How CB2 Doubled Its Holiday Season Revenue Year-Over-Year—Driving $2 Million+ With Text Messaging

Challenge

With all the noise that inundates consumers throughout the holiday season, CB2 needed an engaging and effective way to reach shoppers with promotions and other marketing messages to drive more revenue.

SMS gives us a powerful, direct line to subscribers. This is especially important around the holidays when consumers are constantly bombarded with competing messages.

– Phillip Cruickshank, Brand Marketing Manager at CB2

Solution

CB2 had recently launched a mobile messaging program with Attentive right before the 2018 holiday season, so it leaned into its new text messaging channel at that time to reach holiday shoppers. “We have a few acquisition tactics we interchange throughout the year, depending on business needs,” said Cruickshank, referring to CB2’s welcome offer in exchange for signing up for text messaging.

“We have a static percentage discount offer, but we’ve found that the sweepstakes is a really strong ‘always on’ strategy for us.” After ramping up a list of subscribers using Attentive’s “two-tap” sign-up creatives on its mobile website and custom sign-up creatives on its desktop website, CB2 was ready to engage loyal and high-intent holiday shoppers.

The following year, in 2019, CB2 built upon its learnings from the previous holiday season. After seeing that SMS subscribers were incredibly engaged, the brand extended its promotional window and increased the number of messages sent. This strategy helped the brand continue to grow revenue during the post-holiday period, when sales were traditionally slightly slower. “When we increased the frequency of messages leading up to the holiday season, we saw much more revenue than we were expecting without seeing any spike in opt-outs,” said Cruickshank.

This year, the brand is once again implementing strategies it learned from the 2019 holiday season to increase sales and customer engagement. “Our first year with Attentive, we were dipping our toes in the water. Last year, we were just learning how to swim. This year, we’re feeling pretty confident about swimming,” explained Cruickshank.

CB2 is continuing to grow its list of highly engaged mobile subscribers by trying out new sign up methods, like Attentive’s Instagram Sign-Up solution. “We have a loyal, engaged customer base on our organic social accounts, as well,” said Cruickshank. “We leverage Attentive’s Instagram Swipe-Up list growth solution to promote our SMS program and convert social media followers into text subscribers.”

This is a very engaged audience and SMS is a very effective, direct way to connect with people. It’s the easiest thing I work on and the most successful.
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– Phillip Cruickshank, Brand Marketing Manager at CB2

2018 Strategy & Results

From the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, CB2 sent four text messages to its subscribers, which received as high as 20% conversion rates and drove over $1M in mobile revenue for the brand. CB2 also sent other engaging, non-promotional holiday messages throughout December, including an in-store event invite, a winter clearance pre-sale, and a free shipping alert before the holiday shipping deadline. Overall, during the entire 2018 holiday season, CB2’s text messaging program drove 126x ROI and average conversion rates of 14%.

2019 Strategy & Results

After an incredibly successful 2018 holiday season, CB2 used the next year to quickly grow a list of text messaging subscribers and create a thoughtful strategy to make the 2019 holiday season even more successful. Year-over-year, the brand grew subscribers by 390%. From the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, CB2 sent three messages and more than doubled the amount of revenue generated during that same period of time in 2018—a total of $1 million—to a whopping $2 million from one-time marketing messages and an additional half a million dollars driven from abandoned cart reminders. “We saw a click-through rate of over 30% on our abandoned cart reminder messages, and our conversion rate was also incredibly strong,” added Cruickshank.  

Over the entire 2019 holiday season, CB2 achieved 153x ROI—a 21% increase from 2018.

SMS subscribers are extremely engaged—it’s now the number one marketing channel that we default to if we want to get in front of customers quickly and drive sales in a short window of time.
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– Phillip Cruickshank, Brand Marketing Manager at CB2

Over the course of the past two years, CB2 has evolved its SMS strategy to drive even more revenue beyond the holiday season. “We knew almost straight away that SMS is probably one of the most effective channels in terms of click-through rates and conversion rates. We found that customers who were signing up to get text messages were our most loyal customers who wanted to hear from us,” explains Cruickshank. “We’re really focused on taking care of this customer base and driving incremental revenue from our text messaging channel.”