional service to customers in more than 65 brick-and-mortar stores. The next frontier for the jeweler was ensuring that the personalized, detail-driven experience it was known for providing in-store was also mirrored in the digital space.

However, as REEDS worked to further personalize their customers’ online experiences, the marketing team experienced several pain points with their existing marketing platform. They found it to be increasingly limiting, inflexible, and challenging for many team members to use. But most importantly, as Colby Raker, a Digital Analyst at REEDS explains, it was inhibiting them from taking their efforts to the next level.

“In the luxury space, since there can be a longer consideration period before consumers make a purchase, there’s a lot of opportunity to nurture customers through email,” explains Colby. “That said, we felt like we were only able to use our solution for mass communications — and not for anything advanced. We tried to become more confident in our ability to target customers and create segments, but we struggled to make progress.”

Knowing that tools like segmentation and personalization were key to improving engagement and loyalty among their customers, Colby and her team set out to find a provider that would help them as they strived to aim higher and set clearer marketing goals.

Solution

When REEDS representatives, along with their ecommerce solution partner, Kadro, began considering Dotdigital, they were impressed by the many possibilities the platform opened up — such as its ease of use, supportive team, and ability to seamlessly integrate with their ecommerce platform, Magento.

“We went through a long evaluation process with REEDS to determine which solutions made the most sense, and eventually we chose Dotdigital,” says Malcolm Allen, Chief Technology Officer and Owner of Kadro. “The biggest selling features for us were the tight integration with Magento and how easy it was to send all the various types of data into their platform — not to mention how friendly and available everyone was.”

After selecting Dotdigital as their new marketing provider, the REEDS team began the implementation process in May 2020 — and just a few weeks later, it was fully up and running.

“We were pretty much transitioned to all marketing communications on Dotdigital by August, so it was an incredibly efficient process,” Colby said. “The migration was a big deal, but it didn’t feel taxing or daunting because we had such great support from the Dotdigital team.”

“REEDS already had a lot of email programs with their previous service provider,” Malcolm adds. “Dotdigital helped recreate that and improve it in their platform. It was very smooth for such a large integration.”

REEDS worked with Dotdigital to unlock single customer view capabilities that integrated data from its point of sale and online subscriber data, allowing the team to build a 360-degree view of an individual shopper. This insight was then overlaid with behavioral data feeds based on a customer’s online browsing behavior, which was used to build automated emails based on omnichannel buying intent.

“Our strategy has allowed us to see who in our database is engaging with a specific section of products on our website so that we can target them with relevant campaigns,” Colby says. “That personalization is so important because we offer a wide range of products — which means we often have very different audiences that we need to communicate with.”

Results

REEDS has had tremendous success since their Dotdigital partnership began. By sending personalized, targeted email campaigns to customers based on what they’re browsing online, they’ve seen higher engagement — which has led to a 52% increase in revenues and average order value uplift of 18%.

As Colby notes, REEDS has also been able to expand their use of triggered messaging. “Before, we were sending about 95% marketing messages and 5% triggered messages,” Colby says. “That’s greatly improved with Dotdigital. We’re now able to target more cart abandoners and browse abandoners, and send more communications than we were ever able to before.”

REEDS has also discovered ways to optimize each customer’s journey and deliver real value through their emails. For instance, their strategy enabled them to build personalized post-purchase aftercare into their engagement plan — with educational campaigns on how to care for, clean, and maintain jewelry so that it looks as sparkling as the day it was bought.

“REEDS has focused on putting its customers front and center of its business for over 75 years, so we were delighted to help them extend that highly personalized, one-to-one customer service strategy into their digital marketing capabilities,” says Tink Taylor, founder and president of Dotdigital Group. “With a single view of the customer across its channels, it can now elevate personalization even further to drive not only sales, but long-term customer loyalty too.”

Looking ahead

In the months to come, REEDS has plans to add new dotdigital solutions to their toolkit to further personalize the customer journey. This includes leveraging dynamic content, placing a greater focus on product recommendations, and tailoring messaging to a customer’s local REEDS store. The team is also interested in using Liquid script to bring their personalization to even greater heights.

“As we look to the future, we’d also really like to explore more post-purchase programs,” Colby says. “We’ve laid the groundwork thanks to our work with dotdigital, and now it’s about learning what else is possible and building more automations and triggered campaigns. There’s so much on the horizon that we’re excited about.”