See how SPANX delivers one-to-one email personalization in 100% of daily email sends — without a single manual campaign build.

About

Founded by Sara Blakely in 2000, Spanx is a dynamic women’s brand that has revolutionized an industry and changed the way women around the world get dressed. Now a powerhouse lifestyle brand, Spanx offers both innerwear and outerwear solutions, constantly identifying and solving wardrobe challenges from a woman’s point of view. With smarter, more comfortable, must-haves including activewear, apparel, denim, shapewear, swimwear, intimates, leggings, hosiery and more, Spanx elevates women through product and empowers them to look and feel their best.

The background

SPANX’s CRM team sends daily batch emails to nearly one million subscribers. These emails span everything from new arrivals and category roundups to high-stakes promotional events like BFCM.

Because the brand caters to a diverse base of women shopping a massive product range, one-size-fits-all outreach is never enough. That’s why the team builds every send around the individual: the products they’ve been browsing, the rewards they’ve earned, and the offers waiting for them.

Challenge

Delivering one-to-one email personalization without building every campaign by hand

SPANX had a wealth of first-party customer data on every subscriber, all housed in Klaviyo. They already used insights on browse behavior, purchase history, and loyalty status to power standard triggered flows, but those emails represent only a fraction of total send volume.

SVP, Brand Katie Weeks knew that to drive loyalty and retention, personalization needed to reach every daily send, not just the purpose-built campaigns.

The problem was execution. At the time, Katie’s lean CRM team was building personalized campaigns manually. Every send required coordinating with the creative team, creating the segments and campaigns in Klaviyo, then QAing multiple versions.

Without a way to templatize the process, the workflow ate up creative resources and cost the team time they didn’t have to spare.

And when they did send personalized email variations, the messaging still wasn’t one-to-one. “At the end of the day, segmentation puts customers into broad buckets,” Katie explains. “We suspected our efforts weren’t capturing the full revenue opportunity.”

The single-send A/B tests her team ran couldn’t give them a definitive answer. With multiple campaign versions live at once, there was no clean way to identify whether a revenue lift came from the personalization or the campaign itself.

Creating high-performing content wasn’t the only blocker. Managing its delivery in real time was another headache, especially during peak events like BFCM. Every new promotion had to be manually updated the moment it went live — and when the next promotion went live, the team had to adjust again. These on-the-fly adjustments added to the pressure of an already stressful season and left little margin for error.

Hoping to achieve true email personalization with minimal production burden, Katie began searching for a purpose-built platform.

The team evaluated several solutions, but Zembula was the only one that stood out on the criteria that mattered most to SPANX: pixel-perfect design quality and a feature set built for content personalization.

“We knew it was time to scale our email personalization program, but that just wasn’t possible from an operational standpoint. Zembula’s set-it-and-forget-it approach enables our lean CRM team to tailor outreach to every customer without added overhead.”

Solution

Set-it-and-forget-it personalization with Zembula Dimensions™

According to Katie, onboarding was “quick and super easy.”

Zembula owned all the integrations, connecting to SPANX’s Shopify, then embedding their code directly into an existing HTML block in Klaviyo’s campaign builder. And just four weeks later, SPANX was ready to test their new templatized email personalization program.

All the team had to do was drop the Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™ into the top and bottom of their master email template once — and they were automatically putting personalized email content into every send. Now, the moment a subscriber opens an email, Zembula’s Composition Engine evaluates browse behavior, loyalty status, and purchase history to render the right personalized content in both placements.

The testing approach

The team rolled out Zembula in phases, beginning with approximately 35 banners and kickers. These include abandoned cart and browse banners that pair product imagery with promotion, low‑stock, coupon, ratings, and loyalty elements, as well as regular loyalty, birthday, welcome, winback, and shipment tracking messaging.

To help Katie’s team get a reliable read on revenue impact, Zembula set up a rigorous longitudinal audience test designed to capture real purchasing behavior over time.

In this test, half of SPANX’s nearly one million subscribers saw emails bookended with the Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™, and half didn’t. Subscribers were assigned to a group the first time they opened the email, and remained there for the full test, ensuring the results were attributable to Zembula’s personalization, not individual campaign variance.

The results of the test were exactly what Katie needed to see. She gave the green light to scale, and within weeks, Zembula was bookending 100% of SPANX’s daily sends.

Every daily send tailored to the recipient

Now, time-consuming manual campaign builds are a thing of the past for the CRM team. Katie’s team simply manages a library of use cases in Zembula — then lets the Composition Engine decide which ones to deploy to which subscribers.

Zembula pulls existing product photography from Shopify and customer data from Klaviyo, rendering content with SPANX’s own fonts and design standards. That way, the team can achieve pixel-perfect, on-brand personalization without looping in the creative team.

But the biggest change has been for the customers themselves, who now receive regular messaging speaking directly to their preferences and lifecycle stage.

The impact doesn’t stop with bookending. The team also uses Zembula’s product recommendation email blocks to put curated product grids in SPANX’s daily batch emails — a level of personalization that used to be reserved for trigger flows.

For many customers, these daily nudges are often all it takes to go back for that item they left behind or discover their next favorite purchase. By bringing abandoned cart and browse recovery into daily sends, SPANX increased the visibility of those high-converting messages and the revenue results followed.

Dynamic peak season experiences, scheduled once and delivered on cue

Since adopting Zembula, Katie’s team has also reduced much of the usual stress that comes with peak sales events.

During BFCM, they built out all of SPANX’s triggered sends directly within Zembula, scheduling deals, offers, and promotional terms in advance so that when a promotion went live or changed, the right content was already queued and ready to render within Klaviyo’s send workflow. Being able to plan ahead and avoid contingencies brought essential peace of mind to the team during their most demanding season. “With Zembula, we were able to focus on the customer experience instead of getting stuck in the weeds of execution,” Katie adds.

Now that sales events are so simple to execute, the team can use them to focus on what matters most: creating genuine connections with customers. For SPANX’s 25th anniversary, they built a countdown banner that ran in the lead-up to the milestone. And, during the holiday rush, they created a year-in-review email for their loyalty program members — a deeply personalized recap of each customer’s year that would have been impossible to build without Zembula.

“Before Zembula, attribution was a guessing game. Now, for the first time, we have the data to prove the hard value of our personalization efforts.”

Results

SPANX saves hours per week on email personalization with Zembula

With Zembula, SPANX turned a fragmented, manual process into a powerful email personalization program. Today, the CRM team spends less time building campaigns, relies on fewer creative resources, and sees continued revenue lift with every daily send.

The longitudinal audience test set the baseline. The full program has only built on it from there:

• 11.5% click-to-conversion (CTC) rate
• Hours saved per week on email personalization
• White-glove partnership from onboarding through optimization

Katie and her team have already worked closely with the Zembula team to move beyond the core Dimensions™ email personalization program. The countdown banner is a fixture in their personalization toolkit, and the interactive polling block is next on the roadmap for surfacing social proof directly in the daily send. But Katie also knows that, with a committed partner like Zembula by her side, the chances to uncover new, high-impact use cases are endless.

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