Personalization Helping to Power O’Neill Clothing’s Email Program

Personalized content, whether browsing a retailer’s website, reading an email, using a mobile app, etc., is proven to drive increases in conversion. Leveraging the data you have about a customer to serve them relevant, personalized content and offers is expected in today’s world of big data. Those brands that aren’t using personalization are falling behind.

O’Neill Clothing, a surf, snow and youth lifestyle brand, was one such example. The retailer was behind the times when it came to personalization, particularly with its email program. O’Neill was still employing a batch-and-blast approach for sending emails, segmenting its list only by gender. None of the valuable customer data O’Neill was capturing — e.g., behavioral, demographic, and psychographic — was being integrated into its email messaging.

“We were missing out on delivering a personalized experience,” says Daniel Neukomm, CEO of La Jolla Group, parent company of O’Neill Clothing.

At the time, O’Neill was working with Reflektion, a provider of a one-to-one e-commerce solution, to personalize the shopping experience on its e-commerce site via product recommendations and visual search tools. The next logical step was to bring that level of personalization to the retailer’s email program.

“Email is the ultimate marketing strategy,” notes Neukomm. “It gives you the opportunity to put the right product in front of the right customer at the right time.”

Personalization Comes to Email
O’Neill is now using Reflektion’s Right Time Messaging solution to bring personalized content and offers to its email subscribers. The retailer is now able to deliver personalized email content that’s specifically aligned with each individual recipient’s interests and most recent shopping intent — all right up until the moment the email is opened. Reflektion’s solution is focused on reactivating customers by injecting real-time, one-to-one content into triggered and promotional emails, selecting the most relevant products and promotions for each individual.

Despite having only been using Right Time Messaging for a little more than two months, O’Neill is already seeing positive results. Opens, clickthroughs and conversion rates have all steadily increased.

In addition to using personalized product recommendations to help drive sales from its email subscribers, O’Neill is intent on increasing engagement with these customers through content.

“Product recommendations are great, but we want to ensure we’re moving beyond that and offering a true omnichannel experience,” says Neukomm.

Giving customers the content and products they’re most interested in based on their behavior will help O’Neill get them to come back and purchase again and, in turn, become brand loyalists.