Who they are

Founded in 1918 and headquartered in New York City, New York & Company is a women’s fashion brand best known for its stylish, affordable, and wear-to-work apparel and accessories. The brand is dedicated to helping women look great, feel good, and present themselves with confidence through polished and fashion-right styles inspired by the energy of New York City.

The background

Enterprise retail brands know that standing out in the Promotions tab era requires a new perspective on daily email send frequency.

New York & Company recognized that strategically integrating triggered messages into their daily email send program was essential to improving their email revenue performance. To bring this strategy to life, they partnered with Zembula to integrate real-time personalization into their program.

This case study highlights how Zembula Dimensions™ helped New York & Company automate and scale personalization in their daily email send, lifting their email revenue performance.

The challenge

New York & Company came to Zembula with a clear objective: turn their customer data into highly relevant, personalized messages that could drive incremental revenue growth. The brand wanted to evolve its email program by using an automated approach combining browse behavior, purchase history, and engagement signals to deliver more relevant, personalized content.

The challenge was to integrate this personalized content into New York & Company’s existing programs without adding more complexity or slowing down production.

New York & Company and Zembula launched a longitudinal audience test after six weeks of design and implementation, incorporating use cases like abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and shipment tracking. The results demonstrated how automating real-time personalization could lift revenue, improve efficiency, and provide a scalable foundation for future growth in email.

The testing approach

Taking the right approach to testing is critical to getting a reliable result. New York & Company leveraged Zembula’s longitudinal audience testing solution, which handles several key challenges retailers face when running a longitudinal audience test:

1. Assigning new sign-ups as they occur between the audiences in the test to make sure there is equal distribution.

2. Holding the audience constant for the duration of the test while making sure new audience members are added equally to each group.

3. Assigning audiences as emails are opened instead of when emails are sent. This eliminates the difference in open rates between the two groups.

4. Assigning audiences as an email is opened reduces the noise, as opposed to assigning audiences before the send.

The solution

New York & Company partnered with Zembula to integrate real-time personalization into their email program. Zembula worked closely with New York & Company’s technical and creative teams to streamline data connections, handle discovery and mapping, and ensure a smooth integration into the brand’s existing tech stack.

Once the data foundation was in place, the teams collaborated to design Smart Banners™ and Smart Kickers™ that would align with New York & Company’s brand identity. Best practices for creative positioning, CTAs, and visual optimization were applied to maintain consistency and maximize performance.

After final design approvals and technical checks, the program launched successfully. New York & Company could automate personalized email content at scale without added production complexity.

The results

For New York & Company, we implemented 77 personalized use cases for testing (for more on how we approach longitudinal audience testing, click here). Our approach highlights how revenue can be improved through targeted personalization.

New York & Company saw impressive results:

• Return on spend: A 14.5x return on spend, achieved through a fully automated program.
• Unique daily email use cases: 77 personalized use cases.
• Time to launch: From first kickoff meeting to launch, 6 weeks.

A sample of all the variants that the Smart Banner and Smart Kicker can handle in Zembula Dimensions.

The takeaways

With Zembula Dimensions™ in place, New York & Company efficiently delivered personalized emails that demonstrated a strong return on spend in a short amount of time through a streamlined, automated solution.

Curious how Zembula can help you?
Let’s work together – book a demo with us here.