Iconic New Zealand outerwear brand, Swanndri, strengthens cross-channel marketing strategy

Designed and named after the way the shirt keeps people dry, like a swan’s plumage, the product range has expanded massively since the early days of Swanndri. Swanndri now offers a large selection of outdoor wear for men, women and children, as well as accessories. The products are designed to last and protect, keeping customers comfortable, both in rural and urban environments.

Challenge

With growth always the priority for Swanndri’s digital marketing strategy, the team wanted to further strengthen its brand-building efforts across its various channels. To meet this objective, Swanndri partnered with Dotdigital and Convert Digital. “Over the years, staying ahead of the curve has been key to Swanndri’s brand success. We believe a successful brand journey is about constantly upgrading, updating and moving in the direction of where our customers are,” said Jenny Drinkwater, Marketing Manager at Swanndri New Zealand.

Solution

The Swanndri team partnered with ecommerce web design and development agency, Convert Digital, to launch their new site on Magento 2 in September 2019. Using Dotdigital also enabled the brand to run a wide range of automated list growth campaigns through email and Facebook.

“Convert Digital’s partnership with Magento (now Adobe Commerce) along with Dotdigital’s user-friendly interface and the effortless end–to–end campaign process are the key factors driving this collaboration,” added Jenny. “With Dotdigital, we can delve deep into customer data and leverage it to create highly personalized campaigns, while working with Convert Digital allows us to continually upgrade and improve the website to help enhance the customer journey.”

The welcome series, abandoned cart, CSR partnership and promotional campaigns are some of the key programs currently running on the Dotdigital platform. As part of the brand-building process, the team runs weekly email campaigns for its loyal customers with engaging, interactive, and personalized content to drive engagement. Additionally, Swanndri has a promotional cycle where the team sends an email every three weeks, highlighting the latest promotions.

“Email has remained our major revenue-generating channel with a prime focus on content and creativity. Internally, the marketing team works closely with the creative team to create interesting email designs and templates that resonate with our brand values and customer sentiments,” explained Jenny.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, like every other retailer, Swanndri also pivoted, strengthening its online presence and focusing significantly on effective communications. The brand has gradually moved its focus to new channels with experimentation at heart. Moving from a single email channel to cross-channel marketing, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, Swanndri has enriched its customer experience, built stronger brand recognition, and seen exponential growth in the customer database.

Results

Since partnering with Dotdigital, Swanndri’s subscriber base has increased by 140%. While the welcome series has a 40% open rate and a click-through open rate (CTO) of 14%, the abandoned cart witnessed an 52% open rate with a 17% click-through open rate. Moreover, email marketing accounted for 19% of the total revenue generated over 18 months.

Looking ahead

The future looks bright for Swanndri, with many exciting things in the pipeline. Continuing on its customer-driven approach, the team plans to introduce a customer preference centre. Swanndri will also explore Dotdigital’s Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) value modelling tool for advanced segmentation.

Backed by solid market research, segmentation will allow the retailer to target inactive customers, identify spending champions, and help craft tailor-made customer loyalty programs. Additionally, the coming months will see Swanndri working with Convert Digital to improve its reviews platform and upgrade the shipping middleware.