Draper James success story

Draper James Unwraps the Keys to Effective Email Marketing

Draper James is a classic, American lifestyle brand founded by Reese Witherspoon, and inspired by her Southern roots. Reese named the brand after her grandparents who taught her everything she knows about gracious Southern living. Each year in mid-March, the brand celebrates Reese’s birthday with a weekend-long sale – a major sales event that is central to the Draper James brand.

The Draper James team has enjoyed a years-long partnership with Retention Science, a company providing AI-enabled marketing automation software. The ReSci team provides Draper James with ongoing results monitoring, guidance with new product features, and consulting around marketing strategy, services not typically offered by others in the space.

Prior to this year’s birthday sale, the ReSci team alerted the Draper James marketing team to an issue with their domain reputation which was impacting their deliverability and open rates. Their Customer Success Manager advised them to begin sending only to those customers who visited the site, subscribed, or read an email within the prior 90 days. Once certain benchmarks were reached, parameters were broadened to send to those who showed the same types of engagement within the past 180 days. The larger goal was to tailor their segmentation strategy to consider user browsing behaviors for even further engagement.

As they achieved each incremental goal leading up to the sale campaign, they saw improved open and engagement rates, allowing the team to feel confident and prepared for the event.

With these practices implemented, the Draper James team had teed themselves up for a successful campaign. The results below speak for themselves.

The learnings from the birthday sale campaign continue to deliver benefits to the Draper James team. Since the campaign, they have continued with their segmentation practices and are tailoring messages based on the interests of their customers and their product preferences. In the quarter following the birthday sale, they saw their unsubscribe rate fall by 45%, something they attribute largely to their improved segmentation strategy.

The Draper James team is also seeing improvements with other campaigns, as well as with their domain reputation and email deliverability rates. They continue to see that data-backed segmentation and targeting, and the strategic input from the ReSci team are the gifts that keep on giving.

Results