How Forever 21 Used Smart Banners™ to Get 11x ROAS
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Forever 21 is a global fast fashion retailer headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded as one store in 1984; today, there are over 540 retail operations worldwide. The company focuses on delivering on-trend and high-style designs and basics at affordable prices, targeting fashionable consumers who care about a high-value customer experience.
For Forever 21, innovation matters. Across in-store, eCommerce, and other digital channels, the company wants to expand access and convenience to customers. Of course, email marketing plays a significant role in this strategy.
They wanted to find a way to improve email by adding more personalization — without more manual processes and complicated workflows for the marketing team. So Forever 21 turned to Zembula for help.
Here’s what happened.
The challenge: Increase ROAS and bump revenue
Every brand wants to increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and revenue. But it’s a delicate balance to do so while still serving the customer and ensuring they’re getting the messages that matter to them.
Research shows that email marketing is a key channel for retail and eCommerce brands, helping build customer relationships and drive more return purchases.
- Digital ad spending is expected to grow to over $315 billion by 2025, more than doubling 2020’s numbers.
- According to a recent study, email still accounts for nearly 20% of all transactions, level with paid search and only slightly below organic traffic.
- Average eCommerce retention rates for the apparel industry are around 26%, slightly lower than the average across all industries.
In addition, Forever 21 wanted to implement a solution that wouldn’t hamper its marketing team with extra manual tweaks and effort. The new approach to personalized email marketing had to deliver both measurable improvements and require little additional effort.
The solution: Implement Zembula’s Smart Banners™ for revenue optimization
At Zembula, our approach centers around using personalization for revenue optimization. Adding personalization to every message — from triggered abandoned cart notifications to inventory alerts and shipping updates — helps connect with customers.
It provides the 1:1 level of personalization consumers increasingly want and, using data-driven insights, helps create more clickable content. Driving more action and engagement helps improve conversions and revenue over the long term. And that increases the return on investment for email marketing strategies, exactly what Forever 21 hoped to achieve.
Forever 21 pulled from a pool of Smart Banners™ primarily focused on abandoned carts and browse options. These are generally higher-converting messages that can easily be personalized for customer name, shopping behavior, and history. Banners can also use personalized animation to feature moving product images.
Beyond offering a suite of personalization solutions in the form of Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™, Zembula can be up and running quickly. Implementation takes as little as six weeks, and the platform is fully automated, doing most of the heavy lifting for you.
The results: 11x ROAS
After using a pool of Smart Banners™, the team at Forever 21 saw a lift of 11x ROAS compared to the effectiveness of previous email campaigns.
Zembula’s AI-powered Campaign Decision Engine sorted through Forever 21’s data and displayed personalized Smart Banners™ according to their set parameters. This ensures every customer gets personalized messages in their inbox, building more trust in Forever 21’s email communications and making these emails must-open.
While most included abandoned cart or browse banners, the company also wanted to add real-time package tracking into the mix as a way to help train readers to open promotional emails.
Learn more about Zembula’s Smart Banners™
Some marketing metrics are increasingly more important measures of success, and ROAS is one of them. Knowing if your emails are landing with subscribers and converting them to shoppers helps highlight the effectiveness of your strategy and where changes may be needed.
For Forever 21, implementing a personalization strategy focused on Smart Banners™ helped drive a significant boost in ROAS. If you want to do the same for your brand, we’d love to help.
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