Accelerate marketing success to cosmic heights with Phrasee
How digital fashion retailer N Brown’s adoption of AI technologies led to rocketing email open uplifts for Jacamo and other brands in the group portfolio
Key results at a glance
– 35.4% – email open uplift generated in a single campaign for Jacamo
– 12% – average email open uplift generated across all Jacamo email campaigns
– 21.3% – average click uplift achieved across all Jacamo campaigns
– 500,000 – opens generated across six brands in the N Brown Group
– 150,000 – clicks generated across six brands in the N Brown Group
Background
With over a 140-year history catering to the needs of underserved customer groups, N Brown is now a top ten UK clothing and footwear digital retailer, achieving a remarkable $1.2 bn in revenue in 2018.
Starting out as a traditional mail order company, the group has transformed to reflect the changing needs and consumption habits of audiences. Now 80% of its product revenue is digital .
Success hasn’t kept N Brown from looking ahead. N Brown’s menswear brand Jacamo decided to embrace the power of AI technologies and chose to partner with Phrasee in February 2018 to build on its email marketing success.
A culture of testing
Data is at the very heart of the N Brown Group’s business. It recognizes that data science empowers the organisation to give customers a better experience and this mindset has led the group to accelerate its use of AI across its brand portfolio.
“Data is very important in marketing, so bringing in Phrasee’s AI felt like a natural step”, says Jenny Morris, N Brown’s Head of Marketing (Customer and Trading).
“There was skepticism in the team about AI for marketing at first, but Phrasee helped alleviate these fears and we’ve seen some really great results.”
“We saw really significant results in terms of open rates and also subsequently click-through rates, which we were really pleased with.”
A solution for rocketing success
Jacamo wanted to utilize technology to increase online engagement with its customer base. After hearing about the awesome results that Phrasee had achieved with other retail brands, Jacamo partnered with Phrasee and has seen a 12% email open uplift and a 21.3% click uplift across all campaigns. Phrasee also generated a 35.4% open uplift in a single campaign.
“We just don’t see those type of numbers on the Jacamo emails so we were really thrilled with that”, says Jacamo CRM Manager Angela Rhodes.
Since Jacamo’s initial onboarding, Angela estimates that Phrasee has generated over half a million additional opens and 150,000 click-throughs across six of the brands in the group that Phrasee works with, including Simply Be, JD Williams, and Ambrose Wilson.
“You always think you would know better than a machine, but Phrasee has done better than we could have imagined. It took our brand guidelines and just ran with it”, adds CRM executive Annand Patel.
Since N Brown started working with Phrasee, Phrasee has won 96.3% of the split tests run for all email campaigns.
“We just don’t see those type of numbers on the Jacamo emails, so we were really thrilled."
Angela Rhodes, CRM Manager, Jacamo
Inclusivity matters
N Brown’s portfolio of brands take pride in providing customers with empowering, positive messages. As an inclusive retailer, focusing on the needs of underserved customer groups, size 20+ and age 50+, N Brown’s goal is to make customers feel and look amazing. Partnering with Phrasee was a natural choice as Phrasee’s stance on ethical marketing and Emotions Matter campaign align with N Brown’s vision and values.
“Phrasee’s language technicians build algorithms that adapt to our brand guidelines, ensuring that our copy is relevant and always on-brand. You can’t tell that the language is not written by our copywriting team because it’s tailored to our tone of voice, which is very important to us”, says Annand.
The team at N Brown feel confident knowing that Phrasee’s computational linguists, software developers and customer success team are always on hand to offer advice.
“The Phrasee team are fabulous! They are fun to work with and they made everything very easy from the first meeting onwards”, says Jenny.
Using Phrasee for every email send
With Phrasee, N Brown’s marketing team can generate multiple subject lines at the click of a button, saving the group time and money. Phrasee’s platform is intuitive and easy-to-use, fitting seamlessly within N Brown’s existing email marketing processes, according to Annand.
“By working with Phrasee, AI doesn’t seem as daunting anymore. We want to use Phrasee on every email we send.”
Jenny says that the team is really excited about the future: “Phrasee has optimized our email subject lines. After all, what’s the point in sending an email if no one is going to open it?”