Who they are

Forever 21 is a global fashion retailer known for its trendy, affordable clothing. The company has been a dominant player in fast fashion, offering a wide range of products, including apparel, accessories, and footwear.

The background

Fashion brand Forever 21 has focused on refining its business strategy, optimizing store locations, and prioritizing digital transformation to improve its key business channels.

This case study examines Forever 21’s goal: make their daily email program more time- and cost-efficient while boosting revenue within their restructured sales and distribution channels. To achieve this, they turned to Zembula Dimensions.

The challenge

Facing growing competition from digitally native brands leveraging data analytics to create personalized online consumer experiences, Forever 21 sought to create value from their hard-earned customer data.

They needed targeted marketing and personalization capabilities to create a surge of incremental revenue.

The solution

Zembula came in as a partner with Dimensions. We know from experience that a retailer’s triggered program is generally its best-performing personalization. By adding personalized content to the daily email send, we see exceptional results—and they get better with the more long-tail personalized use cases added. 

We implemented two banners: One dynamic Smart Banner™ at the top of every email sent and one dynamic Smart Kicker™ featured at the bottom. We call this bookending the daily email with personalization. Through extensive testing across numerous retailers, we’ve found this to be the most effective way to layer in personalization to a retailer’s daily email send without impacting the daily workflow of a marketing team.

The implementation started with a four week longitudinal test that examined revenue between audiences. We ran an “A” group that didn’t see Dimensions and a “B” group that did. Audience members are only added to a group when the images load in their email for the first time (this approach reduces the noise from other subscribers). Once added to a group, they remain in it for the test duration.

The results

Over a four week period, Forever 21 generated phenomenal results. After running the longitudinal revenue-based audience test, we saw a revenue lift from the audience seeing Dimensions and delivered 11x return on spend.

Forever 21 saw impressive results:

• Return on spend: An 11x return on spend, achieved through a fully automated program.
• Revenue lift: J.Crew saw a 19% lift in revenue using Dimensions.
• Unique daily email use cases: 52 personalized use cases.
• Time to test: 4 weeks of longitudinal testing.
• Time to launch: 2 weeks to launch, 6 weeks all-in, including testing.

The takeaways

With Zembula Dimensions, we helped Forever 21 spike revenue in its daily email program. This streamlined, automated approach to personalization delivered a meaningful return on spend in a short time while keeping operational efficiency high.