Who they are

Established in 1983, J.Crew is a classic American brand most famous for its timeless, high-quality fashion — from tailored suits and dresses to casual wear. As a multi-channel retailer with a strong legacy, J.Crew has grown a loyal customer base and wants to deepen that relationship through better engagement and personalized experiences, strengthening overall customer lifetime value.

The background

Retailers want to create personalized, dynamic email messaging that drives sales revenue at the moment of opening. However, doing that cost-effectively and efficiently presents new challenges. 

We know that leveraging customer data and strategically incorporating that data with design drives revenue. To achieve this, J.Crew partnered with Zembula to create a more personalized email strategy to drive significant revenue growth while maintaining cost efficiency.

This case study explores the impact of Zembula Dimensions™ on J.Crew’s revenue performance as a result of integrating fully automated personalization into their daily email program. We’ll explore J.Crew’s email revenue performance and the lessons learned from adopting a more sophisticated and targeted approach to their program.

The challenge

J.Crew approached Zembula with a clear vision: to transform their customer data into powerful, personalized customer communications that would generate incremental revenue growth. The brand wanted to evolve its daily email strategy by using a fresh, automated, and data-driven approach that could integrate multi-dimensional aspects of its customer data to generate the greatest value.

The challenge was to create dynamic, individualized content within their existing master email template and framework, tailored to each customer’s browsing behavior, preferences, and purchase history. Most importantly, this required efficiency in all aspects: cost and time.

To showcase the potential of our solution, we initiated a four week longitudinal test with J.Crew after six weeks of design and implementation. The results set the stage for a full-scale implementation across J.Crew.

The testing approach

Taking the right approach to testing is critical to getting a reliable result. J.Crew 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

Zembula partnered with J.Crew’s technical and creative teams to streamline data setup and technical implementation. We handled all connections, data mapping, and discovery and connected Zembula to J.Crew’s existing tech stack to ensure optimal performance. 

With the data connections established, we collaborated with J.Crew’s team on the content build-out. For an established, long-standing brand like J.Crew, maintaining a consistent identity is critical. We focused on optimizing Smart Banner™ and Kicker™ positioning, CTAs, and color contrasts using best practices that have proven successful across our customers. 

Once designs were approved and the data connections were made, we proceeded with QA, testing, and launched the program.

The results

For J.Crew, we implemented 19 personalized use cases for testing (for more on how we approach longitudinal testing, click here). Our approach highlights how revenue can be improved through targeted personalization.

J.Crew saw impressive results:

• Return on spend: A 41x return on spend, achieved through a fully automated program.
• Unique daily email use cases: 19 personalized use cases.
• Time to launch: From first kickoff meeting to launch, 6 weeks.
• Time to test: 4 weeks of longitudinal testing.
• Time all in: 10 weeks all-in, including testing.

The takeaways

With Zembula Dimensions in place, J.Crew efficiently delivered personalization that significantly demonstrated their return on spend in a short amount of time through a streamlined, automated solution focused on value-driven personalization.