See how Madewell transforms loyalty, browsing, and behavioral data into immediate email personalization with Zembula, driving incremental revenue lift.

“The level of personalization we have today wasn’t possible before Zembula. The platform has fundamentally changed what our email program can do.” — Meagan Perle, VP of eCommerce at Madewell

About

Launched in 2006, Madewell is a denim-first brand offering premium apparel, accessories, and footwear for women and men. Rooted in quality craftsmanship and thoughtful design, the brand is known for its perfect fits, lived-in washes, and effortless approach to personal style. Madewell pairs its denim expertise with a full assortment of wardrobe essentials, while prioritizing sustainability through responsibly sourced materials and circularity programs, including its denim trade-in initiative. The brand is available in over 150 stores across the U.S. and at madewell.com.

The background

As a retailer with a highly engaged online customer base, Madewell’s email program is an important driver of revenue. Because Madewell Insiders are an important part of the brand’s customer community, email is also an opportunity to reinforce loyalty benefits and deepen engagement.

And in apparel, where every customer’s style preferences, shopping habits, and loyalty status vary, generic messaging only goes so far. To keep Insiders and prospective shoppers coming back, Madewell needs each email to reflect customers’ latest browsing behavior, purchase activity, and rewards in a way that feels unique to them.

Challenge

Scaling dynamic personalization across a high-volume email program

As VP of eCommerce at Madewell, Meagan Perle oversees the brand’s digital customer experience across loyalty, retention, and performance marketing. While her team had already created a high-performing, personalized website experience, Madewell’s email program wasn’t consistently delivering the same level of tailored relevance.

“I knew that if we could get more people from our emails to the website, the site would do the heavy lifting,” she says. “The missing piece was getting that click.”

Madewell’s emails relied on content that was finalized before campaigns were sent. Once campaign planning was complete and creative assets had been produced, there was no practical way to adjust messages based on customers’ latest activity. Stock levels shifted, customers browsed new categories, and carts were abandoned. But those in-the-moment signals rarely made it into the email experience.

Lack of data wasn’t the problem. Madewell already had access to rich, continuously updated customer insights, including loyalty status, browsing behavior, purchase history, and reward activity. But manually personalizing emails for an enterprise-level subscriber list was unrealistic.

So, more advanced targeting usually lived inside dedicated campaigns, where Madewell could deliver highly relevant experiences. But across the broader email program, most messaging remained generic. As a result, even Madewell Insiders weren’t consistently seeing the individualized content that encourages repeat purchases.

Meagan needed a way to put live customer information to work across every campaign without creating an unsustainable workload for her team. She wanted a partner who could plug into her existing tools and workflows while providing a foundation that could scale with the business for years to come.

Meagan discovered Zembula through Madewell’s parent company, J.Crew Group. After seeing the platform’s impact on their email performance, she was eager to explore the possibilities for her own program.

“We needed a way to make our emails more tailored across the board. It just wasn’t possible for us to do that manually.”

Solution

Unlocking immediate relevance at scale with Smart Banners™ and Smart Kickers™

Onboarding began by integrating with Madewell’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud and loyalty data sources. Zembula joined Madewell’s existing email build inside Salesforce, adapting to the brand’s established workflows. Throughout the implementation, the team stayed hands-on, answering questions quickly and bringing real-time personalization to a complex email program.

Once implemented, Zembula provided an automated personalization layer that works within the team’s existing workflows. This enables Madewell to scale meaningful customer experiences across email campaigns.

Now, each time a customer opens an email, Zembula selects the most relevant, conversion-focused content to display. That content is delivered through Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™ image blocks, bookending daily emails with personalization and maintaining pixel-perfect, on-brand content.

Instead of manually building out every campaign, the team simply dropped Zembula’s code into their master email template. This design-once, personalize-endlessly approach gave the team a scalable way to deliver relevant email experiences without adding ongoing production work.

The testing approach

Madewell took a deliberate approach to validating the program before expanding it across more campaigns. Starting with an initial set of 30 Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™ placements, Meagan’s team launched a pilot designed to introduce real-time personalization into their daily email program.

After the test period, Madewell reviewed performance and saw sizable increases in email click-through rate, which carried over into higher on-site conversion rates. Those results gave Madewell the confidence to expand Zembula across their broader promotional email program.

Instantly personalizing the email experience

With Zembula in place, Madewell tailors the merchandising experience inside every email. Rather than locking in static email content in advance, the Composition Engine combines loyalty status, browsing behavior, and low-stock urgency into dynamically tailored email promotional content, work that the team could not do by hand.

Now, the same email serves different purposes for different shoppers. One customer might see recently browsed products paired with a low-stock reminder, while another receives shipment updates and a fresh set of curated product recommendations in the same send.

And as new behavioral signals come in, those experiences update automatically, allowing Madewell to respond to customer intent without spinning up new creative for every audience. For Meagan, that flexibility adds up to an always-on personalization tool that continuously adapts email content to changing customer behaviors and business priorities.

Turning every email into a loyalty touchpoint

Today, Madewell also keeps Insiders engaged with the loyalty program between purchases. Instead of reserving rewards messaging for a few dedicated lifecycle campaigns, Zembula surfaces live loyalty data in daily promotional emails. Customers see available rewards, progress toward their next benefit, and time-sensitive offers like birthday rewards, so their status stays visible in every promotion.

“The more we can elevate our messages and make sure customers know what rewards they have and how far they are from their next reward, the better off we are,” Meagan says.

Madewell’s email program now goes beyond product discovery, reinforcing the value of the Insider program and helping customers make use of relevant benefits and rewards.

“Zembula really flows with our business. It always feels like we have the right expert from their team on standby when we need help.”

Results

Customer-first emails drive engagement and incremental revenue

By delivering real-time personalization across 100% of their daily email sends, Madewell realized increases in email click-through rate, with gains carrying through to higher on-site conversion. The program proved that tailored, timely email content strengthens key metrics, including:

• A seamless Salesforce integration with hands-on onboarding
• Personalized email lifted both click-through and conversion
• Real-time loyalty messaging strengthened the program that drives transactions
• Individual-level personalization at a scale impossible to execute manually

For Meagan, the greatest value extends well beyond the initial performance improvements. Rather than solving a single campaign challenge, Zembula provided a scalable foundation that her team can continue building on as new ideas emerge.

Next, Madewell plans to continue exploring Zembula’s features and products, using the platform to deliver increasingly relevant customer experiences across every email.

“There is so much more that we can do with Zembula as our partner. We’re really just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this platform.”

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