Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Powerful Personalization with ModCloth’s Sarah McMahon

At the onset of COVID-19, one thing became clear: Retailers needed guidance. In an effort to help brands operate effectively and efficiently in this digital world, we launched Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: A biweekly series with bite-sized episodes tackling the latest in retail, featuring established marketers from today’s biggest brands.

Coming off their recent win for Most Powerful Application of Personalization in the Bluecore Retail Regeneration Awards, we talked to ModCloth’s Director of Growth Marketing, Retention and Acquisition, Sarah McMahon. Specifically, Bluecore’s Senior Director of Marketing, Sarah Cascone, sat down with Sarah to discuss personalization, the customer experience and how Bluecore is helping ModCloth drive retention and increase email conversion rates.

CASCONE: Hi everyone, welcome back to Coffee & Commerce. Joining me today is Sarah McMahon, Director of Growth Marketing, Acquisition and Retention for ModCloth. ModCloth was recently recognized in Bluecore’s Retail Regeneration Awards for the most powerful application of personalization. They consolidated their tech stack to reduce redundancies, drive efficiency and increase performance through advanced personalization efforts. This resulted in more than 50% of their digital communications personalized to each unique customer. Sarah, thanks for joining me today!

SARAH: Thank you so much, I’m excited to be here.

CASCONE: So let’s get real in the fact that personalization is the most used word in retail, but the impact now is far greater than it’s ever been in the past. So what does this award mean to you with regard to everything going on in the industry right now?

SARAH: It’s definitely really exciting. I think from a metric standpoint, we’ve definitely seen huge conversion lifts, which I’ll talk about, but at a more macro level, we’ve really seen great lifts in our customer experience and the metrics associated with that element of our business specifically from enhancing our levels of personalization in our retention programs. ModCloth has a very wide product catalog, and so just by virtue of using Bluecore’s personalization to serve our customer more options in the different communications we send has helped us to increase our email conversion rate about 50% more than even the gains we’ve seen on our website.

And so that’s been really exciting just for our overall conversion and revenue performance. But also from a consumer standpoint, we see a lot of indicators that it’s improving our customer experience. We’ve seen our retention activity and repeat purchase rate lift almost every single month since we’ve rolled out Bluecore personalization across our retention communications. And so there’s sort of two great benefits here. We’re able to drive more conversion and revenue, but we’re also able to make a better customer experience by exposing her to more in our catalog, which is really exciting. And I think that represents a great future for retail.

CASCONE: Yeah, you’re touching on something important here. There is that finding of a balance between the customer experience ModCloth thinks a person should have and letting the data dictate that for you, which is essentially letting the customer dictate their own experience. What’s your perspective on that?

SARAH: I think there’s always a little a balance I’ll say of very customer centric, retention marketers that are ready to embrace tech, but that also recognize we’re a lifestyle brand that always has and continues to see success from specific messaging and a selection of particular products and cadences in our business cycle. But I think one of the biggest takeaways that we’ve had from Bluecore is that because it’s able to show so many products that we might have not thought to include, those are just new insights we got that we couldn’t have gotten before when we were doing manual selections. We weren’t able to expose the customer to as much and get those insights back.

Another area that we’ve really seen great lifts from in our engagement rates is being able to very quickly A/B test content in our marketing communications with Bluecore, which helps us to bring back very clear test results for our creative team on a rapid, almost daily basis and helps us to inform the creative themes and the best practices they use. And so there’s definitely been a mindset shift. That’s come with the implementation of more personalization around just letting the insights determine a little bit more of what the customer wants and being able to use that to help serve them better. And then we can take the data back to help us inform things like product merchandising as well as creative. It’s all been really exciting.

CASCONE: Absolutely. And now tell me how this has translated to the executive and upper management level. This mindset shift does affect the approach that ModCloth PR probably has been operating in for a very long time.

SARAH: Yeah, definitely. Leveraging the Bluecore personalization has definitely helped us accelerate both as a team and our leadership. It started by becoming more comfortable with relying on algorithms and technology to help us drive our campaigns and make us more efficient and better. Another area that we’ve seen Bluecore really help out with is a very clear and precise targeting of promotions specifically to discount affinity vs. non discount buyers. That’s helped us to market more products to drive more revenue, and do it with less discounting. And so we’ve seen overall that our product margins have increased about 13-15% over the last year.

And we do attribute the personalization to be a big help with that in allowing us to serve the customer the right thing at the right time. And so I think that’s been another thing that’s definitely helped management come around to trusting the technology because now we’re engaging with the customer more, we’re driving more revenue and conversion and we’re also even helping our product margins and the health of the margins of the business, which is really exciting.

CASCONE: Yeah, it seems ModCloth is doing a great job just letting the customer be in the driver’s seat while still protecting the ability for the business to thrive. So, Sarah, thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining Coffee & Commerce.

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